Salesforce being a CRM helps facilitates various business processes for an organization. It has several products in this regard to cater to services like Sales, Service, Marketing, Analytics, Portals, Integration and Collaboration (Slack), etc.
While many might not be finalized products at this point in time, Sales & Service Cloud are Salesforce’s two main products.
Sales Cloud is used to record initial interest from Customers /Leads and follow through a sales cycle.
On the other, Service Cloud is designed to support customer service teams and agents from within the business to deal with customer queries and help resolve them.
Table of Contents
Service Cloud
Service Cloud includes Accounts, Contacts, Cases, and Solutions. It also encompasses features such as the Public Knowledge Base, Web-to-case, Call Center, Self-Service Portal, Omnichannel Routing, as well as customer service automation like escalation rules, and assignment rules. It is designed to allow you to support past, current, and future clients’ requests for assistance with a product, service, and billing.
Consulting Phases
Planning Phase : Curating a list of activities that needs to be started with. Kick off meeting with teams, resource confirmation, Client team kickoff and Project plan sign off to ensure alignment. Then we have Components of Project Plan : Purpose, Scope, Cost Estimate, CR Plan, Training Plan, Risks, Milestones and Deliverables. Then we have Approvals that capture approval signatures from stakeholders.
Requirement Gathering : Understanding the as-is process, gathering requirements with stakeholders, and establish project goals.
Design Phase : This comprises of allocating and refining data entities, relationships, data attributes and system requirements. Reviewing and designing the details of the application after a formal review and confirmation of the architecture. The design document is developed with system and technical design.
Build : Building small units into larger components, building technical and system environment, configuration and customization, data migration, documentation, user manuals, unit testing ,etc.
& Testing Phase: UAT, SIT, Performance , Data migration and validation, validate configurations and code, iterations to validate, test and fix bugs.
and then we have Go-Live: Importing all final configurations and desired data to Production org, training agents, taking feedback and thereby final Project sign-off.
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Service Setup Menu
The Service setup menu in the service cloud entails various setting options like setup users, email to case, setting up knowledge base, etc.
Support Setting
The support settings under settings search bar facilitates for various settings catering to case management. For example : Case creation template, case assignment template, automated case user, setting to enable close case option available in case status field or disable it to allow case to be closed on via close case layout, notify case owner when a comment is added, etc.
Case Management through Queues
Queues are group of users to manage a shared workload more effectively. It helps routing of cases to await processing by a group member. The records remain in the queue until a user accepts them for processing or they are transferred to another queue.
Queues can be created by initially selecting objects from the list of supported objects and then queue members for this queue. We have the option like Public groups, roles, roles and subordinates, territory, territory and subordinates, and users to add as queue members.
Case Assignment to Queues via Assignment Rules
To route cases to respective teams automatically, we use Case Assignment Rules. We can create several Case Assignment Rules but only 1 can be active at one given point of time. Though in one Case Assignment Rule itself we can segregate our cases and assign them properly to respective teams making use of the Rule Entry Criteria and Sort Order.
The Rule Entry criteria defines the condition to select the cases like a case with a priority Medium or Low and Case Type equals Electronics, etc and based on this we can differentiate among the Queues to assign these to. Further the sort order defines the sequence in which these criteria will be evaluated to assign the cases to the required members. We can hereby efficiently share the workload via automation in salesforce using Case Assignment Rules.
Case Escalation Rules for meeting SLAs
Case Escalation Rules come in place when we need to handle the escalating cases within the designated service-level agreement (SLA) timelines. It helps automatically determine when cases should escalate and what actions should be taken as a next step. Similar to assignment rules we can have only one Escalation Rule active at one point of time, and has Rule Entry Criteria and Sort Order.
We create a Case Escalation rule and add our Rule entries with criteria and sorting order. Additionally we specify the business hours criteria for the escalation rule to take or ignore business hours while evaluating this rule. We can also specify how the escalation time (or age of the case) is calculated : When case is created, when case is created and disable after first modified, or based on last modification time.
Next we have Escalation Action for the Rule. Here we specify the age or the number of hours after which the case escalates and thereby choose actions like auto-reassign cases and notify case owner. We can find the escalating cases under Case Escalations.
Assets and Products
Assets signify assets owned by the organization like a desktop, tables, desks, etc. These can be related to an account, Contact or Product as well via the lookup fields available on the asset record to keep track of them in the system. We can uniquely identify and keep track of assets via fields like Serial number, Installation date, Status, Price, and quantity, etc.
Entitlements
To differentiate between what kind of a customer support each customer is entitled to based on the support service plan or SLAs, we make use of Entitlements in Service Cloud in Salesforce. Entitlement management helps you provide the correct service level to your customers, we simply need to enable entitlements and related settings under the setup and link each entitlement to an account in Salesforce.
We then grant access as required to the various entitlement fields on Case object and add them to page layouts. We can also add entitlement related lists to Accounts, Assets and Products as needed. Now we can create entitlement records with necessary details and link them to accounts as per the subscribed service.
Entitlement Template
Supposedly if a product that we offer includes the same support level for every customer, then we can attach an entitlement template to the product to predefine its support terms. These Entitlement templates are a neat and time saving way to churn out multiple entitlements with same settings. We can create entitlement templates from setup again and later add the same under entitlement templates list under product record (feature available in Classic currently). Now, when someone purchases the product, an entitlement with the same setting as the template is added to the newly created asset record.
Milestones
Milestones define case management processes like first response time, resolution time, etc. Milestones represents time dependent steps in your support process. Milestones are added to entitlements to ensure that the support agents resolve support records correctly as well as on time.
We can create a milestone with 3 recurrence types based on our need. No recurrence which occurs only once per case record, independent milestones occur when the milestone criteria are met on the case record, and sequential milestones occur on a repeat when milestone criteria are met on the case record.
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Entitlements Processes
Entitlements processes are customizable timelines that include all the steps(milestones) that support agents must complete to resolve a support record such as a case or work order. Once a process is kept in place we can apply it to one or more Entitlements.
We create an Entitlements process by defining the entry and exit criteria and specify the Business hours for the same. After creating the Entitlements Process we now can add milestones and define a time duration after which the milestone must be completed. It can be set numerically as well as dynamically via Apex.
We can also set the criteria and order of execution of different milestones and set their start time as that of the Entitlement process or the milestone criteria. We can also add success, warning and violation actions like create a new task, email alert, update a field or send an outbound message.
We can then add these Entitlements Processes to respective Entitlements records and then the respective cases created from this Entitlement will automatically follow the support process. We can then also add the milestone counter on case records to show case milestones as following the Entitlements Process from the App Builder.
Understanding Field Service Object Relationships
Field Service
Field Service Management is particularly used in industries that employ mobile workers or contractors. The industries in discussion can be public utilities and transportations, vending machine services, retail manufacturing etc. For coordinating the field operations in such sectors, scheduling service appointments, dispatching mobile workers, equipments, tracking vehicle locations can be achieved using field service in salesforce.
When agents create work orders for providing support to customers, the dispatcher then schedules appointments, optimizing them and assigning them according to the right skills for the job. Then we have the technicians or the mobile workers who manage the service appointments, tracking the requisite parts, close the work orders and provide service reports.
Field Service Objects are as below and we can understand their relationship using Schema Builder :
- Service Resource
- Service Appointments
- Service Territory
- Service territory Member
To setup this field service flow we can search “Field Service” under Setup. Firstly we enable the Field Service and make the required settings as under. We can also setup the notifications, setup due date for service appointments, knowledge articles, etc.
We also provide the knowledge user and service cloud user permissions to users’ records. For the users to be assigned as service resources and have the access to service features , we also need to enable Service Cloud User in their User settings.
Service Territory and Operating Hours
Now from the app launcher, we can search for Service Resource and create new resource records by mapping it with desired users and resource types. We can create operating hours record with support hours for various regions and time zones . Now to separate designated work areas for the mobile workers/ workforce, we use service territory to map the service resources and operating hours and to assign them to territories to enable smooth field operations. Service Territory represents the geographic areas where you field service team works.
We assign the operating hours to Service territories and not directly on Service Resources (refer to the relationship schema image above) but on their service territory member record. As the technician or the resource can be working in more than one territory we can add member record on the Service resource related page signifying the service territory.
Skills and Work Types
Work Types are templates we can create for common/recurring jobs, as for example: for a telecom service provider installing service devices is a job that the technicians will be doing on a regular basis. For such jobs, we can estimate time and specify parts and skills required to assign the right resource.
We can enable auto create service appointments on the work types to auto create service appointments when a work order with that particular work type is created. We can also add a required skill for the work type to help identify suitable resources.
Similarly we can create a skill and add it to the service resource to signify the user who have that particular skill to perform a specific work/job. Multiple skills can be added to every service resource and different jobs and service appointments are allotted as per those skills. Resource have one to many relationship with skills.
Now, when the customers request for a service, agents can create a work order with a particular work type. Having a work type for a work order is helpful for tracking purposes but not mandatory. Similarly for each work order we can have subtasks known as Work Order Line Items which can have a work type as well.
Comeback For Part 2!
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