Salesforce Service Enhancements in Summer 15

There are so many exciting features in this Summer 15 release for Service Cloud that narrowing them down actually became a real challenge. So instead, this blog is going to give you a taste of several great features coming our way that will inspire you to want to learn more. Every release brings service features and enhancements that increase efficiency and productivity for agents but this release has taken it to another level.

Push Work to Qualified, Available Support Agents with Omni-Channel (Beta)

It would have been great to have a drum roll for this feature. Omni-Channel is a customer service solution that not only pushes work to agents but routes them to qualified agents within the console. What makes this even better is that any Salesforce object can be changed into a work item and placed within a queue using service channels and then omni-channel will route them to the right agent(s). With this feature, you can prioritize which items get completed first and determine which agents can work on a specific item. Agents will not have to manually pick items from queues anymore. The best part of this is that it all happens in real time. How cool is that?

Omni-Channel is only in beta version for this release but you can enable this feature and provide feedback via IdeaExchange. So be one of the first to try this great feature.

Add In-App Support to Your Mobile App with SOS Video Chat and Screen Sharing (Beta)

This exciting feature allows agents to see the customers they are speaking with at the time of the service. This mobile support service is called SOS and with a simple button, it allows one-way video or two-way video chat. With SOS, information about customers can be easily accessed by agents during calls and customers can share their screens to allow agents to guide them in resolving issues. SOS is also integrated with Omni-Channel and can be routed to the most equipped agents. SOS is in beta version but is definitely a feature worth checking out as well.

Macros Increase Efficiency

Macros, a feature that allows agents to complete repetitive tasks, has some notable enhancements. With macros, agents will now be able to:

• Run Bulk Macros on Multiple Records at the Same Time

• Search Salesforce Knowledge and Attach Articles to Cases

• Automatically Post to Social Networks

• Replace Field Values in a Case

These are just touching on a few of the enhancements that are allowing agents and managers to do more to increase efficiency using macros.

Case Feeds & Email to Case

Both of these features had enhancements worth mentioning. Case feed posts and comments can now be edited, which was not a possibility before. Now agents can highlight feed items that are visible externally. So they can easily tell what internal versus external users see. With Email to Case, email feed items can now be displayed in HTML within the compact feed layout. This allows agents to see inline emails within customer emails. Also, agents are now able display user signature prior to the email thread rather than at the bottom, which was the default. These enhancements for both features are giving agents even more control over what they can edit and see.

Live Agent

Live agent is already such a great feature that allows real time support and this release brings enhancements that make this feature even better for agents.

• Transfer a Workspace with Chat Transfer or Conference

• Conference Multiple Agents Into Chats

• Block Unwelcome Chat Visitors (by IP Address)

• Automatically Set Agents’ Status to Away When Chat Request Times Out

• New Button Lets Customers Cancel a Pending Chat Request

With these enhancements, the agent’s workload becomes that much easier to manage by allowing them to get support as needed (smooth transitioning of a chat from one agent to another or easily conferencing in other agents). Having small changes like blocking unwelcome chats, automatically setting status away and letting customer cancel chats can make such a big difference when managing a lot of customers.

Features to Quickly Highlight

There have been so many great features highlighted but could not end this blog without mentioning just a couple more at a glance.

• Social Customer Service - This feature integrates Radian6 with the Service Cloud. This release brings enhancements like easier customization of the Social Customer Service apex class (not requiring code), access to additional social post fields, and ability to delete inbound error posts to maintain Social Hub rules just to name a few.

• Service Cloud Cookbook - This is a very useful new feature for developers or system administrators. It provide sample codes for customizing the Service Cloud. This can be anywhere from customizing the console to personalizing a Live Agent chat window.

Hopefully, you can now see why it was so difficult to choose from this list of prominent features. If this has piqued your interest, check out the Summer 15 release notes to get more details on these and other great features not mentioned here.   

If there are additional features in this release that are standing out to you, please feel free to comment below, in the Success Community, on our Facebook page, or directly at me on Twitter @sylviacabral44.