How to study for the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant Exam ……I thought was a perfect blog post for this week considering what has happened recently.  First, Sanjoy did a great guest blog last week on the Salesforce Service Cloud and this month I just passed the Salesforce Service Cloud exam. With that, it made perfect sense to go into details as to “How to Study for the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant Exam” to hopefully get you certified! So how exactly does one pass the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant exam?  Good question. Well, first let me put this out there, the initial time I took this exam I did NOT pass. I know why I didn’t pass so was not too surprised, but I do hope to impart some wisdom from taking the exam twice in two weeks within the last month. I will break this blog down into easily digestible sections for your use. Of course as you know everyone studies to their own pace and pattern for any exam, so take what you can use for help you pass the exam.

The Exam

The exam is similar to most other certification exams you may have taken from Salesforce. There are 60 questions and you have 1 hr 45 minutes to pass the exam. The exam is multiple choice/multiple select and as you may know, you get the results in real time right after submission of the exam. Take the entire time allotted and remember to use your scratch paper given to you as well. As I mentioned in my other blog about taking the these type of exams, mark the questions you want to go back and review and don’t spend too much time on one question, you can actually get 19 questions wrong and still pass!

Background in the Service or Call Center World

If you have any  experience in working with call/contact/tech support center software then you are already ahead. There are some basic business terms you should know related to servicing customers.  You should know about the business model of call centers and how they typically operate, which include the phone systems used for call centers (IVR, PBX, skills based routing), managing cases/indents and how call centers deal with escalations. In addition, you must know what metrics are important to run an efficient call center such as ‘first call resolution” and agent productivity reports to measure how the reps are performing their jobs.  Of course this is not everything, but you get the idea, know the basics of call centers operations and you should be good. A good Salesforce online premier class to take is “Reporting for Call Center Managers”, which can help you with running reports for call center operations.

Study Guides and Online Practice Questions

Download this study guide from Salesforce and use it as the baseline as to what to study for this exam. I did not deviate too much from this guide and neither should you. This guide will not give you any answers, but it gives you the guardrails which allow you to stay on the highway to passing this exam. Outside of the the knowledge I already had in my head and some sample exam questions I studied (details below), I stayed with this study guide the whole time and it helped me pass the exam. Of course, the assumption here is you have access to Salesforce Premier Training online. If you do not have access to the online training course, you should take a one of the onsite classes offered which will go over the details needed to pass the Salesforce Service Cloud exam. Outside of these two options (online training/onsite training), it will be rather difficult to pass the exam.

In addition to the study guide, I augmented my studies by using Quizlet.  This site is pretty solid when it comes to the Salesforce Service Cloud and has some pretty adequate sample sets of flash card questions. The sample questions were suffice to give me a pretty good feel for how the exam was structured and how the questions would look on the exam.  The sample set of flash cards on the Quizlet site I would recommend are the following: Set 1 , Set 2  and Set 3. As you will find there are other “sets”, but generally I stuck with these. Set 3 in particular covers allot of call center related terms, which ended up being helpful to me in particular. From the screenshot below, make sure you search on “Salesforce Service Cloud” and the results should be consistent with my comments on the ‘sets’ above.

Extra Tips

I cannot not share with you specific questions given to me, but the list below is a great informal list of terms and areas of the Salesforce Service Cloud you should probably know (wink wink) based on me taking the exam twice within the last month:

• Email to Case  vs On Demand Email
• Communities!  All of them, what are the differences in the different community types
• Knowledge – know the difference between an article type and a data category
• What is the difference between telesales, contact centers, call centers etc
• Service Console layout…know what is for and how it can be helpful
• CTI Adapter and how it works
• Uses for Visual Workflow

In summary, you can pass this exam if you study the right material and keep focused. Remember you may study a whole section (Knowledge, CTI or something else) and during the exam only get ONE question related to that section and that is OK. In addition, you will get some questions you have no idea what the right answer is, so just take your best guess and move on.  If you noticed the title of this blog is “How to Study for the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant Exam” and its not how to pass the exam. You know what you need to pass the exam. You need 41 questions correct out of 60 and have 105 minutes to get it done. Good luck study hard and you will get this result below at the end when you submit your exam.

Hector Perez Jr.

Updated: Just found these helpful YouTube links after I published this blog, these are very helpful!

Get Started with Service Cloud Administration – 2hrs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJFlIqtlscI

Setting up Salesforce Knowledge – 2 1/2hrs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZSZiGuXn24

Delivering Superior Customer Service with Web Chat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBbszP6TFTA

Swarming – 49 minutes, KCS, Knowledge

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mucPAD6eLKc

Communities – The Migration Path from Portals – 1hrs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1QTjV-Md_I

What – Setting up, Getting Started w/Communities

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVS0p7xAVLQ

Service Cloud Console: Giving Your Agents a Crystal Ball 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBNbLZwbQFQ

• Tags: Certification, Salesforce, Service Cloud