Service Cloud Applications

In the previous chapter, we learned how our business can leverage Salesforce sales capabilities to enhance our chances of closing a deal. When a deal is made, we need to build a strong relationship with our customers using our platform features. This is known as Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

What’s CRM without a proper service center? Salesforce Sales Cloud provides great tools that we can use to set up a fully functional service center. In this chapter, we’ll use Salesforce Knowledge to create a powerful knowledge base (KB) that will be integrated within service processes, entitlements, and milestones to enforce a customers’ service-level agreement (SLA), allow the Live Agent to deliver an efficient service chat, and provide Omni-Channel configuration so that we can smartly route our incoming service requests.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following topics:

• Salesforce Knowledge
• Configuring Omni-Channel
• Live Agent chat and communities
• Entitlements for SLA management (and more)

Salesforce Knowledge

An ancient Sanskrit proverb says that there is no comparison between a King and a scholar, as the king is celebrated only in his country, whereas a scholar is celebrated everywhere. This is a concept that a Latin aphorism summarized in scientia potentia est, or knowledge is power: this applies to any aspect of life, including Salesforce.

We are not planning to rule the world or win a battle; all we want to do is speed up and enhance customer service using knowledge.

As we discussed in Chapter 1, Secure Data Access, data is the focus of business processes and extracting knowledge from it can be a win for a company.

The kind of knowledge we are actually talking about is related to customer services. Think about this book: isn’t it a compilation of useful information that we can use to administer our CRM? This is knowledge.

How many times have you been asked to add a field to a page layout? When you did this, did you take the time to explain a quick how-to on page layouts to your junior intern, or did you do it yourself because you could do it quicker? Or did you write a few Trailhead references to help people learn from your knowledge? This is knowledge.

Have you ever assisted your service representatives when they were answering a question and kept telling them the same suggestion/answer over and over? Or do you keep sending them that old email thread where they can find the answer for themselves? This is knowledge as well.

These are great examples of knowledge processes: if I know something that can be of public use, I write it down and share it with my team because verba volant scripta manent, or words fly, writing remains.

Let’s apply this concept to Service Cloud:

• Customers keep creating cases (via web-to-case forms or by contacting the call center) and asking for a specific procedure regarding a product the company sells. Use your knowledge to send an article containing all the necessary details.
• A new intern has just joined your company. All the important policies and guidelines for their first few days of work may be accessible on our company’s internal KB.
• Known issues about a software product are listed on a public KB, which is accessible through the company’s customer community. Customers don’t even need to contact the call center to get their answers (until the problem is well-defined and harder to solve than simply reading the FAQs you provide).
• Your sales partners need constantly updated data sheets about the company’s new products. A shared KB allows your sales partners to know what they are selling, as well as the company’s business, to ensure that everything about their brand-new product is up to date.

At the time of writing, Salesforce provides two types of knowledge:

• Classic Knowledge
• Lightning Knowledge

For the sake of this guide, we’ll deal with Lightning Knowledge, but we’ll summarize the main differences later on.

For more information about Classic Knowledge, please refer to Salesforce Help at https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=knowledge_setup.htm&type=5. Alternatively, take a look at the Trailhead module at https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/knowledge_essentials?trail_id=service_cloud.

If you come from Classic Knowledge and plan to migrate to Lightning Knowledge, use the Lightning Knowledge Migration Tool (more details can be found at https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=knowledge_migration_tool.htm&type=5).

The following are the main concepts of Lightning Knowledge:

• Articles are stored in the knowledge standard object (we can customize this like any other standard object).
• Different article types are related to different record types (in Classic, each article type was a standalone custom Knowledge object with its own fields and layouts).
• Articles are grouped into category groups and data categories (to ease search and categorization capabilities).
• Users can search for articles and post them on Chatter or attach them to cases.
• Users can read articles (depending on the kind of user and article configuration).
• Users can create, edit, and publish articles (the so-called publishers).
• Users can delete or archive articles (higher administrators).

 Once you turn on Lightning Knowledge, you can’t go back, so plan the activation carefully.