Tag Archive for: Service Cloud

What is Enhanced Omni-Channel?

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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, stay tuned!

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. There is 1 exception to this – the ‘Transfer Skills’ button that shows up on the Omni-Channel widget isn’t present on the Enhanced version – if you are using this button, we suggest creating a Flow on the relevant record that handles the transfers instead. You can find an example in this Quip document, including a link to install the Flow and post installation instructions.

For any customers using our Chat channel (formerly 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!

Here is a quick video that provides an overview of Enhanced Omni-Channel, and will show you the upgrade process

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!

Add super powers to supervisors with new Configurable Flow Actions

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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.