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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!

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