Overview
Interaction channels enable support agents to interact with customers to resolve support issues and to respond to product inquiries. It is recommended to understand the design considerations and best practices while setting up these Interaction channels. Design considerations related to User Interface, Object Model, Data Privacy, Data Visibility, and reporting needs to be understood in detail
Mobile
Overview
- SOS helps agents to connect with customers via two-way video or screen sharing.
- SOS is part of Service Cloud Snap-ins for Mobile Apps.
Design Considerations
- Before setting up SOS enable omni-channel
- SOS can be added to Andriod or iOS mobile native app.
- Agents can access cases, accounts, and other customer information during their video conversation.
- Agents can draw on Customers screen during the SOS session to enable in-app guidance.
- Each agent who uses SOS must have an SOS license and be part of a permission set that enables the SOS license.
- Presence statuses indicate whether an agent is online and available to receive incoming work items, or whether the agent is away or offline. Presence can be created and assigned with profiles or permission sets to let agents indicate their availability to receive SOS calls.
- SOS Routing Configurations and Queues can be created to route work items to agents in real time. Routing configurations determine how work items are routed to agents. They let you prioritize the relative importance and size of work items from your queues and helps in equally distributing the work among the available agents.
- An SOS deployment needs to be created to integrate your SOS settings from Salesforce into the mobile application.
Best practices
- Use Omni-Channel to customize how work items—including SOS video calls—are routed to your agents. Route SOS calls to the most available, capable agents in real time. No third-party routing engine required!
- Omni-Channel and SOS widgets need to be added to Service Console. From the Omni-Channel widget, agents can change their presence status and triage their incoming work assignments, including SOS calls. When an agent accepts an SOS call, the call opens in the SOS widget, where agents can view the customer’s screen.
- URL salesforceliveagent.com needs to be whitelisted in the “Whitelist Domain” field of Service Console app to make sure calls are not blocked by company’s firewall.
Phone
Design Considerations
- Open CTI the Javascript API can be used to integrate the third-party computer-telephony systems with Salesforce Call Center. Calls can be made directly from a Softphone in Salesforce without installing CTI adapters on agents machines.
- Open CTI depends on your org’s user interface. There are separate Open CTI APIs for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience and the respective APIs needs to be selected accordingly.
- After choosing the CTI implementation, call center record needs to be defined by importing the call center definition file. Once a call center definition file has been imported into Salesforce, the set of fields that were specified in the file cannot be modified. The values assigned to those fields, however, can be changed within Salesforce.
- Assign Salesforce users to appropriate call center so that they can access the Softphone.
- Call center phone directories can be configured.
- Call center directory can be used to search any object with a phone number field.
- Softphone layouts can be customized and assigned to profiles.
- Personal softphone settings can be edited
- to allow automatic login into call center when logging into Salesforce
- to speficify how a record should display if it is the only one that matches the inbound call.
- Screen pops can only display when the call center state is set to ‘Ready for Calls’
Best practices
- Separate Open CTI APIs are available for Classic and Lightning Experience
- CTI toolkit is retired and no longer supported.
- Check if the available Open CTI Implementation developed by partners in AppExchange work with your telephony systems and meets all your requirements.
Use Email-to-Case to automatically turn customer emails into cases, so agents can quickly track and resolve their issues.
Design Considerations
- Email-to-Case
- keep email traffic inside the network’s firewall
- to accept emails larger (includes header, message and attachments) than 25 MB.
- This requires download of the Email-to-Case agent on the local machine.
- Maximum number of emails that can be converted to cases per day can be 2500
- This can be configured using Guided flow.
- On-Demand Email-to-Case
- Email-to-Case checkbox needs to be enabled before Enabling On-Demand Email-to-Case
- Keep traffic outside the network’s firewall
- Requires to setup Salesforce Apex Email Services to turn emails to cases.
- Maximum number of emails that can be converted to cases per day can be 10000
- On-Demand Email-to-Case automatically shortens email text to 32,000 characters. Contact Salesforce if you’d like this limit raised to 128,000 characters for your organization.
- Notify Case Owners on New Email can be enabled to allow case owners to receive notifications of new emails on existing cases.
- Enable HTML Email warns users before opening the incoming HTML email content.
- Set Case Source to Email updates the Case Source Field to Email for all cases that originate from Email-to-Case. Once this setting is enabled associated emails get marked as Read when the agent opens the case.
- Save Email-to-Case Attachments as Salesforce Files converts attachments from inbound emails into Salesforce Files.
- **Insert Thread ID in the Email subject and Insert Thread ID in the Email Body **adds thread Id to the subject/body of email which is a unique number that identifies the organization and case associated with the outgoing email.
- Place User Signature before Email Threads adds user signature after the reply but before the email thread. If this is not selected user signature is placed at the bottom of the email thread.
- Make sure the subject line and body of outgoing emails are unique. If the Email Subject ID and Email Body Text ID are the same, Email-to-Case creates an infinite loop of emails related to each case. If these settings are not selected, Email-to-Case eventually could stop accepting new emails.
- Select Over Email Rate Limit Action and Unauthorized Sender Action settings based on how your company plans to use On-Demand Email-to-Case. The allowed values are Bounce, Discard, Requeue (only for Over Email Rate Limit Action)
- The Priority and Case Origin fields auto-populate the case via the routing address settings when the routing address is included in either the To, CC, or BCC fields of an inbound email.
- Email attachments using On-Demand may be up to 25 MB. There is no attachment size limit when using the Email-to-Case agent.
Best practices
- Test Email Routing Address by manually sending emails and verify if they are converting emails to cases and the default values set on routing address are working as expected
- Email Templates can be created for agents to use when replying to email.
- Email quick actions should be added to the case page layouts to allow support agents to send an email from case.
- Email Related list can be added to the case page layouts.
- Get your cases into Service Cloud fast with a quick guided setup flow for Email-to-Case. Connect your support email address to Salesforce, give your incoming cases a default priority and queue, and set up mail forwarding so your emails become cases for your support team.
- Make sure that the subject line and body of your outgoing emails are unique. If the Email Subject ID and Email Body Text ID are the same, Email-to-Case creates an infinite loop of emails related to each case. If these settings are not selected, Email-to-Case eventually could stop accepting new emails.
- Before you enable On-Demand Email-to-Case, set the Default Case Owner and Automated Case User and enable and configure Email-to-Case.
- In Routing Address Settings
- If you specify a case owner, auto-assignment rules are ignored.
- You can’t delete a queue that a routing address refers to. Either delete the routing address, or edit the routing address settings to point to a different queue.
Chat
Use Live Agent web-based chat to offer real-time chat support to customers. Quickly connect customers to agents by adding chat buttons on your web pages and sending automatic chat invitations to customers as they peruse your website. Visitors simply click a chat button or accept a chat invitation that sends a chat request to your agents.
- Web chat consists of four parts: Live Agent, Omni-Channel, Snap-ins Chat, and Einstein Bots.
- Live Agent is the console component that support agents use to send and receive messages.
- Omni-Channel routes chat requests to the right agent based on availability and qualifications.
- Snap-ins Chat is the customizable chat window that customers use to get the help they need. Snap-ins Chat is optimized for mobile browsers, so customers have a frustration-free chat experience on every device.
- Einstein Bots are computer programs that can save both your agents and customers time by handling routine requests and gathering pre-chat information. Bots are your agents’ allies—not their replacements.
Design Considerations
- Support agents use the console in Salesforce Classic to chat with customers. Snap-ins Chat and Einstein Bots can be added to give your agents and customers the best web chat experience.
- As an administrator, you can set up and customize Live Agent for your users, including agents and support supervisors. Live Agent is easy to set up and highly customizable. You can enable a suite of features that your agents and supervisors can use to assist customers.
- As a support supervisor,
- you oversee your employees to ensure that they provide the best customer support possible. Live Agent is a chat solution that’s fully integrated with the rest of Salesforce, making it easy for you to access the information you need about your agents and their chat activity in a single workspace.
- The Live Agent supervisor panel is your one-stop shop to find information about your department’s chat buttons and chat agents
- Assign Skills to Agents
- Report on Live agent sessions
- As a support agent
- you assist dozens of customers with their support issues every day.
- Live Agent is a chat solution that’s fully integrated with the rest of Salesforce and hence helps agents to provide 360-degree view of customer.
- In addition, Salesforce leverages the power of the Service Cloud, giving you access to important tools like a knowledge base and pre-defined support messages, that let you assist your customers and close cases more quickly.
- Users require Live Agent User feature license, as well as API Enabled administrative permission enabled either through Profile or Permission set.
- Live agent configurations can be created and assigned to users and Profiles to control the functionality of live agent in Salesforce console. Live Agent configurations enable you to control your users’ access to certain Live Agent features. You can create multiple configurations that define Live Agent’s functionality for multiple types of users
- Deployment code can be added to web pages wherever live agent should be deployed.
- Live agent branding can be customized using Platform Sites and Static Resources. The maximum size for a standard chat window image is 50 pixels.
- Chat buttons can be created to enable customers to request a chat with a support agent from website.
Best practices
- To enable supervisors to assign skills, enable the “Assign Live Agent Skills to Users” permission on their profiles, or assign it to individual users via a permission set. When supervisors have this permission, they can go to Setup | Customize | Live Agent Skills and update the assigned profiles or users under each skill.
- If you specify an automatic greeting message in both your Live Agent configuration and in an individual chat button, the message that’s associated with your chat button overrides the message that’s associated with your configuration.
- Chatlets are tools that are available only to organizations that use Live Agent in the Live Agent console. The Live Agent console is no longer supported, so we don’t recommend setting up chatlets.
- Users can be assigned to only one Live Agent configuration at a time. If you assign the same user to a second Live Agent configuration, the system removes that user from the first Live Agent configuration without warning you. So make sure that you know exactly which Live Agent configuration each user should be assigned to!
- Chat conferencing does not support the Related Entities panel. If you attempt to use it with chat conferencing, important details might not be saved on your record.
- Pre-Chat and Post-Chat Pages should be used to enable exchange of information with customers who use chat.
- Quick text messages can be created to allow agents to insert standardized notes, greetings, and answers to repeated questions to improve their productivity.
- Sesitive Data rules should be added to block sensitive data.
- Live Agent should be added to Service Console app to allow agents access it with other service tools.
- Live Agent Supervisor panel should be added to the Service Console app to allow supervisors to access information about agents and chats.
Web
Use Web-to-Case to gather support inquiries and turn them into cases. Web-to-Case can help your organization respond to customers faster, improving your support team’s productivity.
Design Considerations
- Create custom fields on the case object to capture the required information.
- Whenever possible, web-generated cases are automatically linked to the relevant contact and account based on the customer’s email address.
- Salesforce runs field validation rules before creating records submitted via Web-to-Case and only creates records that have valid values. All universally required fields must have a value before a record can be created via Web-to-Case.
- The format for date and currency fields captured online is taken from your organization’s default settings—Default Locale and Currency Locale.
- Salesforce doesn’t support rich text area (RTA) fields on Web-to-Case forms. If you use these fields on your forms, any information entered in them is saved as plain text when the case is created.
- If your organization exceeds its daily Web-to-Case limit, the default case owner (specified in your Support Settings page) will receive an email containing the additional case information.
Best practices
- Create custom fields on the case object to capture the required information.
- Create a default email template for an automated notification when a case is submitted.
- Create case queues for assigning incoming cases.
- Select default case owner on support settings so that cases that don’t meet criteria defined in the case assignment rules are assigned to them.
- For Spam prevention, enable require reCAPTCHA Verification under Web-to-Case settings.
- To allow customers to report cases on several products at a time, use a custom multi-select picklist.
Social Media
Social Media Channel helps us join customer conversations on social media, such as Twitter and Facebook and to Create cases from social posts, and deliver service on customers’ favorite channels.
Design Considerations
- Free starter pack can be used to track two or less social accounts.
- When a lead is converted to an account or contact, the social items in the feed are removed.
- Social Customer Service supports sending and receiving 280-character tweets.
- We can set Up Social Customer Service with a Guided Setup Flow.
- Modifying the default settings is not recommended. If you choose the modify the default settings, you may experience issues using Social Customer Service.
- All users can view external social accounts from their org via the API.
- If you delete a Social Account, it’s deleted everywhere, including Social Studio, and you can’t retrieve the deleted account.
- When you add the Social Conversations component, agents can quickly get a sense of who the customer is, the context surrounding the case, and insight into previous interactions. The component pulls information from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
- The influencer score is only for Twitter. It’s a global measure of influence on a scale of 0–100. The calculated score leans heavily toward reach and frequency. Other measures and ratios are considered to decrease blatant manipulation.
- To display parent posts in the component, enable the org setting Enable retrieval of parent posts for added context. Parent posts don’t display when this option isn’t selected.
- With the Starter Pack, you can select if you want cases created automatically when posts come from a particular social account with the Case Creation box on the Social Accounts tab.
- Permission sets can be used to grant access to managed social accounts to different set of users.
- Social publisher action should be added to case feed to allow support agents to reply to customers.
- Social action fields can be added, removed and organized according to requirements.
- Social Business Rules can be used to automate how inbound social content is processed and appeared to support agents. It is also possible to choose how inbound social content is formatted for Case Subject.
- Social Post object is used to store information about a post from a person or company on a social network such as Twitter or Facebook.
- The maximum number of active managed social accounts is 2000.
- The Maximum number of post labels is 200.
- If you are using the starter pack, you can’t change the Apex class. However, you can change the user it’s run with in Run Apex As User. The default Apex class creates a social post, social persona, case, contact, and supports common use cases.
- To support attachments on social posts, make sure the Run Apex As User has access to Files, Salesforce CRM Content, and ContentVersion in the API.
- Give social post read access to external community and portal users. There are 3 requirements to make social posts available in communities and portals.
- Ensure that the user has access to cases in the community.
- Give users read permission to social posts on their profiles.
- On your organization’s Social Post object, enable visibility to individual fields through the field level security settings.
Best practices
- If there are two or less social accounts to track, use the Starter Pack. Otherwise, the Social Service Pro add-on or Social Studio accounts are needed. Instagram and YouTube aren’t available in the starter pack version. You must have a Social Studio account to sync your Instagram and YouTube accounts.
- Case Feed Tracking for all related objects should be enabled to create case feed items for social posts.
- If you want posts approved before they send, check Enable approvals for social posts.
- Set up the quick text so agents can create ready-to-send responses to social networks.