Take Omni-Channel on the Go!
I’m thrilled to share some exciting news with you all! After a lot of hard work and determination, we’ve finally introduced a feature that has been on my mind since early in my time at Salesforce: the ability to message with customers directly from a mobile device. This has been a challenging problem to solve, but one we’ve managed to solve in a generic cross channel way – I can’t wait to dive into the details and show you how this can enhance your customer interactions on the go.
So what is Omni for Mobile?
Simply – this is the ability to login to Omni-Channel and receive work on your iOS or Android device within the Salesforce Mobile app.. There isn’t a whole lot more to it than that, and that is very deliberate – it’s the Omni-Channel experience that you already know, now available on a mobile device.
This includes push notifications to your mobile when new work is delivered, or updates to that work occur – such as replies to your emails or messages being sent by customers.
At launch, it includes support for all channels supported on Enhanced Omni-Channel, with the exception of Service Cloud Voice. That means that users can now send & receive text message with their customers in a secure, trusted & compliant way from their mobile device – super powerful!
Check out this demo to see it in action:
What does this unlock?
This new feature opens up a huge number of new use-cases for Omni-Channel & all the channels we offer (outside of voice, of course). The most exciting part of this feature is that it opens up totally new use cases that we couldn’t help with before, particularly for users in more Sales-focused roles who want to provide white-glove service. Some examples we’ve been hearing include:
- Financial advisors: Keeping their customers up to date on market trends and answering them quickly & securely from anywhere.
- Retail: Enhancing customer recommendations, interactions and support on the go.
- Hospitality: Ensuring their high value or priority guests have all they need.
- Real estate agents: Keep in contact their customers while showing houses or apartments.
This is going to be particularly relevant for highly regulated industries, as having all customer correspondence logged may be a requirement. Similarly, industries with a high turnover will want to be able to reassign numbers easily and allow new employees to see past correspondence, rather than losing it all when employees leave with their phone.
In addition to these Sales use cases, there are a few in our traditional service area that this enables:
- Supervisor approvals or escalations: A persona that is commonly away from their computer but may need to be informed about something to action urgently.
- Field Service technicians: Enabling them to contact clients they are visiting securely via the Salesforce app.
- Overtime or on-call: Allow users to step away from their computer and still get important work done.
- Ad-hoc service tasks: Users that get a few tasks here and there throughout the day that need to be completed.
I’m sure you can think of so many more!
Great – what does it cost?
Good news here! For most of these use cases, it is included – this feature only requires that the user that is receiving work on the mobile device has a Digital Engagement license, which if they are handling SMS or WhatsApp conversations already today, then they will have this license already.
Amazing! How do I set it up?
The other great thing about this solution, is that we’ve made it super simple to setup. Once you have setup all of your Omni routing rules, it is very simple to enable that work to be delivered to mobile workers. There are a couple of pre-requisites
- The Org is using Enhanced Omni-Channel
- The user has a Digital Engagement license
- The channel you want to use on the mobile is set to use ‘Status-based Capacity’
Once you have those pre-requisites configured, there are just a couple of simple steps left – check out our help docs for the setup steps.
The last consideration is updating the mobile page layouts for the objects you are planning to route on the mobile – in particular check the Messaging Session object. Ensure you have all the required components and actions available for your mobile users, so they can take action once the work is assigned to them.
Give it a go!
I hope this article has got you as excited to try it out as I am to have delivered it to you! Please try it out and let us know how you get on and what we should be prioritizing next to enhance the experience by logging items on the IdeasExchange, LinkedIn or comments on this page. We’d love to help you be successful with this offering.
Check out our other Winter ’25 innovations in this blog too!