Chapter 16
In This Chapter
Customizing cases
Using case queues and assignment rules
Building a knowledge base
Automating your support processes
Improving team productivity
The heart of any successful customer service application is case management, and Salesforce Service Cloud provides a fully integrated solution to track, resolve, and manage all customer interactions, regardless of the point of entry.
Your support team can log in and begin using cases immediately, but they’ll be much more successful if you invest some time up front to customize the program to the team’s exact needs.
In this chapter, we guide the support executive or administrator on setting up case processes and customizing cases. Next, we review how to configure a scalable knowledge base. Then, we cover the different methods for automating customer service processes to improve agent efficiency.
As a support executive, if you want to get Salesforce Service Cloud working for you, you need to do some careful up-front planning. After you think through your processes, you can customize cases either by yourself or with your Salesforce Service Cloud administrator. Here are some tips to think about before you get started:
As a support executive or system administrator with the right permissions, one of your biggest challenges will be managing and administering a growing collection of cases. And because support centers need to maintain customer satisfaction, efficiently opening and resolving cases and keeping customers happy are paramount to your bottom line.
The Salesforce Service Cloud provides built-in tools to help efficiently queue, route, and escalate cases according to your support needs. By distributing and managing case workload more effectively, you ensure that the right agents address the right cases to comply with internal or external service-level agreements (SLAs).
To set up a case queue, choose Setup⇒Administer⇒Manage Users⇒Queues, and then follow these steps:
The e-mail address will be used for notifications, such as when a new case has been added to the queue. The e-mail can be for an individual or point to a distribution list (on your e-mail server).
The Queues page reappears with your new queue displayed.
Assignment rules are key to efficient and timely routing of new cases. Your team can apply these assignment rules when adding or editing cases, or when customers submit cases themselves through your website, e-mail, or a Community. (See later sections for more on supporting multiple channels.) These rules allow cases to route directly to users or queues.
To set up assignment rules, choose Setup⇒Build⇒Customize⇒Cases⇒ Assignment Rules, and then follow these steps:
A New Case Assignment Rule page appears.
Typically, you have one case assignment rule to serve all your case assignment purposes. So, for example, you may have an active assignment rule called US Standard Support and another called US Holiday Support that you activate only when your holiday schedule is running.
The Case Assignment Rules page appears with your rule listed.
The Case Assignment Rule page for your rule appears.
A Rule Entry Edit page appears, as shown in Figure 16-1.
The Salesforce Service Cloud evaluates these rule entries until it finds a match and then stops. The first successful match satisfies the rule, and an assignment is made accordingly.
For example, if your company provides a different support team for partner inquiries, you might enter a criterion of Account: Type Equals Partner to denote cases that relate to partners.
When completed, the Case Assignment Rule page for your assignment rule appears with the related list of rule entries.
To make sure that no case is ever overlooked and proper attention is paid to priority cases, you can apply escalation rules. Escalation rules prevent Chicken Little–type overreactions — so that you don’t unnecessarily run around telling your team that the sky is falling … unless it really is. Instead, these rules allow you to create automated actions when cases with certain criteria are still open or untouched after a set duration. When escalating, you set up rule entries (similar to assignment rule entries) to notify users, reassign the case, or both.
To establish escalation rules, choose Setup⇒Build⇒Customize⇒Cases⇒ Escalation Rules, and then follow these steps:
As with case assignment rules mentioned in the preceding section, only one case escalation rule may be in effect at one time.
A Case Escalation Rules page appears with your rule listed.
The Case Escalation Rule page for your rule appears.
The Rule Entry Edit page appears.
The Rule Entry Edit page reappears with a related list for Escalation Actions.
An Escalation Action Edit page appears, as shown in Figure 16-2.
You can set escalations to occur after 30-minute intervals.
You may also select a notification template for the recipient.
You must also select a notification template for the recipient.
These addresses don’t have to belong to Salesforce Service Cloud users.
The Rule Entry Edit page reappears.
Repeat Steps 8–13 as often as needed to add your escalation rule entries, plus corresponding actions.
In addition to using the phone, customers want to access support in two other common ways: directly from the web and via e-mail. You can have your customers use a web-based form or let them send an e-mail to your support organization. For either method, the Salesforce Service Cloud can enable these additional channels and make it easy for your agents to follow up. In this section, we describe the various options that you can use to begin collecting this information from your website.
Where do customers go when they have problems? Many customers would be happy if they could simply log the problem and be assured of a prompt response. With Web-to-Case, you can quickly generate an HTML form that captures cases submitted from your website. Then, by using case assignment rules, new cases can route directly to the agents or queues responsible for handling these inquiries. (See the section “Using assignment rules for routing,” earlier in this chapter, for information on automating assignments.)
To automate Web-to-Case, choose Setup⇒Customize⇒Self-Service⇒Web-to-Case and follow these steps:
The Capture Cases page appears, as shown in Figure 16-3.
The return URL that you specify usually leads to a thank-you page or your support home page. After you click Generate, a new page appears with the HTML code in a box.
You’ll want to review the notes at the top of the HTML, but this step is pretty simple. If such a review seems foreign to you, simply copy and paste the HTML into an e-mail and send it to your webmaster for help with this step. She knows what to do.
You return to the Capturing Cases from Your Website page.
When the web page with your case-capturing form is live, fill out the form, like the unformatted sample in Figure 16-4, and test it to make sure that the case routes to the right resource.
Service Cloud from salesforce.com enables you to join the conversations happening on the web about your products and services. Instead of creating an additional channel for your agents to monitor, salesforce.com has already thought about how to capture these conversations and respond efficiently to the topics discussed.
Salesforce Knowledge provides a knowledge base solution for support departments and call centers. It’s available for Enterprise, Performance, and Developer Edition users for an additional price (talk to your account executive for more information).
Salesforce Knowledge has its own vocabulary:
Data categories can be mapped to users’ roles to decide what articles users can and can’t see.
To try your hand at creating an article, do the following:
The New Article box appears.
The article type determines the page layout of the type of article you’ll be writing.
As many as eight categories are allowed there.
After a draft article has been reviewed and has passed your internal quality standards for publishing, do the following to publish an article:
Alternatively, click Publish on either the detail page or the edit page of an article.
Users from these channels can see that this article has been modified since the last time they read it. This check box is not available when you publish an article for the first time, as the icon displays by default then.
If the draft being published is a working copy of a currently published article, it is published as a new version of the original.
Articles that you’re publishing now move directly to the Published Articles view.
The Service Cloud Answers feature allows service agents to ask questions to internal and/or external groups and also see various answers from the community. Community members vote on answers they like, and the original asker can deem one response as the best answer. This is similar to how sites like www.StackOverflow.com source responses from their users, and is available in Enterprise and Performance Editions.
You’d be surprised by how many customers would prefer to get the answers themselves (if they knew where to go), rather than call you. By creating a knowledge base of frequently discussed questions or issues, you can allow your customers to solve their own issues, decreasing call volume to your call centers. You can also improve your agents’ response times so that they don’t have to constantly retype repetitive solutions, and your call center managers can track topic trends to provide feedback to product and marketing teams.
When customers have a problem, they can log in to your Community and do things such as
Depending on how new your instance of Salesforce is, you may need to contact salesforce.com to enable Communities for your organization to launch it.
To determine if you already have Salesforce Communities enabled, follow these steps:
The Community Settings page appears.
You are asked to acknowledge that enabling Communities is irreversible. If you wish to proceed, check the box to acknowledge that there’s no going back.
The URL defaults to a force.com web address. You get to choose the subdomain. Use something recognizable to your users, such as your company name. The domain name will be the same for all your communities, but you create a unique URL for each community during the creation process.
Once your Salesforce Communities is enabled, it’s time to create your first, well, community.
The Manage Communities page appears.
The Create Community window appears.
The URL field will be a subdirectory that lives under the domain name that you selected earlier. This community is only visible by administrators until you share the URL with others, or publish it where others can access it. Until then, you can customize it to your desired look and feel.
A confirmation window appears once your community is created. You can click an Edit button to continue to fine-tune this community, or hit Close to return to the Manage Communities page.
After you thoroughly test your Salesforce Community, you want to make it available to customers.
To add members to your Customer Community, take these steps:
The Manage Settings page appears.
A Community Settings window for that community appears.
Select available profiles or permission sets from their respective left selection windows. Use the Add or Remove buttons to move your selections from the Available windows to the Select windows.
This lets community members notify the community moderator to review content. This usually means the flagged content is inappropriate for your community, or at least should be reviewed.
This lets stakeholders see what all the fuss has been about.
The Community Settings window for this community reappears.
If your business deals with several types of customers, each requiring a customized interface, you can create multiple communities for them. For example, maybe your platinum customers need Salesforce Community access to report on very specific information captured in custom fields that don’t apply to your regular customer base. Or maybe you’re dealing with a large set of customers testing out the newest version of your product, and you need them to provide specific feedback that isn’t normally captured for your current products. Additionally, you can customize the Salesforce Community so that it fits seamlessly with the rest of your corporate website’s branding.
To customize your Community, do the following:
Collecting answers to increase your agents’ efficiency is just the tip of the iceberg. Using that information to then efficiently address conversations in the cloud distinguishes your company from the rest. The extent of your customer service efforts will closely follow the pace of conversations so that your brand and its reputation stay current with all messaging. By making your knowledge base available to a customer, you can use the relevant information about a specific customer (like what products of yours they own) to automatically suggest articles relevant to that customer. Salesforce Knowledge can even suggest an article before the customer does a search!
Not only can customers find a quick answer, but they can also find out more about the products they use. The more often that customers can educate themselves, the more often that service agent interactions will start off at a more sophisticated level of dialog.
And if customers have feedback about some of the articles, they can vote on the information and see what others think about it. This closed-loop feedback provides valuable information to other customers and to the internal product folks that put that information there.
Assuming you already have Salesforce Knowledge enabled and want to associate it with Salesforce Communities, do the following to associate a Knowledge-friendly profile with a community:
The User Profiles page appears.
The Clone Profile page appears.
Your new profile page appears.
The Profile Edit page appears, as shown in Figure 16-7.
The Community detail page appears.
For those of you who operate a support center in which you handle a high volume of support issues, you probably want to make your agents’ time as productive as possible. What information can you put at their fingertips to help them resolve that case that much faster? In the following sections, we review a timesaving option that may be a good fit for your team.
High-volume call center agents need access to a lot of information at once. Typing fewer keystrokes means that resolving a customer’s issue takes less time. From a single web page, the Salesforce Agent Console allows an agent to view all his cases, handle a single case, and see all the records — including accounts, contacts, and opportunities — that relate to a case. The Salesforce Agent Console provides a multifaceted interface, designed to be a one-stop desktop for your agents.
We highlight the basic steps that you need to take to get the Salesforce Agent Console up and running in the following sections. Try to walk through a scenario in which an agent handles a new case and sees it to closure from within that Agent Console. Check out the Help & Training section in Salesforce, for more details on the following summaries.
Choose Setup⇒Build⇒Create⇒Apps to create a new app that defines which tabs your agents will see in the console.
Choose Setup⇒Administer⇒Manage Users⇒Users to edit each user and select the Service Cloud User in the User License field.
Choose Setup⇒Build⇒Customize⇒Agent Console⇒Console Layouts⇒New to build a new console layout.
Service Cloud provides two options for managing calls from your customers. The first option is already set up and seems obvious. You define some basic roles and rules for levels of support in your call center. When a person calls in, the agent searches for the contact, validates the caller against information in the Service Cloud, and captures the case in real time. Then, hopefully, the agent resolves the case in the same call.
The second option is to integrate your telephony environment with the Service Cloud to make managing customer calls easier for agents and customers.
Additionally, agents can provide customer service when they’re not in an office. You can distribute your contact center across the world through the wonders of chat-based support. Service professionals constantly on the go can continue to manage multiple customers using Service Cloud mobile solutions and even look up answers to common questions from their favorite mobile device. Field technicians can view their route schedule without going into the office, and they can report issue resolutions without ever turning on a computer.
Service Cloud telephony integration works with more than 80 of the most popular phone systems and may include interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distribution (ACD), and screen pops that automatically present the caller’s contact record to your agents. With an open CTI integration architecture and the free Force.com Connect CTI Toolkit, available at http://developer.force.com, your technical resources can deliver an even more robust experience, which is especially valuable in higher-volume contact centers.
The integration can work with a bevy of on-demand telephony partners, such as Angel.com, Five9, inContact, and LiveOps, or with on-premise solutions from leading telephony providers including Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, Nortel, and more.
These providers offer prebuilt integrations from their telephony systems to salesforce.com, allowing the agent desktop to be shown right inside the salesforce.com user interface.