Case Management - Given a set of requirements, design a case management solution from case creation to closure including case assignment, case escalation, case resolution, and case disposition

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Overview

A case is a customer’s question, feedback, or issue. Support agents can review cases to see how they can deliver better service. Sales reps can use cases to see how they affect the sales process. Responding to cases keeps your customers happy and enhances your brand. Customer issues are typically gathered from various Interaction Channels like Communities, Website, CTI, Emails, Social media.

Configuration Steps that helps in Case Management

Case Teams

  • Case Team is a group of people who work together to solve cases which may include SMEs, Senior agents, Support managers etc., Before creating Case teams, team roles are defined that determine the level of access to a case such as read-only or read and write access.
  • Predefine case teams so that users can quickly add people with whom they work.
  • Create assignment rules that add predefined case teams to cases that match specific criteria, such as when cases originate from emails.
  • Create email alerts that notify team members when an action happens in the case. Case Team can be selected as recipient type when sending email notifications through process automation like workflow or process builder.
  • Agents or Internal users (who have access to the case) can add people to Case Team related list on cases and chose the team role.
  • Contacts can also be added to Case Teams but they can access cases only if they are enabled as customer portal users. Customer portal users cannot update the case team or view case team roles.
  • Team members can filter cases and run a case report by choosing My Case Teams.

Set up Cases

  • To use Email action, set up Email-to-Case
  • To use articles, set up Salesforce Knowledge
  • Create layouts for case detail, close case pages and highlights panels.
  • Create layouts for feed view pages to specify which actions, fields and tools agents see when they are working with cases.
  • Use Page Layout assignment to assign the layouts.
  • Follow these optional steps to add more functionality to Case Feed.
    • To let agents include short, pre-written messages in their emails, set up quick text and create quick text messages.
    • To give agents the option of emailing customers to let them know when questions they’ve posted to a portal have been answered, enable portal email notifications.
    • To allow agents to save email messages as drafts before sending them, and to make it possible to create approval actions for email, enable email drafts.
    • To help agents save time and increase consistency when sending emails to customers, create text, HTML, or Visualforce email templates.
    • To let agents automate repetitive tasks, add the macros browser to the console and give agents permission to use macros.
    • To give agents access to more functionality, create and add custom actions.
  • Once you enable Case Feed actions and feed items, your cases are upgraded to the new user interface automatically. It is recommended to wait until this upgrade process is finished before giving users access to Case Feed.
  • Customize different parts of the case page layout in Case Feed:
    • Highlights panels, which appear at the top of both feeds and case detail pages. The highlights panel shows key information about a case so that the most important information is immediately visible to agents.
    • Feed views, which agents see when managing and interacting with cases. The feed view shows the case history using a Chatter-like feed, so that agents can see what’s happened in a case in context.
    • Detail views, which agents see when they click View Case Details. The detail view shows useful information about the case, such as a description of the contact’s company, the account’s address, and related lists.
  • Any additional requirements that cannot be met using configurations can be customized using Visualforce and apex programming language and through Case triggers.

Auto-Response Rules

  • Auto-response rule can be set up for cases created through any interaction channel to automatically send quick replies so that customers gain confidence.

Process Automation

  • Based on Business requirements, Workflow rules or Process Builder or Triggers can be configured to perform pre-processing or post-processing actions.
  • It is better to understand the Order of Execution while configuring various rules and adding custom code through triggers.

Case Creation

Below Service Cloud Features can be used for creating cases in Salesforce.

Manual Case Creation

  • A case can be created manually from a case tab, cases related list, feed of record detail page.
  • A case can be created through custom buttons or quick actions or through a global action depending on the organization’s setup.
  • Validation rules can be enforced to maintain data quality during case creation.
  • To create a case for a support email or phone call
    • Use search to find an individual’s account and locate contact in contacts related list, create contact if one does not exist
    • Click new in the cases related list of contact
    • Enter information about the case like subject, description and other useful information as per the service requirements
    • Establish other relationships based on requirements (like linking case to an asset or to another case)
    • Select appropriate perms like visible in self-service-portal, Assign using active assignment rules, Send notification email to contact based on requirement

Web-to-Case

  • Web-to-Case can be set up to automatically capture customer’s issue details from the company website.
  • Web-to-Case helps in call deflection and is the quickest and easiest way for customers to raise issues.

Email-to-Case

  • Email-to-Case or On-Demand Email-to-Case can be utilized to capture cases automatically from customer emails.

Communities, CUSTOMER PORTAL, SELF-SERVICE PORTAL or CHATTER ANSWERS

  • Customers can open cases from communities that can be either authenticated or unauthenticated.
  • Support agents can escalate any unanswered questions into cases in an answers community.

Live Agent

  • Cases can be created automatically from chat sessions accepted by Support agents using Live Agent.

Social Customer Service

  • Social Customer Service can be utilized to create cases from Social Media Posts by customers on Social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.

Case Assignment

Case Assignment Rule

  • A case assignment rule can be created to define the conditions that determine how the cases should be assigned and routed to an agent or a queue.
  • Only one Rule can be active and it can have up to 3000 rule entries.
  • Order -
    • sets the order of the rule entry. Each entry is evaluated in order and tries to find the match, as soon as the match is found, Salesforce processes the item and stops evaluating the other rule entries.
    • If no match is found, the case is assigned to either default case owner defined in Support Settings or the user creating the case or importing the case.
  • Criteria - Specifies the conditions
  • User - Specifies the user or Queue
  • Do Not Reassign Owner - Specifies that the current owner on the case will not be reassigned when the case is updated.
  • Email Template - Specifies the template to use for the email that is triggered to the owner. No email is sent if no template is specified.
  • Predefined Case Teams - Specifies the predefined cases team(s) to add to the case when it matches the condition.
  • Replace any existing predefined case teams on the case - Specifies that any existing predefined case teams on case are replaced with predefined case teams on the condition when a case matches the condition.
  • Case Assignment rules do not fire when a case is created from the community built using Napili Template. Use case trigger for assignment.
  • Case assignment rule is propogated to parent case when child case is updated.

Case Queues

  • A Case Queue is a group of people who share the workload.
  • Case Queue members can take ownership of any Case within the Queue.
  • Queues can be used to hold cases for different teams, levels of support or parts of the organization.
  • List views are automatically created for each queue and these will be accessible by Queue Members.
  • A email distribution list can be added to queue email field. If Send Email to Members is selected, members in the Queue email distribution list will be notified when a case is assigned to the queue.
  • Roles, Public Groups, Users and Partners can be added as Queue Members.

Mass Update Ownership

  • Ownership of case records can be mass-updated using the list view or data loader.

Omni-Channel

  • Omni-Channel is a flexible, customizable feature that can be configured declaratively.
  • Omni-channel can be used to route case records to the most available or skilled support agents.
  • Agents capacity to take work items and skills can be managed.
  • Work items can be routed to the agents based on the skill sets with Skills-based routing.
  • Agents no longer have to pick and choose work assignments manually from a queue, which saves everyone in your call center time, effort, and brainpower
  • Presence statuses indicate whether an agent is online and available to receive incoming work items, or whether the agent is away or offline.
  • Add Omni-Channel widget to Salesforce console or Omni-Channel utility to your Lightning Service console so that agents can start receiving work.
  • Integrate third-party routing with a partner application with Omni-Channel using Salesforce standard APIs and streaming APIs. External routing is supported with Omni-Channel in both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience.
  • See real-time information about your Omni-Channel agents, queues, and work in the Omni-Channel Supervisor panel, including waiting times, open work, and more

Case Escalation

Escalation is a process to ensure cases are progressing as per the defined SLAs.

Case Escalation Rule

  • Escalation rules automatically escalate cases when the case meets the criteria defined in the rule entry. You can create rule entries, which define criteria for escalating a case, and escalation actions, which define what happens when a case escalates.
  • For each rule entry, we can specify:
    • Order in which rule entries are evaluated
    • Criteria for escalating a case
    • How business hours affect when cases escalate
    • How escalation times are determined
  • Escalation actions specify what happens when the case escalates. You can add up to five actions for each rule entry to escalate the case over increasing periods of time.
  • For each escalation action, you can:
    • Specify when the case escalates
    • Reassign the case to another user or queue, and select an email template that sends the new assignee (the new case owner) a notification email.
    • Send notification emails to other users, the current case owner, or other recipients.
  • Case Escalations can be monitored from the Monitoring section.

Entitlement Process

  • Entitlement processes help you provide a consistent level of support to your customers.
  • Entitlement processes are timelines that include all the steps (or milestones) that your support team must complete to resolve support records like cases or work orders. Each process includes the logic necessary to determine how to enforce the correct service level for your customers.
  • Add milestones to entitlement processes to define the required steps in your support process.
  • Milestone actions are time-dependent workflow actions that occur at every step (milestone) in an entitlement process. After you create an entitlement process and add milestones to it, add milestone actions to the milestones.
  • Apply an entitlement process to a customer’s entitlement so all support records linked to the entitlement use that process.
  • You can create up to 1,000 entitlement processes total, with up to 10 milestones per process

Case Resolution

Service Console OR Lightning console

  • Unified user interface for support agents that allows accessing multiple records on a single screen.
  • Helps in improving the productivity.
  • Support agents can use multiple applications at once and keep the context of cases as priorities change.
  • Administrators can customize a console to determine everything from the objects in the navigation tab, to whether you can place phone calls with a softphone. Customizations can also include displaying knowledge base articles alongside cases, creating custom actions with keyboard shortcuts, or chatting with customers over the web with Live Agent.

Case Feed

  • Case Feed streamlines the way you create, manage, and view cases. It includes case actions like creating case notes, logging calls, changing the case status, and communicating with customers in a Chatter feed.

  • Case Feed displays important case events in chronological order, so it’s easy to see the progress of each case.

  • Agents assigned to a Case Feed page layout see a page that typically looks like the page shown in the screenshot when they view a case.

    • Highlights Panel (1)—Provides an overview of the most important information about a case, such as the contact information, case name, case description, status, priority, and case owner. Agents can use the column dividers to resize sections of the highlights panel so they can see more of the info that’s most relevant.
    • Feed and Detail Views (2)—From the feed view, which includes the publisher and feed, agents can easily switch to the case detail view to see more in-depth information and work with related lists.
    • Publisher (3)—Contains the actions agents use to work with cases, such as the Email, Case Note, and Change Status actions.
    • Articles Tool (4)—Lets agents find Knowledge articles that can help them resolve cases, and then attach them to a case or email them to customers.
    • Feed Filters (5)—Help agents quickly find specific information in the feed by limiting the feed items that appear.
    • Feed (6)—Offers a chronological view of the case’s history. Feed items are created for:
      • Incoming and outgoing email related to the case
      • Comments related to the case on a customer portal or Chatter Answers
      • Calls logged about the case
      • Changes to the case status
      • Comments made on the case
      • Links or files added to the case
      • Milestone activity related to the case
      • Case actions that result from workflow events
      • New tasks and events related to the cases
    • Follow Button and Followers List (7)—Let agents follow the case so they’re notified in Chatter of updates to it, and let them see other followers.
    • Custom Buttons and Links (8)—Give agents access to more tools and functionality.

  • The community case feed lets community users and support agents see all case interactions in a unified feed. Also, agents can take more actions directly from the console. To set up the community case feed, enable it in your organization from Support Settings (Enable Community Case Feed) and make sure that the case page in your community is properly configured.

  • Feed filters make it easy for support agents to see all updates of one type, such as all call logs or all email messages when working with cases in Case Feed. By using filters, agents can find the information they need more quickly, without having to browse through each case event.

  • Use the printable view option to view and print a comprehensive list of the information related to a case.

Chatter

  • Chatter can be used to collaborate with other support agents, Subject Matter Experts, Support Managers, Account Team.
  • Customers can be invited to chatter groups to discuss on issues.
  • A private Chatter Group can be created to discuss cases that require the sharing of confidential information.
  • With custom quick actions, you can make your users’ navigation and workflow as smooth as possible by giving them convenient access to information that’s most important. For example, you can let users create or update records and log calls directly in their Chatter feed or from their mobile device.

EMAIL CUSTOMERS

  • Respond to your customers using email directly from the case record page. To stay efficient, you can insert and create email templates, use quick text, and merge fields.
  • Work with email in the case feed publisher in Lightning Experience or Work with email in the case feed in Salesforce Classic.
  • Give customers comprehensive information to help resolve their issues more quickly by attaching files to email messages, and add inline images to include pictures that enhance your text.

Case Comments

  • Case comments let you and your support agents add, edit, and delete public and private comments on a case. All comments appear in the Case Comments related list.
  • Comments can remain private or be made publicly available to a case’s contact on the Customer Portal, Self-Service portal, or Chatter Answers.
  • When a portal user adds a comment, the case owner receives an email. A comment icon remains on the case heading until the case owner views it.

Case Teams

  • Case Team is a group of people who work together to solve cases which may include SMEs, Senior agents, Support managers etc., Before creating Case teams, team roles are defined that determine the level of access to a case such as read-only or read and write access.
  • Predefine case teams so that users can quickly add people with whom they work.
  • Create assignment rules that add predefined case teams to cases that match specific criteria, such as when cases originate from emails.
  • Create email alerts that notify team members when an action happens in the case. Case Team can be selected as recipient type when sending email notifications through process automation like workflow or process builder.
  • Agents or Internal users (who have access to case) can add people to Case Team related list on cases and chose the team role.
  • Contacts can also be added to Case Teams but they can access cases only if they are enabled as customer portal users. Customer portal users cannot update the case team or view case team roles.
  • Team members can filter cases and run a case report by choosing My Case Teams.

Account Teams

  • Account Team resides under account object
  • Case access level can be specified for Account Team members.

Knowledge

  • Suggested articles can be enabled to allow support agents to resolve cases quickly and efficiently using knowlede articles.
  • Articles related list helps agents to search for more relevant articles and attach them to cases.
  • Knowledge One is available as a widget that you can plug into the Salesforce Console for Service. If you are using the Knowledge tab, you get the same easy-to-use interface for articles and external sources on cases and within the Salesforce Console for Service. You can search, send, and create articles, all without leaving the case.
  • The article widget in a case feed search doesn’t necessarily use the agent’s language
  • If you can’t see the Knowledge One sidebar, increase its width to 250 (height to 150) in the page layout. These are the minimum measurements for the Knowledge One sidebar to display properly.
DOES THE WIDGET… <a href=“https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=knowledge_widget_comparision.htm&amp;type=5#kb_article_widget_compare"&gt;ARTICLE WIDGET</a> <a href=“https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=knowledge_widget_comparision.htm&amp;type=5#kb_article_casefeed_widget_compare"&gt;ARTICLE CASE FEED WIDGET</a> <a href=“https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=knowledge_widget_comparision.htm&amp;type=5#kb_one_widget_compare"&gt;KNOWLEDGE ONE WIDGET</a>
Filter on data category Yes No Yes
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Create an article No No Yes
Search an external object No No Yes
Access your draft articles No No Yes
Attach an article to a case Yes Yes Yes
Send an article as a PDF No Yes Yes
Share an article’s public URL No Yes Yes
Adjust with the window size No No Yes
Have more than one way to suggest articles No No Yes

Solutions

  • A solution is a detailed description of a customer issue and the resolution of that issue. This does not require any separate feature licenses like Knowledge.
  • Solution managers, administrators, and users with the appropriate permissions can create, review, and categorize solutions. They can also publish solutions to the Self-Service portal and make solutions public.
  • Administrators, and users with the “Import Solutions” permission, can import solutions.
  • The Solutions tab displays a home page that lets you quickly locate and manage solutions.
  • By default, solutions are created and displayed in text format. Administrators can enable HTML solutions (from Solution Settings, Enable HTML Solutions) so that all solutions are displayed in HTML format and created using an HTML editor.
  • When the suggested solutions feature is enabled in your Self-Service or Customer Portals, customers can view suggested solutions when viewing or submitting cases. Viewing suggested solutions may help customers solve a particular case and close the case themselves.
  • Using HTML code supplied by Salesforce, in cooperation with your website administrator, you can add a special search box and button to your website to allow customers to search your public solutions without having to contact your support center. Public solutions are different from a Self-Service and Customer Portal because users are not required to log in, and they can only search for solutions, not submit cases.

Entitlements and Milestones

  • Entitlement management helps you provide the correct service level to your customers. It includes a variety of features that let you model and enforce service level agreements.
  • Service Contracts can be used to represent warranties, subscriptions, SLAs and other types of customer support.
  • Entitlements are units of customer support in Salesforce, such as “phone support” or “web support.” They’re typically used to represent terms in service agreements.
  • Entitlement processes help you provide a consistent level of support to your customers.
  • Entitlement processes are timelines that include all the steps (or milestones) that your support team must complete to resolve support records like cases or work orders. Each process includes the logic necessary to determine how to enforce the correct service level for your customers.
  • Add milestones to entitlement processes to define the required steps in your support process.
  • Milestone actions are time-dependent workflow actions that occur at every step (milestone) in an entitlement process. After you create an entitlement process and add milestones to it, add milestone actions to the milestones.
  • Apply an entitlement process to a customer’s entitlement so all support records linked to the entitlement use that process.
  • You can create up to 1,000 entitlement processes total, with up to 10 milestones per process

Case Path

  • A Case Path is a visual component that guides agents through different stages of case.
  • One Path can be set up per record type.
  • Steps for each path are based on values in the picklist that is selected when path is set up.
  • At each step, we can display up to five key fields to focus users on the most critical information and help agents succeed with step specific guidance, such as tips, important links etc.
  • The path’s final step represents all final statuses for the object. You can change which statuses are included in the final step.
  • Path Considerations
    • You can’t use the page layout to require different fields in different steps. You can, however, set up validation rules based on the path step.
    • Deleting a record type that has a corresponding path also deletes the path.
    • Validation rules appear as page-level messages, even when you configure the rules to appear near the fields.
    • You can’t include images in packages for Path.
    • You can’t package custom values in standard picklist fields.

Mass Quick Actions

  • A mass quick action is a quick action that gets added to an object’s Search Layout → List View option → List View Actions in Lightning Experience
  • After a mass quick action is set up, you can select up to 100 records in a list view and perform mass updates.
  • You can use a mass quick action with cases, leads, accounts, campaigns, contacts, opportunities, work orders, and custom objects that support quick actions and have a search layout in Lightning Experience.
  • You can’t perform mass quick actions on a Recently Viewed list.
  • Mass quick action can be performed only on the following quick action types:
    • Create a Record
    • Update a Record

Case Email Notifications

  • A lot of actions takes place within a case during Case resolution and it is better to send email notifications to different parties involved in Case like the agent, Customer Contact, SMEs etc.
  • Email notifications can be sent when a case is created, updated or case comments are posted.
  • Email notifications can be sent by configuring workflows and processes based on the requirements like case owner change, status update or escalated case.

Quick Text

  • Quick text saves agents time and increases standardization. With quick text, you can insert predefined messages, like greetings, answers to common questions, and short notes. You can insert quick text in emails, chats, events, tasks, Knowledge articles, and more.
  • You can share quick text with users, public groups, and more. The way you share quick text in Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience is different. In Salesforce Classic, you can share individual quick text. In Lightning Experience, you share quick text using folders.

Process Automation

  • Workflow rules and process builder can be set up to automate steps in case resolution steps.
  • Workflow actions can include sending email notifications, creating tasks, updating fields, sending outbound messages.
  • Process Builder Actions can include creating record, invoke anotehr process, create chatter post, use quick actions, launch a flow, send an email, submit a record for approval, update record, call apex code.

Case Disposition

Case Closure

  • Case Closure can be performed from Case detail page or cases related list.
  • Close case page layouts can be configured to show specific fields.
  • Report charts can also be added to close case page layouts.
  • Update Status, Case Reason, or any other fields as necessary.
  • If solutions are enabled, you can fill in the Solution Details for the case. If you don’t want to save the solution or submit it for review to a solution manager, uncheck Submit to public solutions. When this field is checked, the new solution is automatically linked to the case.
  • If you have the “Manage Cases” permission, you can close multiple cases at once using the Close button on case lists.

Case Closure Notes and Notifications

  • Agents can provide problem statement and resolution steps in the case closure notes custom rich text field.
  • If there’s a contact on the case, select Notify contact on case close to send an email to the contact based on a predefined case close template.

Article Creation/SOlutions for Closed Cases

  • Salesforce Knowledge and article submission during case close can be enabled to allow article creation while closing cases
  • Click Save or Save and Create Article. The article option is available if both Salesforce Knowledge and article submission during case close is enabled.
  • If Solutions are enabled, agents can document the solution details while closing the case.

References

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