Dreamforce 2023 Omni-Channel presentation

For those that were unable to make our presentation at Dreamforce, you can find the content here! The slide deck that we presented is below – for each of the 5 tips, there are posts on this website that dive into more details, however first, we announced that ‘Enhanced Omni-Channel‘ is now GA! Check out the link for more details.

Best practices for Status-Based Capacity with Omni-Channel

This post is to describe how and when to setup and configure Status-Based capacity in Salesforce, when using Omni-Channel routing, including some common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

One of the big issues we hear a lot is that admins will configure agents to have really high capacity numbers, so that they are always busy with cases that are in progress – maybe a capacity as high as 100 cases at once. This works OK initially, but then an agent goes on leave for a couple of weeks and when they come back online they get 100 brand new cases right away they need to action – PANIC!

I’ll talk about how to avoid this problem down below, but first – let’s start with the basics.

What is status-based capacity?

Within the Omni-Channel setup you have two options for capacity management – ‘Tab-based’ or ‘Status-based’. This gets set at the ‘Service Channel’ level, so for each object type that is routed in Omni-Channel, you can use a different model (e.g. VoiceCall versus MessagingSession).

This influences how and when work items are consuming an Omni-Channel users capacity, and therefore if and when they receive new work.

So what’s the difference? I’ll start with Tab-based, this is the default capacity model and the simplest. When an Omni-Channel user accepts a piece of work, that work is opened in a new console tab. That work will continue to consume capacity until the user closes that tab, or logs out of Omni-Channel.

Status-based works differently – capacity consumption is based on a the value of a picklist field on the record that is being routed. In the Channel Settings, the admin will map which picklist field to use on the object and then map each of that picklists’ values to an Omni-Channel status – either ‘In-Progress’, ‘Completed’ or (new in Winter ’24) ‘Paused’. When the appropriate field on the record is updated, the Omni-Channel status may change, and result in capacity being released. For example, in the configuration below, if the ‘Status’ field on this record was updated from ‘Working’ to ‘Waiting for Customer’, capacity will be released as the work will move to a ‘Paused’ state – similarly if it moves back to ‘Working’ it will start consuming capacity again.

When to use status-based capacity?

Status-based capacity is best suited to long running asynchronous work, where the work may pause and resume throughout it’s life cycle – perhaps you need to wait on the customer to get back to you or a back office team to respond with more information – these are perfect candidates for Status-based capacity. Most often, this is an object like the Case or Lead object.

Today, unfortunately it isn’t supported on the Chat, Voice or Messaging channels, but we’re working on fixing those last two, stay tuned!

How should I configure status-based capacity?

I’ve sold you on status-based capacity – great!! The basics you can find in our help docs, but in this post I want to go into more details of the ins and outs of this.

What we have often found, is that admins will only map the ‘Completed’ status to fields that map to the work being fully complete, rather than also when the agent is unable to do more work on it right now, e.g. Waiting on a customer. To work around this, they will set the agents’ capacity to a really high number – which works OK initially, until a new agent or an agent who was on holiday for a while comes back and they get assigned 50 work items at once! Oh no!!

To avoid this, admins should always ensure that the capacity matches what a user is actually capable of handling at any one moment, so more like 3 or 4 cases at once for instance. There are then 2 more steps: at once.

  1. Map or create any mid-states for the work, where work is not actively happening on the work right now, but will should resume later, to a ‘Paused’ or ‘Completed’ status, to ensure work in these states do not consume capacity
  2. Ensure that users are updating the records appropriately to release capacity, or ideally use automation to update the record as appropriate for the user.

When to use Paused or Completed? What’s the difference?

In Winter ’24 we enhanced Status-based capacity to add a new ‘Paused’ status. The purpose of this is to give users visibility into work that they currently own, and will need to resume at some point. The purpose of this is to give us

The difference between paused and completed is two-fold – the first part is the visibility mentioned above, and being able to see their paused work in the Agent Inbox. The second part is related to when the work resumes – paused work will always go back to the record owner, regardless of their current status or capacity, meaning they could be offline when that work resumes. Work that resumes from the ‘Completed’ state, can go through some extra logic to determine who the work should be assigned to – for instance it can check availability or capacity and return it to the original queue if the record owner isn’t available right now.

Which you want to use are up to you and your business case – is a quick response more important? Then use Completed. Is a consistent owner and the customer relationship more important ? Then use Paused. Both work great for different use cases.

Just now there is no easy way to initially ‘Paused’, and then change to the ‘Completed’ behavior (e.g. at the end of your shift or before going on leave) – but a way to ‘Leave’ the work, or relinquish ownership will be coming soon (goal for Spring ’24!) – stay tuned!

Are there any downsides? What’s the catch?

Once you have status-based capacity configured correctly, there are very few downsides, however there are one or two things to be aware of:

  1. You are now more dependent on agents to end their work and look after their workload a lot more, so they will need to stay on top of their work and backlog to update it as appropriate (or add automation to auto-close work as needed).
  2. The ‘Active Time’ field on the AgentWork record doesn’t get recorded – this is on our backlog to resolve, so keep a lookout each release.
  3. Messaging and Voice don’t support this capacity model today (yet!)

We will continue to invest in enhancing Status-based capacity, but don’t worry – Tab-based isn’t going anywhere!

I hope you found this post useful and please let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

Blending Phone and Chat channels together

When Service Cloud Voice launched a couple of years ago it was a game-changing opportunity in so many ways.

There were a lot of problems that it solves for, particularly on the User experience and swivel chairing between the Phone system and the Agent Desktop, but an interesting one was that companies could now use one tool, Omni Channel, to receive all of their Phone Calls, Chats, Messages, and Cases in one place, potentially with one agent.

Traditional Contact Centers often look the same, a big Phone team with one set of tools, a Chat team with another, and a third group handling the Cases. It’s not uncommon for us as end customers to talk to a company on Web Chat and be told “we don’t have access to do that, please call the phone team” or “we only answer the phones between 9-5, please go to Chat to speak to somebody”.

But now I get a message every week from a company looking to do something different. Maybe it’s a smaller business with inconsistent volumes of Calls/Chats, or a multi-national with teams in a dozen languages struggling to double staff every specialism. Lots of reasons why people are trying this out.

It’s an interesting opportunity, but comes with challenges, so I thought I’d type up some thoughts.

Note: This post is focused on the Chat/Messaging and Phone use-case.
I typed up a previous post on having agents handle Cases alongside Phone or Chat with a new feature Interruptible Capacity which has just now gone to GA in Winter!

Key things to do

Starting with the basics, if we want to set our team up for success, there are some key tools that Service Cloud has built to make things easier. A few tips on the big ones you want to look at doing.

  1. Agent Experience
    • Create blended Presence Statuses
      • Add both the Messaging and Voice channels to a status, and now agents will be able to go online for both
    • Turn on Respect Agent Capacity
      • The Phone routing engine may not know that the Agent is busy working on something else,
    • Build a consistent Agent experience for the Messaging Session and Voice Call
      • A key way to ensure that agents don’t need to be trained twice on new features, and that customers get a consistent level of service, is to define the same or similar page layout for both channels. In Service Cloud most agent features, including Screen Pop, Contact Linking, Next Best Action, and others, are available in the same way for both channels.
  2. Supervisor Experience
    • Queue mapping and management
      • This lets supervisors manage the queue membership for all channels in one place, Omni Supervisor, without needing to switch back and forth between systems (a common reason for needing a separate phone and chat supervisor)
    • Omni Flows
      • A key benefit of this is that all queue volume data for calls and chats come into one tool, again letting a single supervisor manage all of the queues
    • Monitor and Flag Raise
      • Lastly, monitor the Calls and Chats inside Omni supervisor, and build the Flag Supervisor Alerts in one place for both channels

Success! Now you’re ready to get Agents started!!!!!

But what are the challenges?

Routing, Routing, Routing.

With most versions of Service Cloud Voice there are two routing engines in play, the Phone vendor for the calls, and Salesforce for everything else. This causes a few challenges that need thought through carefully.

1. Capacity Management

One of the big challenges is that one channel can end up blocking the other one, so that either your phone or chat solution stops accepting new inbound requests, as all agents are busy. Most often in Salesforce, this is caused by agents being able to handle multiple chats at once, but only one phone call.

Take a scenario with 10 agents who can all handle 2 chats each. 10 Chats come in and everybody gets one chat each. Then a Phone call comes in and nobody is free for it.

The contact center is only 50% utilised but the call can’t go anywhere.

If volumes are low enough then this isn’t that big of a problem, but if the queues for both are full then you can end up with Chats blocking the Phone Calls.

2. Agent History

When an Agent is on a Chat or a Case in Salesforce, the Telephony system doesn’t know about it. That can lead to a situation where the phone routing engine doesn’t know who most recently was busy when assigning the next call to them. At higher volumes this tends not to matter because everybody is busy, but when there aren’t many calls or chats coming in we can end up with one agent handling a chat and then a call, while the other agent doesn’t get anything.

Potential Solutions

Sub-groups of teams

One trick for success is to keep sub-teams within the group, so that the Chats stack on some agents, leaving others free to take the phone calls. This can be done using Additional Skills in Salesforce routing, and similar concepts in the Contact Center vendor for the Phone queues. It helps make sure that agents consistently receive the same type of work, while all being available for both.

By creating a simple ‘Chat’ skill we can set this up that inbound Chats look for that first before falling back to the wider group 5 seconds later, thus ensuring that agent capacity will get fully utilised.

External Routing

Some BYOT partners offer the ability to route Salesforce Chats in their system. This comes with a lot of complexity in and of itself. so not to be taken on lightly, but it can be an approach that lets us have a single priority list between the two channels.

Future Considerations – Unified Routing

Some BYOT Voice partners are running POC’s now of unified routing, allowing customers to do the end to end routing of Phone calls using Omni-Channel, which should help significantly with the above challenges.

We’re actively looking for customers interested in trying that out, so please reach out if you’d like to learn more!

What is Enhanced Omni-Channel?

Maybe you’ve heard about “Enhanced Omni-Channel” in our release announcements, or maybe saw a great new feature in a demo that you don’t have access to and want to learn more. You are in the right place! Let’s answer some common questions about Enhanced Omni-Channel, and get you excited to upgrade to a whole new world!

Why does Enhanced Omni-Channel even exist? What’s wrong with the previous platform?

First – the boring stuff! In technical terms, Enhanced Omni-Channel is running on a whole new backend infrastructure, that is built for increased horizontal scale on Hyperforce. The existing platform has served us well until now and will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future, but as we look to scale & streamline our applications, a new one was required.

What do I get with Enhanced Omni-Channel?

Enhanced Omni-Channel is available to all of our customers as part of the Winter ’24 release, and at launch includes:

More detail on these shortly, however the other important thing to note is that all future innovation on Omni-Channel will only be available to customers on Enhanced Omni-Channel – so if you want any routing, agent or supervisor experience improvements then you will want to upgrade as soon as you can!

What is the Enhanced Agent Experience?

I’m so glad you asked! In Winter ’24, we’re excited to bring a new Agent Inbox experience to our Omni-Channel users. This new experience is optimized for asynchronous and long running work, allowing agents to see all the work on their plate in a single Inbox view. This gives agents much more visibility into their backlog and is much easier to use – and what’s more, this is just the beginning of the enhancements to their experience!

Paused Work

Those with keen eyes may have noticed something a bit strange in the screen shot – what does that ‘Paused’ badge mean? As part of this upgrade, we have improved the Status Based Capacity setup, to add a ‘Paused’ status alongside the previous ‘In-Progress’ and ‘Completed’ statuses for work. This means customers can now define situations where the record owner retains ownership and visibility of work in their Inbox, but the work doesn’t consume their capacity.

Once there is work to be done, the user is notified via the blue dot shown above – this is just the first use case of this notification, and we’re confident that users are going to love it!

These are just the beginning of an improved agent experience – more big changes are coming soon!

What is the Enhanced Supervisor Experience?

We haven’t forgotten about our Supervisors! Omni-Supervisor is great, but it has lacked a high level summary view, where you can see the health of your operations in one place – that is until now! The first feature available for Enhanced Supervisors is a new Wallboard view allows you to quickly and visually get a quick pulse check of your team in real time, allowing easier and faster identification of any actions that may need to be taken.

Check wait times, queue or skill backlog sizes, handle times, agent status & agent capacity all at a glance, and filter to see your most important queues or skill combinations.

What’s the catch? Do I lose anything when I upgrade to Enhanced Omni-Channel?

Sounding too good to be true? For most Omni-Channel customers, you will lose absolutely nothing, and all features that are available today will continue to work on Enhanced Omni-Channel with no changes necessary after upgrading – agents just need to log out and back into Omni-Channel.

However, for any customers using our Chat channel (formally known as LiveAgent), or any ‘Standard’ Messaging channels (such as SMS or WhatsApp) will need to upgrade to their ‘Enhanced’ equivalents before upgrading to Enhanced Omni-Channel, as these channels will stop working after the upgrade.

Learn more about upgrading from Chat to the Messaging for In-App or Web product here.

Sounds great! How do I upgrade?

It couldn’t be simpler! Navigate to ‘Omni-Channel Settings’, and click the toggle on the right hand side. That will walk you through accepting the required terms and conditions, before enabling Enhanced Omni-Channel. After that, with a quick logout of Omni Channel and a screen refresh, the new Agent & Supervisor experiences will show up!

I hope this post answers the question of what is Enhanced Omni-Channel and motivates you to turn it on. We have an amazing roadmap of features that we will continue to deliver on the Enhanced Omni platform – stay tuned and keep logging your ideas on the Ideas Exchange!

Omni Channel Pilot: Interruptible Capacity

The Omni team is a month or so into a very interesting Pilot just now, moving to allow admins to define two capacities for Agents instead of just one. I thought I’d write a short blog post to share what we’re learning from customers, and also a bit about what the feature is an how to try it.

As with any Pilot, reach out to your Account Executive if you want to take part! 😉

What’s the problem we’re solving?

One of the more unique/interesting parts of Omni that makes it different from standalone Contact Center systems is that we route both Work (Cases/Incidents/Leads) as well as Communication Channels (Voice Calls, Chats, Messaging Sessions, Video calls etc.).

That introduces several interesting challenges, for example:

Cases blocking Channels
Customers who want to route Phone/Chats to Agents at the same time as Cases might find it tough. The problem is that Agents might be working on a Case for hours or days, but the Call or Chat for minutes, thus the case blocks the Call.

P1 items sat in the queue
When a Priority 1 case comes in, it can go straight to the top of the queue, but if all agents are busy on long-running work then it might still not get delivered right away.

….and more

So what’s the feature we’ve built to solve it?

In the Spring release we introduced Interruptible Capacity, where Agents now can have two capacities on their Presence Configuration instead of the traditional one. A Primary, and an Interruptible capacity, work items can be marked to. consume from one of the two, thus not blocking each other.

Primary work items will come in on top of Interruptible items, but Interruptible items will only be delivered if the agent has free space in both buckets.

Work items that come in marked as Primary (e.g. a Chat) will check to see if the Agent has free capacity in their primary bucket only, ignoring (interrupting) any interruptible work items (e.g.a Case) that they have.
In reverse though, if an Interruptible item is in the queue, then it’ll only get assigned to an Agent if they have free space in both buckets.

And what are some success stories we’re hearing?

A lot of customers are getting excited by this, but a couple of interesting stories that I heard recently:

Reduced Idle time
An interesting metric captured by Omni is Idle time, the amount of time where agents don’t have any work to do.

One customer we spoke to had separate teams for Chats, Calls, and Cases. Cases were their busiest channel, but they were blocking the calls and chats and so they had standalone teams of agents to handle them.

They wrote a report on the Idle time across the Chat and Call teams and identified 4000 hours per week that an agent somewhere was free with no work to do. They updated the agents to have a second capacity, and then added them to the low priority Case queues. They managed to reduce the Idle time across the teams by >90%, and a commensurate reduction in the time to response for their support cases.

Reduced Manual Intervention
Another customer we spoke to had a big challenge with their P1 cases not getting picked up quickly enough. They’d tried putting the agent capacity right up high to make sure there was always space, but the agents were getting swamped as a result. So their only solution was to have supervisors monitoring the queue and manually assigning out the P1’s.

By marking the P1’s as Primary and all the others as Interruptible, they could confidently make sure that the top cases would always get picked up right away. One of the managers at that customer insisted that they want to give a hug to everyone on the team for rescuing them from this one 😀

Where can we learn more?

I’ve attached a link to the pilot guide, and also linked below to a great Youtube video that another blogger put together after trying it out. Fire us over a note if you have any questions!

How to Optimize Omni Supervisor with Supervisor Configurations

In recent releases there have been some big changes to Omni Supervisor setup to make life easier and more efficient for Supervisors. In the Winter ’23 release it has been taken a step further, by adding the ability to create your own Custom Actions using Salesforce Flow – this puts the power in your Salesforce Administrators hands to add the most impactful actions for your supervisors to each Omni Supervisor screen.

This configuration is all setup through ‘Supervisor Configurations’ – some of the key benefits of using these are:

  • Only see the agents that are most relevant to each Supervisor
  • Only see the work that is relevant to each Supervisor (through Queues or Skills)
  • Have custom actions that are most relevant to each Supervisor

The goal of this post is to walk you through setting up Omni Supervisor in the most optimal way in Salesforce.

Setup guide

First, I want to cover the basics – getting and setting access to Omni Supervisor and some of the Omni Supervisor settings available, before we move onto optimizing the Supervisor experience.

Access to Omni Supervisor

Included with Service Cloud (or any other way you have gained access to Omni-Channel) is the ability to monitor agents and work in real-time with the Omni Supervisor tool. Once Omni-Channel is enabled, it will become available – however we recommend that you limit who has access to it. You can do this by:

  • Editing all of your profiles to set ‘Omni Supervisor’ to ‘Tab Hidden’ under Tab Settings (or Object Settings) for your profiles
  • Create a Permission Set that grants access to this tab – similar to the screenshot below. You can then assign this permission set to your managers, supervisors and team leaders. Ideally you may want to include this option with other Supervisor settings, or create a Permission Set Group which includes this access.
Use a Permission Set to control the visibility of the Omni Supervisor Tab

Now that you have configured who can see it – you can add ‘Omni Supervisor’ to your Service Console by following the instructions in our help docs.

Supervisor Settings

On the ‘Supervisor Settings’ admin screen, there are various options you can enable – we recommend you enable all of them (learn more about each setting here), unless your country has particular restrictions on these items (the sneak-peek options need to be disabled in some countries due to privacy concerns).

Optimizing Omni Supervisor

Now that you have Omni Supervisor showing up for your Supervisors, let’s improve their experience. All of the configuration for optimizing Omni Supervisor can be done on one screen, the ‘Supervisor Configurations’ admin screen. We recommend that you create a Supervisor Configuration for each team or department in your organization – this will allow your supervisors to just see the agents and work that is relevant to them, removing any extra noise from other teams or departments.

Configure which Users Supervisors can see

Select the Public Groups you want your supervisor to see in Omni Supervisor

The first part of Supervisor Configuration is restricting which agents the Supervisor with this configuration will be able to see in Omni Supervisor – this is done through Public Groups. There are many other benefits to assigning your agents to Public Groups on top of using them with Supervisor Configurations – you can even nest Public Groups, so this is a great practice even without using them here.

As we suggest a Supervisor for each team and department, we also suggest you have a Public Group setup for each of your teams or departments. Once created, it is as simple as assigning the public group(s) to a Supervisor Configuration, this will mean that Supervisors assigned this configuration will only see agents within the assigned public group(s), reducing the noise in Omni Supervisor.

Configure which Work Supervisors can see

The next step is to filter the amount of work that the Supervisor sees in the Queue Backlog, Assigned Work and Skills backlog Tabs. For queue based work, this is as easy as assigning the appropriate queue(s) to the Supervisor Configuration – this will once again reduce the noise, and ensure the assigned Supervisor(s) only see the queues and work most relevant to them.

Select the Queues you want your supervisor to see in Omni Supervisor

If you are using Skills based routing, it is a little more complex as you have the option to either display work with ANY of the skills you add to the configuration, or only display work that includes at least ALL of the assigned skills. The ‘ALL’ setting can be particularly helpful if you split your work by particular departments and/or countries or languages, and assign skills to work in this way. For instance, if you could add ‘French’ & ‘Tech Support’ to this list, and all work assigned at least the ‘French’ and ‘Tech Support’ skills would show up, but not any with only ‘France’ & ‘Finance Support’ skills assigned.

Select the Skills you want your supervisor to see in Omni Supervisor

Configure which Actions Supervisors can take

This part is so exciting we have created out own blog about it! Check it out here.

However at a minimum, we recommend that you add the standard buttons to the screens – these are ‘Change Queues’ & ‘Change Skills’ (if you are using Skills based routing) on the ‘All Agents’ tab, and add the ‘Assign Agents’ button to the ‘Queues Backlog’ tab.

Assign Supervisor Configuration

Now you have created a configuration for each team and department, you can assign them to the appropriate supervisors and/or team leaders, and watch their productivity soar!

Assign your new configuration to the appropriate users

Add super powers to supervisors with new Configurable Flow Actions

In the Winter ’23 release, an exciting new feature was shipped allowing admins to put more power in the hands of Supervisors to run their teams’ with a new configurable action framework from Omni Supervisor.

You can leverage the power of live data on Omni Supervisor, across all of the tabs (lists of Agents, Queues, Skills, work items in a given Queue, etc.) to execute contextual Screen Flow actions.

Make changes to agents configurations, Re-route work from a Queue, Order a Pizza for your team! The possibilities are endless – I’ve created a few examples that you can try out to get you started, you can find the details, including the installation link in this post.

New Omni Supervisor Actions can be found in the top right of each screen

To get the most our of this great new feature, you will want to find out what are some of the common actions Supervisors need to take on users or work items which require many clicks or manual steps today – these going to be perfect candidates to create new custom actions for, which can speed up their day tremendously (making you a hero). There may also be common actions IT or admins need to make, that could be delegated down to Supervisors, which are also great candidates (e.g. reset a users password).

To make use of these actions, you will need to assign Supervisors a ‘Supervisor Configuration’ – more details on those here.

Creating Custom Actions

A Custom Action is just a Screen Flow – however, the powerful part of these custom actions is the context you can pass to them – that is the list of records users select before invoking the action. That list of records gets converted to a list of IDs and put into an input variable for the flow, called ‘ids’, which the Flow can then take action on.

Each page passes in different types of data to the Flow – you can find more information in our help docs about each, but they fall into 1 of these 3 options:

  • User(s)
  • Queue(s)
  • Work Record IDs (i.e. the ID of the work item being routed – so a Case or Voice Call for instance)

Once you have your use case, creating the custom action is pretty straight forward and is outlined in our help docs, but here are the quick steps:

  1. Create a new Flow of type ‘Screen Flow’
  2. Create an input variable called ‘ids’ that is a Text Collection variable and is ‘Available for Input’
  3. Now perform the action(s) on the records that are passed in as appropriate, looping where required
  4. Save & Activate, giving it a sensible label as this is what will show up to your Supervisors as the button label

How easy is that??!! However, I want to help you out even more by diving into a few extra hints and tips when creating these:

  • Use a Toast to display success or failure instead of an extra screen to reduce clicks for the supervisor. You can find a package with this component on this site, here: https://unofficialsf.com/show-toast-flow-action/
  • Use the ‘Collection Filter’ element to quickly create a list of record IDs of all the same type (e.g. Cases), by checking the IDs in the list all start with the same 3 character prefix. You can then iterate each list independently with the Loop element
  • You can use the Flow feature of running Flows in System Context to delegate down extra powers to the Supervisors, so that the actions they run can manipulate admin data (such as Presence Configurations or Routing Configurations), or even objects/fields that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to – within the guardrails of the Flow that restricts what they can and can’t do to those objects.
  • You can add Emoticons 👍🙏❗️ to the Label of the Flow, which will then show up on the Supervisor screen to stand out more
  • The order you assign these is important – the first 4 will be shown on the page, while you can have up to 6 more in the dropdown (for a total of 10).
  • To test your actions, create a test Screen Flow that calls your new Flows as sub-flows, passing in the list of appropriate IDs to each.

Now you can go ahead and assign this action to your Supervisor Configurations, and see your Supervisors productivity skyrocket!

I’m excited to see how our customers will make use of this exciting new feature! Don’t forget, to get you started I have created some examples of some common Flows you may want to use, and even packaged them up – details can be found in this page.

Example Custom Flow Actions for Omni Supervisor

In the Winter ’23 release, an exciting new feature was shipped allowing admins to put more power in the hands of Supervisors to run their teams’ with a new configurable action framework from Omni Supervisor. I’ve gone into some details on creating your own actions in this post, but this page is here to describe a package of custom actions that I’ve created that you can install and use make use of as you see fit.

You can install these Supervisor Flow Actions as a standalone package from this link (unmanaged) – Now updated for Spring ’23 to include Skills and bulk reassignment!

  • Ensure that Omni Channel is enabled before installing

Once installed – check for each flow below as to whether you need to make updates, before adding it to a Supervisor Configuration (as detailed in the help docs) – all Flows that reassign work will need updating.

Flow list:


Password Reset

Description:
This flow is designed to be used on the ‘Agent Summary’ tab of Omni Supervisor, and expects a list of User record Ids to be passed in (to the input variable ‘ids’ – this is done by default from Omni Supervisor). This will show the above screen – where you can choose to send a notification to the affected Users – choosing to send the notification will result in the users getting a Salesforce notification (bell icon), informing them that their password has been reset. They will also get the standard password reset email (whether you select the checkbox or not).

Note – this Flow is set to ‘Run as System’ as it is calling Apex, and the ‘system.resetPassword()’ function.

Required Updates

  • Add this action to the appropriate ‘Supervisor Configurations’ (or create one) that you want this to appear for.
  • Ensure you have a ‘Custom Notification’ in the Setup screens which is active, and applies for both Desktop and Mobile (for the checkbox to send a notification to work)
  • Ensure the user has access to the ‘ResetUserPassword’ Apex Class (via Permission set or Profile)

Optional Updates
None


Update Capacity

Description:
This flow is designed to be used on the ‘Agent Summary’ tab of Omni-Supervisor, and expects a list of User record Ids to be passed in (to the input variable ‘ids’ – this is done by default from Omni-Supervisor). This will show the above screen – where you can enter the new capacity to use for the selected user(s). Note that in doing this, it may create a new ‘Presence Configuration’ in the back end – this is why this Flow needs to be ‘Run as System’, as a standard user won’t have permission to create or edit those admin records.

If a Presence Configuration with the entered Capacity doesn’t exist, then the Flow will clone the ‘default_presence_configuration’ (created when you turn on Omni-Channel) to create a new one, using the capacity entered – therefore you may end up with a lot of different Presence Configurations when using this Flow. Therefore, please update the default presence configuration to have the values you expect/want for each of these new Presence Configurations.

Choosing to send the notification will result in the users getting a Salesforce notification (bell icon), informing them that their capacity has been updated, and they need to log out and back in to Omni-Channel.

Required Updates

  • Add this action to the appropriate ‘Supervisor Configurations’ (or create one) that you want this to appear for
  • Ensure you have a ‘Custom Notification’ in the Setup screens which is active, and applies for both Desktop and Mobile (for the checkbox to send a notification to work)
  • Update the ‘default_presence_configuration’ to have any settings you want replicated across new Presence Configurations

Optional Updates

  • You can change this to create a Presence Configuration per agent – this creates a lot of overhead, but means that their capacity change can take effect right away (i.e. without logging in & out of Omni). The risk with this is updating the capacity of an existing Presence Configuration, will result in all assigned users having the new capacity, which may not be what you expect or want.

Send Notification

Description:
This flow is designed to be used on the ‘Agent Summary’ tab of Omni-Supervisor, and expects a list of User record Ids to be passed in (to the input variable ‘ids’ – this is done by default from Omni-Supervisor). This will show the above screen – where you can enter the subject and body of the notification you want to send the selected User(s).

Sending the notification will result in the users getting a Salesforce notification (bell icon), with the entered values. Clicking on this notification will take them to their ‘Home’ screen

Required Updates

  • Add this action to the appropriate ‘Supervisor Configurations’ (or create one) that you want this to appear for.
  • Ensure you have a ‘Custom Notification’ in the Setup screens which is active, and applies for both Desktop and Mobile (for the checkbox to send a notification to work)

Optional Updates

  • You can copy/clone this Flow to send a message in your appropriate messaging platform (e.g. Slack, Teams or SMS) or to send an Email, using the various Flow actions available (either OOB, or via install).
  • You can update the navigation from the ‘Send Navigation’ action to go to a different location as appropriate for you (but a navigation target of some sort must be defined).

Reassign All

Description:
This flow is designed to be used on the ‘Queues Backlog’ tab of Omni-Supervisor, and expects a list of Queue (Group) record Ids to be passed in (to the input variable ‘ids’ – this is done by default from Omni-Supervisor). This will show the above screen – where you can select the appropriate Queue or User you want to assign all of the work in the selected Queue(s) to. Today, this only supports Queues, Skills and Agents.

Required Updates

  • Each of the Route Work actions need to be updated for your Org – select the appropriate channel and routing configuration (where appropriate) to a valid value.
  • For any other types of work you have in your org, you will need to add another ‘Collection Filter’ element to filter for that work, and loop through it.

Optional Updates
None


Reassign

Description:
This flow is designed to be used on any of the tabs in Omni-Supervisor that lists work – such as the Skills Backlog, or any of the sub-tabs of each page. The Flow expects a list of record Ids to be passed in (to the input variable ‘ids’ – this is done by default from Omni-Supervisor) – these could be of many different types. This will show the above screen – where you can select the appropriate Queue, Skills or User you want to assign all of the selected work items to.

Warnings

  • Reassigning work that is currently assigned directly to an agent to a Queue will fail – workaround is to assign to a skill first, before assigning to the queue (can be added to the Flow)
  • Using this action on the ‘Assigned Work’ page may have unexpected consequences – as that work is currently with an agent, and will be re-routed while they are still working on it, potentially leading to multiple people working on the same work item.

Required Updates

  • Each of the Route Work actions need to be updated for your Org – select the appropriate channel and routing configuration (where appropriate) to a valid value.
  • For any other types of work you have in your org, you will need to add another ‘Collection Filter’ element to filter for that work, and loop through it.

Optional Updates


Assign to Me

Description:
This flow is designed to be used on any of the tabs in Omni-Supervisor that lists work – such as the Skills Backlog, or any of the sub-tabs of each page. The Flow expects a list of record Ids to be passed in (to the input variable ‘ids’ – this is done by default from Omni-Supervisor) – these could be of many different types. This will show the above screen – where you can select the appropriate Queue or User you want to assign all of the selected work items to. Today, this only supports Queues and Agents, due to limitations with the setup of dynamically adding skills in Flow – it is on the near term roadmap to resolve this short-coming.

This is the same as the Reassign Flow above, but a faster way to assign to yourself if you want to quickly grab a work item out of the backlog.

Warning – using this action on the ‘Assigned Work’ page may have unexpected consequences – as that work is currently with an agent, and will be re-routed while they are still working on it, potentially leading to multiple people working on the same work item.

Required Updates

  • Each of the Route Work actions need to be updated for your Org – select the appropriate routing configuration to a valid value.
  • For any other types of work you have in your org, you will need to add another ‘Collection Filter’ element to filter for that work, and loop through it.

Optional Updates
None

Salesforce Field Service: Create Batches of Appointments with Service Appointment Generator

Last update: January 31, 2022

Authors: Leigh-Anne Nugent and Christopher Albanese

Watch the Video. Send us Feedback!

Business Requirements 

Customers need to be able to build a solution that supports the following scenarios for teamwork and multi-stage work:

  1. Wanting in day changes to the Crew Member/Job Assignment i.e. a crew member called in sick on Monday and we need to send someone in just for that day
  2. Partial job assignment to a new Crew Member for a single day of the multi-day i.e. tech assigned on Monday but will see the whole week on the mobile app and also doesn’t get alerted or have an Assigned Resource created
  3. When various resources are required throughout the duration of the job i.e. need someone with troubleshooting skills for the first day, then a mechanic the second day, then an electrician the third day (team approach)

This will provide a stop-gap accelerator-style solution that will be an unmanaged package with access to the source code for customers to modify.

General Capabilities and Principles

  • Leverage the knowledge of the dispatcher to generate a collection of Service Appointments (SAs), assigned to designated Service Resources (SRs or techs) by creating Assigned Resource (AR) records. It improves the end-user experience for the creation and maintenance of a large number of SAs which would be administratively burdensome, if not impossible, to do with the out of the box capabilities.  
  • This tool provides an alternative to using the Salesforce Field Service Crew Management and Multiday Work features.  This does not provide an automatic, project-like scheduling tool, it’s intended to enhance multi-resource assignment capabilities.  
  • Generate SAs and Assignments based on the Dispatcher’s direction.
    • Create 2 weeks’ worth of SAs, with the option to include Saturday and/or Sunday, for Gloria and Alan for this Work Order.
  • Generate an ad hoc batch of SAs to staff a night shift for a given period of time.
    • The customer reduced the due date which requires an overnight shift to be added for the job to finish on time.
  • View the SAs for a Work Order and edit them in an easy, spreadsheet-style way.
    • The customer wants the job finished sooner, which means we need to add 2 hours to each SA Duration.
  • Selectively Delete SA and Delete all SAs.
    • The customer called and says we can’t be on-site for a set of days or wanted to cancel the whole job.
  • Move jobs from one resource to another.
    • Fred is out for 3 days so move a set of his appointments to another Service Resource.
  • Push some or all of the jobs N days into the future or to a new date.
    • The customer says we can’t be on-site for a set of days, so shift all appointments to when we can go back on site.

Phase 1  Features

(MVP) As a Scheduler, I know what jobs my resources are working on. I should be able to:

  • Set the Service Appointment Parameters I need to determine the first date on-site, the last date on-site (or in the batch), the Start Time, the Duration on-site. 
  • When I’m scheduling jobs outside of my Timezone, I want to be able to be clear about what Timezone I am creating the Service Appointments for so that I can properly offset the Start Time in the Service Appointment Creation Parameters screen.  
  • I need to be able to select from a list of Service Resources that have a Primary or Secondary Territory Membership record of the Service Territory of the Work Order (or manually selected). 
  • In the Resource selection list, I want to know if the Service Resources have any existing Absences and/or Service Appointments already assigned to them during the date range selected so I can select the Service Resources that have the most availability.  
  • In the Service Appointment Creation Review list, I need the ability to NOT create some Service Appointments for some Service Resources on some dates because they only need to be on-site for some of the days in the batch.
  • I need all created and Assigned Service Appointments to appear on the dispatcher console as soon as they are assigned and I need any updates made in the dispatcher console to reflect in the data table Service Appointment review screen (and vice versa).
  • I need the ability to create and assign additional batches of Service Appointments that may include night shift and/or off-shift coverage to shorten the elapsed duration of the job. 
  • When I create new assignments, I’d like to be guided by the dates of the SAs that have already been created so I know where to create the next batch of SAs (visibility on the summary table).
  • When I create additional assignments, I’d like to be guided by the overall Work Order Start and End Dates so I don’t create SAs outside of this date range (visibility on the summary table).
  • I want the option to create a single batch of Service Appointments for more than 14 days (up to 16 weeks) if I know I only need 1 or 2 resources to assign work and know I will be well below the tool limits of 1000 SAs in the Data Table.
  • I want to be able to review all of the Service Appointments and Assignments across all of the days so I can see everyone who has been assigned.
  • I need to be able to move all or some of the Service Appointments to another start date so I don’t have to manually update each appointment start date/time.
  • I want to be able to edit the Scheduled Stat and/or the Duration of selected Service Appointments and have the Scheduled End recalculate for me so I don’t have to worry about calculating and updating that field myself.
  • I want to mass delete all or selected open assignments if the job gets rescheduled or canceled to simplify the data management of deleting each one manually.
  • I want to reassign all or some of the open assignments if a resource becomes unavailable (team shuffle) to simplify the data management of reassigning each one manually.

End-User Guide

  1. Create SA Screen
    1. Parameter screen
      1. When there aren’t any Service Appointments for the Work Order, you will be presented with the Service Appointment Parameters including the technicians you want to surface.
      2. The Start Time is presented in the Users Salesforce Time Zone. Consider the TimeZone offset if you are creating Service Appointments in a different TimeZone.
    2. Service Resource selection table
      1. This Data Table will show you all the Service Resources a dispatcher can select to assign work to.
      2. Select as many resources you would want to add to the job.
    3. Service Appointment selection table
      1. This Data Table will show you all draft SAs for the entire duration of the job and for each tech.
      2. Select the SAs to keep; you can select all the rows and deselect the ones you don’t want. 
      3. Can sort by Scheduled Start Date or Service Appointment.
      4. Can inline edit the Scheduled Start Time and Duration. 
  2. Edit SA Screen
    1. When there are Service Appointments for the Work Order, you will be presented with two options: Edit SAs or Create SAs.
    2. Edit SAs
      1. This Data Table will show you all Final SAs for the entire duration of the job and for each tech.  Can inline edit the Scheduled Start Time and Duration. 
      2. You will have three new options as well as a Data Table.
        1. Change Service Resource – Use this feature when you have to shift a set of SAs to new Service Resource.
          1. Select the SAs you would like to reassign in the Data Table.
          2. Select the Service Territory and Skills to build the list of Service Resources to select.
          3. Select the Service Resource from the Data Table.
          4. All Assigned Resource records will be updated to the new Service Resource.
        2. Shift Appointment Dates – Use this feature when you have to shift a set of SAs to new start date.
          1. Input the start date and the end date range of the SAs to move.
          2. Input the new date to shift the SAs to.
        3. Delete Service Appointments – Use this feature when you have to delete an ad hoc set of SAs.
          1. Select the SAs you would like to delete in the Data Table.
    3. Create SAs
      1. You will be redirected to the create Service Appointment parameters screen.
  3. Delete All SAs
    1. Use this when you need to delete all of the Service Appointments.

Considerations

  1. Datatable presents date/time in the user’s machine settings, not Salesforce User TimeZone or the Service Territory TimeZone. 
  2. The max number of rows of Service Appointments the Data Table can display is 1000 rows.  Keep this in mind when creating your Service Appointment batches. Its recommended to create batches 2 weeks at a time to keep the numbers down for performance.
  3. Validation rules are caught when you try to save the records (you won’t see them in the table).
  4. Any scheduling conflicts will have to be resolved in the Gantt based on rule violations.
  5. You won’t see the list of Skills each Service Resource has in the table.
  6. If you don’t select any rows in the Service Appointment creation table, you could possibly not create any SAs.
  7. It’s not recommended to mass edit the Date/Time fields in the Data Table Service Appointment.  It will update all the records to be the same date and time; you won’t only just update the date value. 
  8. If you back out of the flow or sit in the flow screen for over 10 minutes, you might have SAs in a Draft status until the Delete Service Appointment Triggered Flow comes in to delete them (but this time frame can be changed in the flow).
  9. If an appointment is shifted and crossed a daylight saving transition period, this will have to be manually adjusted as it is not accounted for in the solution.
  10. The Service Appointment edit table is not filtered by status but can be configured if desired.
  11. Consider the implications when the package is retired if/when this feature is added to the Product long term roadmap
    1. It is recommended to document the configuration in detail to then determine if something would require refactoring or removal.   

Developer Guide

Data Model

Service Appointment Fields

  • MR Service Resource – this is the Service Resource that the Dispatcher has assigned. It is used to create the Assigned Resource record when creating a new Service Appointment.
  • MR Parent Work Order – this is the Work Order that owns the Service Appointment.
  • MR Creation Status – Picklist of Draft, Confirmed, Deleted, This is used to drive the creation process as well as the automatic deletion of Draft SAs that don’t get confirmed or deleted (user just exits the flow with completing)

Work Order Fields

  • MR_Estimated_Calendar_Days__c
  • MR_Hours_Actual__c
  • MR_Hours_Completed__c
  • MR_Hours_Created__c
  • MR_Hours_Scheduled__c
  • MR_Hours_To_Be_Assigned__c
  • MR_Hours_To_Be_Created__c
  • MR_Number_of_Techs_Needed__c
  • MR_Total_Hours_Required__c
  • MR_Trigger_Cleanup__c – Used by the time based workflow to delete Draft SAs
  • MR_Trigger_Date_Time__c – Used by the time based workflow to delete Draft SAs

Service Territory Member Fields

  • MR Resource Name – formula field to display Service Resource Name
  • MR Service Territory – formula field to display Service Territory Name

Automation

Flows

  • MR DT Service Appointment Main (name = Multi Resource Assignment Wizard) – calls Creator, Review and Delete
  • MR DT Service Appointment Creator
  • MR DT Delete Service Appointments – Mass delete all of the SAs for a Work order
  • MR DT Service Appointment Review – Update, Change Techs and Delete selected SAs
  • MR DT Trigger Delete Flow – Time Based flow which deletes Draft SAs that have not been confirmed within 10 minutes (parameter can be changed)
  • MR DT Update sched end time – Record Triggered flow to recalculate SchedEndTime if SchedStartTime and/or Duration change. 

Apex Classes

  • WOSchedulePayload – Class  used to contain the parameters set by the user and pass them to the batch apex job
  • MRDTAssignment – Assigns SAs to their Assigned Resource – called by MR DT Service Appointment Creator
  • MRDTGETSTMs – Returns filtered list of STMs based on Territory and Skills and Start / End Dates
  • MRDTReassignTechs – Called by MR DT Service Appointment Review Flow and used to reassign existing SAs to a new Resource
  • MRDTSchedMultiVisit – called by MR DT Service Appointment Creator and is used to create the SAs initially
  • MRDTDateShift – move selected appointments to a new date
  • MRDTSAValidateUpdate – update any discrepancies between manual updates to SA, like a drag and drop, with the MR_Service_Resource field. return list of SAs to the Review flow along with count of SAs.
  • MRDTGetTimeZoneInfo – returns the timezone offset between the running users timezone and selected service territory’s timezone. This is used by the MR DT Service Appointment Creator flow to generate a warning message to the user if the timezone offset is not 0.

Test Classes

  • WOSchedulePayloadTestClass
  • MRDTAssignmentTestClass
  • MRDTGETSTMsTestClass
  • MRDTReassignTechsTestClass
  • MRDTSchedMultiVisitTestClass
  • MRDTDateShiftTestClass
  • MRDTSAValidateUpdate
  • MRDTGetTimeZoneInfoTestClass

Platform

Permission Sets

  • MR DT Permission Set – grants access to all of the fields and classes above

Other Requirements

  • Prior to use, you must deactivate Service Appointment Validation Rule called: Dont_allow_scheduled_or_dispatched

Installation Steps

  1. Install Base and Screen Base packs
  2. Install Datatable
  3. Install the Service Appointment Generator package
    1. Sandbox Installation Link: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N4V00000GV6u2UAD
    2. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/cxalbanese/multiresource.git 
  4. Deactivate Validation Rule on Service Appointment called: Dont_allow_scheduled_or_dispatched
  5. Assign Permission Set to Users who will use this package: MR DT Permission Set
  6. Add flow to work order page: Multi Resource Assignment Wizard

Optional Configuration Steps

  1. Update Flow Screen messaging to suit your business process 
  2. Other fields to display in the Data Tables to suit your business process

Related Requests, that are not related to the SA Generator solution

We heard these other requirements that would improve the end-user experience.  Consider building something yourself to help with these.

  1. As a Scheduler, I want to be able to go to the Dispatcher console and visibly identify the Service Appointments for the Work Order so I don’t get confused with all the jobs on the Gantt. 
  2. As a Scheduler, I want an easy way to clone a Service Appointment from another Service Appointment on the Dispatcher Console so that it is easy to add another appointment for one more day.

Feature Requests

Jobs to be DoneStatusNext Steps
As a Scheduler, I’d like the flexibility to select the Timezone I’d like the Service Appointments to be scheduled in when setting up the initial parameters.  Design note: Data table renders the Date/Time fields in the context of the MACHINE settings.  Also, mass edit doesn’t only update the start time, it updates the date and the times.CapturedReview and determine next step
As a Scheduler, in the draft Service Appointments list, I want to know if that SA has an existing Absence or Service Appointment on that date so I can immediately see the conflicting record for that specific Service Appointment (or use any ensuing Gantt violations as guard rails for the dispatcher to use to tweak the schedule for a given Work Order).CapturedReview and determine next step
As a Scheduler, I want to define the Skills required at the Work Order and have the Match Skills rule consider that the combined Skills of the people I have Assigned to the WO will fulfill the Work Order Skill Requirements.CapturedReview and determine next step
As an Admin, I want to be able to modify the screen flow so that I can insert another Data Table displaying the individual dates with start times and durations before seeing the Resources to select so that the rough schedule can be created before selecting the resources that will be assigned.CapturedReview and determine next step
As a Scheduler, when I am deleting a set of SAs, I’d like an additional confirmation screen so that I don’t accidentally delete records.CapturedReview and determine next step
As a Scheduler, I want the option to let the scheduling engine select the resource based on a defined Role required for each SA (extended match).CapturedReview and determine next step
As a Scheduler, I’d like to have a job template that could create WOLIs with the required skills (sub-work types) that can be applied for each Task.CapturedReview and determine next step
As a Tech using the app, I need to see who else is going to be on-site on the same day so that I can see if I can carpool with someone.CapturedReview and determine next step
As a Tech using the app, I need to see the tool that was assigned to me so that I can bring the right tool on site.CapturedReview and determine next step
As a Site Supervisor using the app, I need to see all of the people who are staffed on the job each day so that I know who to expect and when (they are ok seeing the data table in the App).CapturedReview and determine next step
As an Admin, I’d like to have access to Setup Controls to help identify which automation to enable.

– Status Filters for SA edits
– Align Earliest Start and Due date if the Scheduled Start/Scheduled End is updated
– Set how long the Draft SAs stay in Draft
– Error Message and Screen Message Templates
CapturedReview and determine next step
As an Admin, I want to be able to bring the component into Custom Gantt Actions to Create SAs, Edit SAs (make the component a VF Custom Gantt Action)CapturedReview and determine next step

Use Voice IVR data in an Omni Flow

I wrote a post recently about how to set up routing for Service Cloud Voice, which now uses Flows in Salesforce to decide what queue to route to. One of the questions I got back was how to leverage data captured from the IVR to drive the routing decision. It’s a great use-case, as it allows us to take the power of an AWS LEX Voice Bot and combine it with both the CRM data in Salesforce and the end Routing decisions, to enhance the customer and the agent experience.

One simple approach is to set fields on the Voice Call record, but it’s actually possible to pass any field from an Amazon Contact Flow into a variable in Salesforce with just two simple steps laid out below.

Step 1: Map the Variables

To get IVR data (or any other inputs) from Amazon Connect into a Salesforce Flow, we just need to pass in the parameters when the Omni routing flow gets invoked.

To do this, we can define input parameters to the Invoke AWS Lambda Function action where we’re running the executeOmniFlow method. For those of us using the default Subflow ‘Sample SCV Inbound Subflow’ this is just the first node.

The input parameter in AWS should have the destination key value of flowInput-[variableName], where variableName is the name of the variable in the Omni Flow.

In the below example, imagine that we had our AWS IVR configured to ask the customer what product they were calling about, and want to pass it into the Omni Flow. We stored the customer’s answer in a variable on the AWS Contact flow called productAnswer, and then we pass it into an equivalent variable in the Omni Flow called customerProduct. Make sure that the Flow variable is set to be Available for Input.

Step 2: Use the IVR data to do powerful stuff in the Omni Flow

Once we’ve got the IVR data into Salesforce, the opportunities are endless for us to use it both to lookup/update Salesforce data, and then to combine the two in defining the routing behaviour.

In the example below, I did a few things:

  1. Grabbed the contact from the phone number
  2. Looked to see if there’s an Asset linked to the contact with the name that the customer gave in the IVR
  3. Created a Case with the Contact and Asset details
  4. Marked all three to Screen-pop when the agent accepts the call
  5. Checked the Product Type field on the Asset to route the call to the correct team

There are many, many, more things that could be done. This is just one example, and hopefully it is helpful, but I’ll look forward to seeing what exciting use-cases others come up with.