An opportunity was given to me to get certified - either Sales Cloud or Service Cloud. I chose Service Cloud as I found it more challenging and difficult (from my colleagues, less number posts, my lack of experience in Service Cloud compared to Sales Cloud). I passed Service Cloud Consultant exam on Tuesday (23rd April 2013).
Whenever I go for certification first things I do are:
- Go through Study Guide - get an idea which topics to go in detail, which ones to brush up
- Check Blogs - As usual I found Bob's (a.k.a +Keir Bowden) blog extremely useful. Also as mentioned in his blog +Jeff Douglas's blog was the base for his preparation. I am grateful to these gurus.
Both blogs have covered enough detail what needs to be done in order to pass. All I can do is to include new features that were released much after these blogs were written. Couple of features that you may want be aware of:
- Live Agent
- Changes in Portal licenses
- Answers, Chatter Answers, Case Feeds
As summary I can recall these areas from which scenario based questions [as a Consultant what would you suggest, what would you consider etc.] were asked (apologies if this repeated from those blogs):
- Analytics - many questions on what kind of report would be helpful to determine specific use case
- Entitlements, Knowledge (Article Type, Data Categories) - there were good number of questions around these
- Service Cloud Console related questions were also
- Portal license - 1 or 2 questions on this
- There were few straight-forward questions (surprisingly) on - tools used for migration, order of data loading etc.
Partner training videos helped me big time, as well as the cheatsheet PDFs. Just knowing the feature is not enough, you need to know how it can be applied, what is best for a given scenario. Many of the videos can help you in this but if you have work experience then there is no match for that.
While writing exam I slowly started hating Universal Containers, but once I saw "Pass" after submitting I thought - Ok, they are in trouble, they need help :)
Be confident once you have covered the topics in study guide. All the best!
