salesforce case management presentation

9 Salesforce Case Management Best Practices in Salesforce Service Cloud 

Customer loyalty is heavily influenced by how you handle customer service inquiries. When a customer contacts you with a question or an issue, they want an immediate response. Furthermore, according to Salesforce data, 76% of customers prefer diverse channels based on the context. 

Case management comes into play here! 

A good case management system enables a smooth procedure from start to finish for both the customer and the service agent, regardless of the communication medium. It unifies the entire service organization and provides agents with all of the information they need to resolve a case, covering activity history, next best actions, and critical customer data.  

Let’s dig deeper into this idea! 

Table of Contents

What are Cases? 

Cases are the cornerstone of the Salesforce Service Cloud and are used to track customer complaints & concerns. Cases are also commonly used to document & manage customer’s questions, feedback, and issues. 

Case Management in Salesforce 

Salesforce Case Management is the process of collecting customer cases in one place and ensuring that they are delivered to the correct person at the right time for a response. It also allows for seamless communication between support employees and consumers, ensuring transparency and a tailored experience. With features like automated workflows and knowledge base integration, Salesforce Service Cloud’s Case Management empowers businesses to deliver prompt and effective customer service.     Some of its basic tools include: 

Top 3 Benefits of an Effective Salesforce Case Management System for Business Success  

An effective case management system offers many advantages aside from resolving client concerns and complaints. Let us examine some of the following for business success: 

1. Gain Deeper Customer Insights 

Equipping agents with comprehensive case details, including order status, service history, and communication preferences, transforms service interactions into opportunities for customer-centric engagement. It encourages personalized experiences, which leads to higher customer satisfaction. Agents can also collect accurate, intelligent data about consumers, which benefits both the service team and other departments. 

2. Assigning the Right Agent Ensures Quick Resolutions 

A pivotal feature of a case management system is its ability to employ omnichannel routing. It ensures that incoming cases are promptly directed to the most suitable agent based on their expertise and availability. Customers no longer face the hassle of extensive searches or prolonged waits for responses, while businesses enhance their average handle time. 

3. Empower Agents through Task Automation 

Salesforce case management systems use automation to streamline agents’ processes by eliminating repetitive chores. This grants agents more time to engage in strategic activities. Agents are guided through sequences that prompt them to take necessary actions and inquiries, expediting case resolutions. 

9 Best Practices for Efficient Salesforce Case Management 

Case management is crucial for a business because inefficiencies in case management result in previously unheard-of service outages. Case mismanagement leads to unjustified escalation, which can increase the company’s support costs. In this section, we will go through the numerous best practices for Salesforce case management that you can use to make it more efficient. 

1. Customize Page Layouts for Effective Case Management 

Importance: Customization ensures agents have easy access to relevant information, making case resolution more efficient and accurate. 

Brief: Page layouts serve as the interface for managing cases in Salesforce. Customizing them ensures that the fields and information displayed align with specific business processes. For example, if a company has distinct steps for handling customer service cases (gathering information, investigating, and resolving), the page layout should accommodate fields and sections for each step. 

2. Create Record Types to Streamline Case Handling  

Importance: It streamlines case handling by presenting agents with a tailored view, reducing commotion and improving productivity. 

Brief: Record types allow you to categorize cases based on different business processes. For instance, creating separate record types for returns and customer service ensures that only relevant fields are available for each type of case. 

3. Implement Standard Support Processes for Consistency  

Importance: By following these standard processes ensures that customers receive a consistent level of service, building trust and satisfaction. 

Brief: Salesforce Service Cloud provides predefined support processes and workflows designed to guide agents through common support scenarios. These help to ensure consistent and high-quality customer service. 

4. Respond to Customer Queries with Email Templates 

Importance: It improves response times and ensures that customers receive accurate and timely information. 

Brief: Email templates allow agents to quickly respond to common customer inquiries with predefined, standardized responses. It is time saving and maintains consistency in communication. 

5. Enhance Communication through Auto-Response Rules 

Importance: It demonstrates responsiveness and sets initial expectations for case resolution, enhancing communication. 

Brief: Auto-response rules automatically acknowledge receipt of a customer’s case by sending an immediate response. This reassures the customer that their issue is being addressed. 

6. Increase Customer Satisfaction with Effective Escalation Rules 

Importance: These escalation rules prevent cases from getting overlooked, helping to meet service-level agreements and maintain customer satisfaction. 

Brief: Escalation rules define criteria for when a case should be escalated to a higher level of support or management. It ensures that unresolved cases receive timely attention.  

7. Improve Customer Support through Entitlements 

Importance: Entitlements automate case assignment, ensuring that cases are directed to the appropriate queues or agents and that they are resolved within specified timeframes. 

Brief: Entitlements establish the conditions under which a customer is entitled to receive support. It may include factors like product coverage or service-level agreements. 

8. Automate Case Assignment for Even Workload 

Importance: Automation ensures that cases are distributed evenly among agents, preventing overload and ensuring prompt resolution. 

Brief: Automation is used to assign newly created cases to specific queues. From there, they can be further assigned to individual agents or teams based on predefined criteria. 

9. Monitor Performance with Reports and Dashboards 

Importance: These reports and dashboards offer insights into case management effectiveness, allowing for timely adjustments to processes and resource allocation to maintain high-quality service. 

Brief: Reports and dashboards provide visual summaries of case-related metrics, such as case volume, average resolution time, and status distributions. These tools help monitor performance and identify areas that require attention.  

Source: https:// appexchange .salesforce.com/

Read More: 5 Impactful Service Cloud Dashboards for Board Members .

Wrapping Up  

Salesforce Case Management is a significant part of Service Cloud for delivering exceptional customer service. By adopting these best practices, businesses not only resolve cases efficiently but also foster personalized experiences that lead to happier customers. With Salesforce Service Cloud’s robust case management system, businesses are well-equipped to not only meet but exceed customer expectations, ultimately driving long-term success and loyalty. 

Want to take your business to new heights? Speak with one of our Service Cloud Experts right away! 

Ali Zakir is a Salesforce consultant/advocate specializing in Service Cloud and Field Service. With 25 years of experience in IT business management and operations, Ali empowers organizations to go beyond solving complex customer challenges and meeting business requirements.

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Want Happy Customers? Start With the Right Case Management System

Give customers service they’ll love and save your agents time with the help of a good case management system

Sophia Le-Dimitrova

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Think about what your customers go through when they contact your business for help. Are they quickly connected with a chatbot or agent who efficiently resolves their issue? Or, do they send an email, then wait more than a day before an agent finally gets back to them with a solution? This is why your case management system — how you keep track of all your customer data and resolve issues — can make or break customer relationships.

How your team responds depends not on how much they want to help – but on whether they have access to customer data and the AI and automation tools to quickly get the job done. To give your customers a service experience that turns them into fans of your company, now is the time to invest in the right case management system. No matter how your customers contact you  — chat, phone, email, SMS, or social media — your support team will have the customer data and tools they need to efficiently solve problems right away.

Get actionable customer service insights

High-performing service organizations use data and AI to drive efficient case management without compromising on the customer experience. Find out how in Salesforce’s latest State of Service report.

What is a case management system?

At a basic level, a case management system collects and organizes customer service interactions that occur on any channel , then tracks each case to resolution. It does this by pulling customer requests into a centralized customer relationship management system (CRM) , so your agents can view, categorize, and respond to them. 

This helps your agents solve cases faster and reduce costs for your business – even as case volume increases – by unifying data into one CRM and automating processes. Our research underscores the desire for speedy resolutions: 81% of customers expect faster service as technology advances.

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How does a good case management system help your business.

A case management system offers many benefits, including that it lets you:

Understand your customers better

Your agents can see a customer’s full history with your business – from purchases and order status to past service interactions. With this data at hand, your agents can provide personalized customer service, including recommendations and offers tailored to that customer. When agents have the key information they need, they are freed up to focus on the customer, and may gain deeper insights that are also very valuable to other departments like marketing and sales.

Assign the right agent to the case

Another benefit is omni-channel routing. When a case comes in, the right agent is automatically assigned based on their skill set and availability. Your customers don’t have to wait hours for answers to their questions, or explain themselves over and over as they get transferred from agent to agent, because they are routed to the right agent in the first place. Your agents will also improve average handle time and first contact resolution.

Improve efficiency and save time

Automation and AI remove repetitive tasks from your agents’ queues, freeing them up to focus on complex cases that require critical thinking and empathy. Generative AI can suggest recommended replies to customers, or even write knowledge base articles to be used in your customer help center (be sure to have a human review and edit). With the support of automation, your agents can follow sequences to resolve cases more efficiently with prompts on what to ask and what to do.

Lead a thriving service team

An excellent contact center has not only the right mix of channels and tools, but a strong, tech-savvy service team. Build your skillset for leading a productive team on Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform.

Service Leader

What features does your case management system need?

Your solution should help your support team work more efficiently to deliver better customer service. Key features include the ability to:

Give everyone a single view

When your support agents have everything they need at their fingertips, on a single screen all the time , they can deliver service more efficiently. Cloud-based case management systems that are integrated with your CRM data and your external data provide every agent with the same view of the customer, no matter where they are – or what device they are using. This makes sure your customers always have a consistent experience.

Serve customers on their preferred channel

Customers want service on the channel of their choice – chat, email, social media and even the phone. (Yes, people still use voice as a way to get service – especially for complex cases). This is critical as customer behaviors continue to change and new channels emerge . A good case management system natively integrates these channels, so all your customer data and workflow automation comes together to resolve issues seamlessly – no matter how or when a customer contacts you.

Offer efficient self-service

Many customers prefer to solve their issues on their own. Self-service options like a customer portal, help center, or chatbot, offer 24/7 support. Customers use these channels to access knowledge base articles, FAQs, and routine information such as delivery date. They may also choose to ask a question on a customer community portal to tap into in-depth knowledge of your product’s features and functionality.

Remember: customer experience can mean the difference between rants or 5-star reviews. Set up for success with a case management system that helps you keep track of customer data and get the insights you need to deliver effective service.

Visualize contact center performance

You need to understand what’s happening in your contact center – both the good and the bad. A case management system with native customer service analytics provides reports and dashboards that show how you’re doing. It helps you track important metrics like average handle time, first contact resolution, customer satisfaction (CSAT) , and more. Armed with this information, you see problem areas and can work to correct them.

Customize the lifecycle of support cases

A good case management system allows you to tailor the lifecycle of support cases in order to meet your service goals. For example, your support team may have different service level agreements (SLAs) with different customers, depending on the plan they select. Those paying for premium service may have access to a live agent 24/7, whereas customers with standard service may have only self-service or email support. You can also customize workflows to include entitlements that represent the terms of each customer’s SLA, and add milestones that track how you meet those entitlements. That way, individual agents don’t have to ensure you serve your customers as promised – the system does that for you.

Another example would be creating business rules and workflows within your CRM that help automate case escalations. Again, this takes the burden off the individual agent to shepherd that case – it happens automatically within the system, on the desired timeframe.

Looking for efficiency? Start here

See how you can help your agents become more efficient — and your customers happier. When you have an easy-to-use platform for your data, agents have all the information they need to provide the service customers expect. 

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Sophia Le-Dimitrova is a Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce. She focuses on helping organizations deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale through Service Cloud solutions such as AI-powered automation, Customer Service Incident Management, and Slack swarming.

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About 30 mins

Learning Objectives

Case management tools in salesforce, plan for case automation, share case lists or workloads with queues, add automatic case assignment with rules, add automatic case escalation with rules, add automatic responses to customers with rules, more case management tools in salesforce.

• Challenge +500 points

Automate Case Management

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Route case ownership with queues.
• Assign cases automatically.
• Escalate cases when necessary.
• Respond to customers automatically.

Accessibility

This unit requires some additional instructions for screen reader users. To access a detailed screen reader version of this unit, click the link below:

Open Trailhead screen reader instructions .

Case management means organizing customer cases into one place and making sure they go to the right person, for the right answer, by the right time. Service Cloud does all that behind the scenes with automation tools. Service is easier, faster, and better with a little automation.

Maria checks out a few of the main case automation tools. She notices automatically is the key word.

Based on what the tools can do, Maria jots down some questions to ask Ursa Major Solar’s service team. The answers determine which tools Maria uses to automate case management.

Based on Maria’s case automation planning, she knows that the Platinum Support team shares a workload of incoming cases. These cases are from customers who pay extra for the best service. To help these agents find and work off this list of cases from high-priority customers, Maria creates a queue. Here’s how she does it.

• Click the setup gear icon and select  Service Setup .
• From Service Setup, enter Queues in the Quick Find box, then select  Queues .
• Click  New .
• Type a Label and Name for the queue, such as  Platinum Support .
• If you want the support agents included in the queue to receive an email when a new case arrives, leave Queue Email blank. Otherwise, type an email address to notify a person or persons with the email address when each new case arrives.

• Add members, including yourself, to the queue and save your changes. Now that the queue is created, let’s check it out as if we were support agents. We can get there with a few clicks.
• Select the Service Console app from the App Launcher. Then click the  Cases tab.

While planning for case automation, Maria learns that she can assign incoming cases to one person, groups of people, or even queues. Since some support agents at Ursa Major Solar work on solar panel installation, she creates an assignment rule so that any case with a reason that includes “installation” is automatically assigned to them. This is what she does.

• From Service Setup, enter Case Assignment Rules in the Quick Find box, then select  Case Assignment Rules .
• Type  Solar Panel Installation and save your changes.

• In Sort Order , type  1 so that the entry we add is processed first. Typically, you’d create one assignment rule with many different entries, which are processed in chronological order. When a case matches an entry, it’s assigned without proceeding to other entries.
• For entry criteria, select  Case: Case Reason equals Installation . One of the many useful things about case assignment rules is that you can determine how cases are assigned based on fields from records other than cases. For example, you can choose case assignment based on fields from accounts, contacts, assets, or users.
• Add yourself as the User assigned to the rule entry. We assume you’re a support agent who’s an expert at solar panel installation.

• Save your changes.
• Click Edit to mark the rule as Active, then save your changes. When you activate an assignment rule, it disables any other assignment rules in your organization, so make sure that your active rule includes all of the assignment entries that your support team needs.

Now any cases about installation issues are automatically assigned.

When planning case management with the service team, Maria learns that certain cases must escalate to the right person within 5 hours. A lingering customer case can ruin a big deal or tarnish Ursa Major Solar’s brand. Just like assignment rules, Maria can use escalation rules to specify criteria that automatically trigger an action on a case. For case escalation, she uses her org’s default business hours, which simply means the service team is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. She can change Business Hours later from Company Settings in Service Setup. Here’s how Maria sets the rule.

• From Service Setup, enter Escalation Rules in the Quick Find box, then select  Escalation Rules .
• Type Gold Support , then Click  Active and save your changes. Activating a rule deactivates any existing active rules.

• In Sort Order , type  1 so that the entry we add is processed first. In the real world, you’d create one escalation rule with many different entries, which are processed in chronological order. When a customer issue comes in and is converted to a case, it’s assigned based on the first entry it matches.
• For entry criteria, select  Case: Status equals New . Similar to other rules, you can determine automatic case escalation based on fields from records other than cases.
• Set business hours to your organization’s default 24/7 support.
• Set that escalation times are based on when cases are created.
• Save your changes, then  New to add an escalation action.

• Auto-assign cases to you, and from  Notification Template , click the lookup icon to pick any template. At a real company, you’d assign cases to a support manager or team.
• Select yourself as the user to notify, and from  Notification Template , click the lookup icon to add a template to see how this works. Save your changes.

Now any cases that haven’t been closed in 5 hours are assigned to the right person.

Note : To keep the Assign using active assignment rule box checked by default on cases, update the Layout Properties on case page layouts.

From Maria’s case automation planning, she knows the service team wants customers to receive a confirmation when their case is received. With auto-response rules, she can make sure each Ursa Major Solar’s customer knows that their voice is heard. She sets up response rules so that customers are automatically sent a personalized email when they ask for help. Here’s how she does it.

• From Service Setup, enter Case Auto-Response Rules in the Quick Find box, then select  Case Auto-Response Rules .
• Type Welcome to Support , then Click  Active and save your changes. Activating a rule deactivates any existing active rules.

• In Sort Order , type  1 so that the entry we add is processed first. In the real world, you’d create one response rule with many different entries, which are processed in chronological order. When a customer issue comes in and is converted to a case, it’s assigned based on the first entry it matches.
• For entry criteria, select  Case: Case Origin equals email . Similar to escalation rules, you can determine the automatic response to send to a customer based on fields from records other than cases.
• Add a name and email address to include in the From line of the email template to send to customers.

• Save your changes and you’re done!

With basic case automation complete, the service team at Ursa Major Solar is looking forward to easier, faster service. But Sita and Roberto want to make the most of their Service Cloud investment. They wonder what other case management tools the team can use in the future.

Maria looks into more case management options. She jots down these discoveries to share.

Sita and Roberto want to explore some of these tools when they return to the case management stage of their service journey. But for now, they’d like to jump ahead to the basics of digital engagement.

• Salesforce Help : Set Up Queues
• Salesforce Help : Assignment Rules
• Salesforce Help : Set Up Escalation Rules
• Salesforce Help : Set Up Auto-Response Rules
• Salesforce Help : Lightning Experience Customization