6. Customizing the Service Console via App Settings
Customize the service console via the Lightning app builder. So now I want to go into Setup and let’s work through some of the customizations you can do in a console via Set Up. And so to do that, we need to go into the App Manager inside of Lightning and look for that specific application. So we have app manager here. So I’m going to click on that and there’s a list of the different applications that are available. All right, so the service console and the API name for this is Lightning Service. The description just shows Lighting Experience, et cetera.
And we are going to edit this one to customize it. So I’m clicking the down arrow and then selecting Edit from that line item there for the Service Console. Now, this is once again inside of the Lightning App Builder, and we have different app settings that we can adjust. And so it defaults to the details and branding of the application. And you can adjust the description here. For example, you could decide that you don’t want the parentheticals around the Lighting Experience, and we’ll just say Lightning Experience version.
Kind of odd that this is capitalized. Well, I guess because it was a parenthetical was. So let support agents, work with multiple records, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so now we could change the color or add a different icon, for example. But I’m just going to click Save at this point. And so now we can move on to the other app settings such as App Options. And here’s where it’s set as either Console navigation or standard Navigation. And this is not editable.
This is one of the applications out of the box with the free salesforce account. Trying to think why that wouldn’t be editable. I was thinking we could edit it, but we want to keep it Console anyways. But if you ever want to convert an application to a Console application, you would do it here under App Options and change the navigation style to Console as well.
The setup experience goes to the service setup. So I don’t know if you noticed this or not. Let me tab over to a different tab and I’ll show you this in action. So when we have the Service Console application, we see our updated description here already. But if we’re in the Service Console for Lighting Experience, and then if I click on Set Up while the Service Console application is selected and go to Setup, it takes me to the Service Setup option and that’s the default there. And so the Service Set Up is a customized home screen setup that has to do with Service.
And there’s some quick links here for adding a user customizing case status and then some other quick links, and also some performance as far as cases created and closed and lifetime performance, for example. And so how that corresponds with the Service Set Up is that that is set here under the setup experience and the full set up of options is under the traditional setup service set up is condensed version with more service specific options. So then utility items that has to do with the items down at the bottom of the console.
So if we go back to the console, this history here is available at the bottom of the console. So now if we go back here you can see that you can remove these things and these are utility items a lot of times for success on the exam as well, you need to understand the verbiage. So utility item would be this bar down here inside of a console application and these are considered utility items. This pulls up the history, my recent history of the different tabs that I’ve dealt with. And then as well these actions, you can copy a link here that will take you directly to a case.
And so these links for these actions are helpful because you may have closed a tab and not have it available, because you could just copy here from the URL of your browser, but you can quickly just grab a copy of the clipboard and just one click to a case so that then you could email that to another user or chatted to another support agent, for example.
And so then addition other things, the utility items which you can add additional ones by clicking add utility item and selecting that to add additional ones as well as custom ones that you can create if you’ve deployed your own domain. But for example, you could add report charts, VisualForce pages, wave dashboards and a whole lot more. You can integrate with a CTI soft phone system that takes them further set up and a lot of these require further customization.
So for sake of time, I’m not going to go in and configure and enable a lot of these, such as Quip, which is a recent acquisition by Salesforce, which I don’t think will make an appearance on the exam. But perhaps but once you’ve enabled a lot of these different features, you could add those to the utility items down below in the console. Now, in addition to utility items, you have navigation items which we adjusted previously from within the actual interface.
Now you can also get to navigation items through the app settings. So if you recall before let me close this and let me bring back up, I don’t have to actually bring up the list view on the side, I can just click here. If you remember we clicked Edit to adjust the navigation items and so in addition to that you can hit those here as well, the selected items here on the right display. What is shown and what’s kind of throwing me for a loop here is because we added orders to the selected items and it’s not appearing here.
So it’s almost like that didn’t persist because here’s the asset management application that we added previously. And let me go ahead and add Orders again, I’m not sure why it’s not on the right hand side already, because it is live in the application. Let me click Save and then let me refresh this and then see where Orders ends up. So Orders is there and the asset management is not making an appearance. Let me try to move these up higher. And there may be some caching issues that we’re having, or there may be some sort of disconnect, or perhaps I’m overlooking something, but it seems that this is not working correctly. Could be that it’s a lightning issue, I’m kind of guessing at this point.
All right, so now it probably was just a caching issue. Now here’s Asset Management down here at the bottom, and then Orders close to the bottom. But what I did here was I had those higher up. So it’s not quite the same. We’ve got the selected items in a different order here than what we see here. And then if I select Edit, it’s got Asset Management at the bottom, orders coupled from the bottom, which is what we have in our interface. But from the app settings we have a different sequence for the selected items. So I’m not sure why there’s a difference there.
So if you figure that out, let me know and you can put that in the comments or reach out to me and I’ll update this. So then beyond that, there’s other app settings you can perform on the service console, such as Navigation Rules. And before I get into Navigation Rules, I want to go back to Navigation Items, because when I went to Navigation Rules, it made me realize like, wait a minute, I don’t think I click save or anything, but if I go back to Navigation Items, there is no save button. So it does dynamically update this, but then it’s not necessarily keeping the sequence in order. So perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it’s a dynamic save and maybe things just get out of sync. So Navigation Rules determine whether to open a related record in addition to the primary record. So this is an object by object option you can set up for cases, contacts, orders, accounts, and we added orders to a navigation menu. And so for cases, you can say that cases are either their own workspace tab or their sub tab of accounts, for example, or other related objects that cases related to, such as a parent case, as self relationship with other cases, you can have a parent case and then child cases, for example.
Or you could have the parent or the top tab and the console be the contact that’s associated with the case or even the asset that’s associated with the case. And what a sub tab is, and we saw this earlier, is if we select Orders, for example, and click on one of these, it wasn’t with orders it was my own user record as a sub tab. So we had case and then a sub tab of that is my user record for the case owner and that’s a sub tab of this primary tab here. So that’s what a sub tab is. So you can have multiple sub tabs underneath a top level tab here. And so Workspace tabs means that it’s a tab unto itself. A sub tab would be that appears below a Workspace tab and it also shows here cases open as sub tabs of selected but we’ll just make that a Workspace tab. And the same for contacts, for Orders, we could say let’s make that a sub tab of contract. And then for Accounts, we would just typically you want account to be a top level thing. So you make that a Workspace tab.
We’ll click Save to save our changes there for the navigation rules. And you might have noticed as well that Save does not appear until we’ve made changes. So what I want to do is I want to go back to navigation items. I want to make some changes. I’m going to confirm leaving that page. I want to move some stuff around and so scratch what I said earlier. So that’s why there’s a disconnect. It was because the Save button appears as I make changes. And so I think what happened was I did not save my changes adequately and that’s why there’s this disconnect between the two different options for the navigation items. So I’m going to experiment here to see if we can get this right. So I’ve got accounts orders, asset management and then cases. And I clicked Save. So now I’m going to refresh, I’m going to refresh my screen here and then I’m going to click the navigation items to see if we’ve got everything synced up and we do not. So the mystery continues.
Let’s move on. Navigation rules, we touched on that just a minute ago. And once again, you can save your changes. If you make changes, the button appears, so be sure and click it. Now, another thing that you need to be aware of is the profile settings. And this is where you make applications available to specific profiles. Apps can be made available to users. Either you could go through the individual profiles and set up and set it up that way, or you can select all the profiles that you want to have access to this application from inside the Lightning app builder under App Settings and User Profiles. This is probably the quickest way to set up access to an application is through this route because then you can add and remove profiles so that certain users cannot access this particular application. So if you don’t have this application in your own, you could make it available to your profile by selecting System Administrator and making it a selected profile, for example, and clicking Save.
And then finally app performance, which is in beta at the time of this recording. And this will not appear on the exam, I don’t believe, but you can run an optimizer for this application and this will give you a report of how you can optimize your application better as far as some best practices go, and evaluate the structure of your record pages and usage and placement of components. And the report, I believe it’s emailed to you as an attachment and then it’s also saved to your files or somewhere inside your own salesforce instance as well.
And so the Service Console is basically it’s a console application that is geared towards service and support and you will typically be working in console applications if you’re dealing with case management. Now there are other console applications for other uses such as Sales Console and a console has that same look as far as a side panel or ListView typically. And then you can click on different records and those open up in tabs and you can adjust and customize console applications just like we’ve done through the Lightning App Builder. Now, once you’re done making your changes here, you can also associate Page or Creative Page and make it a home page for this application inside the console. So in the next lesson we’ll go ahead and create a home page for our console application.
7. Creating a Lightning Home Page for the Service Console
We’ve done a lot of customization for our Service Console application and so now we want to create a page for our Service Console. So inside of the Lightning App Builder, you can select pages from this down arrow here and there’s a couple of different options here. There is an app page for Asset Management that we created previously and that would be brought up by clicking on the Asset Management Application. All right, so Asset Management. So I click on that and that brings up this custom Lightning page that we previously created for the Asset Management application. So let’s look at creating a page by clicking on Pages and selecting New Page. And this will be a new app page for the Service Console for Lightning Experience. This is building a one page app for Lightning Experience and the Mobile app. Now that would be an app page.
A Home page is the page that comes up when you click Home or go to the Home tab on an application. And then a record page has to do record detail page in this example here is for opportunities. So let’s create a Home page and this will be the Home page for the Service Console application. So we’re selecting Homepage and clicking Next and then provided a label and click Next. And so then for the page template, you can either just choose a standard home page template or you can actually clone the Salesforce default page, which is the two columns made up of a main area and right sidebar. And that’s the home page. That includes quarterly performance, assistant today’s events, et cetera. Let’s just choose the page template of Standard Home page and click Finish. And so now we’ve got an empty shell of placeholders for components. And so we think about service console. We may want to have for example, a list view. And we’re going to make this be the home page for the Service Console. So we may want this to default to my accounts for account records for a list view there. And we could add additional list view for cases for example.
And this would be my open cases would make sense so that any cases that are open for me would appear here as well. And you could increase the number of records to show I think I’ve only got two cases but I’m going to show up to five. And then for my accounts I’m going to show up to five there as well. And then you could also allow for inline editing and that enables you to just double click or click the pencil icon and make a change to fill and save it from inside of the related list. And so here in this main body above these related lists, we could have the Chatter publisher and this is where you could do Posts, Polls and Questions. You can select different types if you have those configured. You can also set filters as well for component Visibility. And by setting Component Visibility just means you could show or hide this based on certain filter criteria. And then for this component area here, you may want to include as well trending Topics which we may not have any trending Topics in our just yet, and Recommendations.
And so let’s click Save and finish out making this page available by activating it. And once we activate, we want to make this not the default necessarily. This would make this the default Home page for all users in the we want this to be an app default for the Service Console, clicking Next and then Save so the activation is successful. So if we go back, I’m in Set up actually. So let me refresh this by clicking on Service Console to force a refresh here and this takes me, it should take me to the Home screen. I was previously on the Asset Management tab so that is keeping track of what I was on previously. So now if we click on Home, it should bring up our Lightning Page and it does. Now I had on the right here trending topics. There were none, so it’s not showing that there. But we have the Utility item for History down below as well, in addition to these two list views for my accounts and my Open cases and then the Chatter publisher here, you can make further customizations by clicking Edit Page and we couldn’t instead do Recent Items.
This may be a more helpful thing in our example and get rid of these trending Topics and Recommendations since it wasn’t pulling anything up and just click Save. So now if we refresh our screen here, if we go back to the Home page for our Service Console, that tab had the Asset Management up. We now see the updated Lightning Page and this is a Home page for our application for the Service Console. So we’ve got a Lightning Page for our Service Console application and then we have a secondary application inside of our Service Console and that’s the Asset Management application which has its own app Homepage as well. And so this gives us great functionality within this application, being able to house additional applications and specific Home pages for these different applications as well. And so clicking Home from inside the Service Console brings us up to that page there. So just keep in mind that you can make further customizations whenever you so choose by selecting Edit Page. And it’s here that you can drag the different components, of course.
And then as well, if you want to go in and change the Utility items, the way that you do that is through Set up and going once again into the App Manager for that application and then selecting the Utility Items selection and we did that in the previous lesson. To round this out, let me just show you real quickly as a reminder, the utility Items. So if you wanted to remove all utility items. For example, we’re going to click Save. And so now we have no utility items. It says, to enable the utility bar for this app, add a utility item. So I’m going to go back to my application. If I can find a tab that has it open, such as this one, let me go to the home tab. So we bring up our lighting page that we created and let me refresh. And then that utility bar should go away. And it does. All right, so we’ve done a lot of work customizing the service console we’ve created, lightning app pages we’ve created and removed utility bar items we’ve used, templates we’ve activated. So now let’s continue on with other core components of the service cloud Applications knowledge area. We will look further at the case feed in the next lesson.
