1. Service Cloud Applications Introduction
So now we’re ready to dive into service cloud applications. And I’ve got the exam outline here and if we expand this, you’ll see three bullet points and so we’re going to be covering all the concepts represented in these bullet points. I’ll have several lessons related to each of these bullet points and sometimes a lesson or two devoted to like a single list of different functions such as live aid agent or case feed or service cloud console. So get prepared. As we learn how to maintain salesforce knowledge, we’ll be looking at article record types and data categories and as well we’ll be learning about service entitlements in the entitlement process.
And then finally we will also be covering the features of salesforce which enable interaction between support agents and customers and that would be such items as live agent, the case feed, the service cloud console communities and omnichannel. And so we’re going to start things off before we get into these bullet points to kind of do a reset and a reminder of things as far as fundamentals go that you should know from the admin exam and that has to do with case management and the case process. And we will dive into that in the next lesson as we get started down the path of learning more about service cloud applications on the advanced admin exam. So I’ll see you there.
2. Creating Support Processes
Spend a moment talking over the case process as far as it relates to case management. If you recall from what you learned in the admin exam, the goal of case management is to resolve cases quickly and ideally it’s termed one and done as far as one touch point with the customer. And either they’re able to self service themselves through a knowledge base, perhaps, or they call in, or perhaps they chat with a support agent. But the goal is to minimize the touch points so that their problem can be resolved quickly in order to save time and cost and also just to provide better customer support because there’s nothing more frustrating. Especially those of you that suffer through comcast for their cable and Internet provider will know this full well in having to call multiple times for the same issue.
And so with that said, let’s get into case management and specifically the status field on cases. Now you notice here on this case that I’m on and I pulled up the service application from the app launcher and selected the cases tab and selected a random open case from a list view. But the status field here is similar to the Opportunity stage field on the sell side of things. And so you can track the lifecycle of a case through the status field and it starts off as a new status and then you have working escalated and closed in this example.
And then to remind you, and perhaps you don’t know this or you’ve forgotten this, is that the status designations that are available are controlled and set up through the service process inside of salesforce. So if we go into setup and look for support process and click on the support processes, you’ll see that we’ve not set any up yet. So the thing to remember or recall or understand fundamentally with the support process is that that is how you can specify different status fields across different types of support processes. So you could have a support process for example called hardware and then you could also then specify the values that you want to display in the status field for hardware cases. So you may not want to allow cases to be escalated for whatever reason for hardware cases you can also set the default status designation for hardware cases to either new or working. You can’t default it to closed for example. So we’re just going to leave that as new for the default and let’s create one more support process and we’ll just base this on the master support process and we’ll call this a support or software support process and click Save. And so you may have people calling in with issues related to software or hardware and so you can adjust the values here on the case status for software support cases under this support process.
So let’s click save. So now that we have these support processes created, we can create case record types to correspond with and leverage the support processes. And if we don’t create the Case Record types then if we were to go in and just try and create a new case, at this point we don’t get the option of creating either a hardware or software case. So therefore we will have just the four status designations based off of the Master Record type. And so we need to associate these support processes with Case Record types. So if we go into Object Manager and select Case and then go to Record types, we do not have any Record types created yet for our Case object. So in the next lesson we will create a couple of Case record types, one for hardware, one for software and associate those with our support processes. And then this will bring things full circle as far as controlling the status designations of different types of cases, bringing together the case process with the Case Record types. So let’s create those Case Record types in the next lesson.
3. Creating Case Record Types
So now let’s create Case record types and we’ll click New from Object Manager on the case object and then selecting Record Types. So, creating new Record type, we will base this off the master record type because that’s our only option at this point. And we will create one record type for cases called hardware. And here’s why.
We created the support process previously, and that’s to select like the hardware support process which controls which status designations are available from the Status Picklist field, we’ll make this record type active. We will enable this for all profiles and with it being the first record type, it is automatically the default record type for all profiles. And you cannot unselect that. Okay? So clicking Next, the next part of this two step wizard is to apply the page layout for this record type so you can apply one layout to all profiles. And for hardware, we will just call this the Case Support layout.
We’ll select that page layout and then we’ll click Save a New to create another case record type. And this one will be for software. We’ll base this off of the hardware record type and then we’ll give this a label of software tab out of that for the record type name. The support process will correspond with the software support process, make this active as well. We’ll enable this for all profiles, but not make it the default. So we’ll leave this unchecked and click Next. And then for the page layout we’ll assign for the software, let’s just assign it the case layout to all profiles.
So another thing to remember is that you’ve got to do page layout assignments when you introduce record types. And so if you look at the case page layouts and then look at page layout assignments, we now see the record types and the case page layouts assigned by profile as well. So we have the master record type, the hardware record type, and the software record type.
