Salesforce.com Service Enhancements in Winter 14

Salesforce Knowledge Access for Internal Users

This one might seem simple but the ramifications are huge. In the past in order to view knowledge you had to have a knowledge license but with the Winter 14 release, Enterprise and up licenses can view Knowledge articles. This will be a great help to organizations that rely on Knowledge not only as an external resource but a way of training and educating internal employees as well. Maybe it is one step closer to setting knowledge free.

Critical Wait Alerts for Unanswered Chats

Live Agent is one of the gems of the Service Cloud and with each release it just keeps getting better. With eight updates in this release alone it was hard to pick my favorite but as a user of online support chat, this one stood out. This small, but useful change, is a setting that will alert agents when they should respond to unanswered chats and is very handy when an agent is dealing with a handful of chat sessions. In Winter 14, the agent will get an alert that it has been too long and they should go back and answer the customer. As a customer, this one makes me happy.

Activity History

While this next one is in the Service section of the notes, it could also be tagged with "Community" as everyone in the Salesforce Community will enjoy the feature. Now in Winter 14 both your Chatter Answers and Ideas will be summarized in a new "Community Activity" section on the profile page. The new feature will outline how many answers and ideas the community member has voted on or answered and give other members a sense of their overall involvement. This is yet another step forward in both the Community implementation and in Salesforce's growing customer community and the unified profile that has been disjointed for awhile.

Keyboard Shortcuts Panel

This next feature is very close to my heart as I am a big promoter of using the keyboard as much as possible. While there have always been keyboard shortcuts in the Service Console, learning them took a little digging in the documentation or the dreaded help files. New in Winter 14 is a great (if not very familiar <ahem>Google</ahem>) feature that makes learning those key commands much easier. With a simple COMMAND + K in the console up will pop a new overlay with all of the keyboard commands, letting the user reference them quickly. While it doesn't say it in the release notes, I am hoping the same command makes it disappear as well. This is a good step in the right direction but I would really like to see more attention to keyboard shortcuts for the rest of the applications and so would others.

Let me know what some of your favorite Winter 14 features in the comments below, on our Facebook page or @JasonMAtwood.