Aim for Constant Improvement

Learning Objectives

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

Brainstorm for ways to keep problems from escalating.
Use specialized managed packages for customer integrations and metrics.
Automate changing case ownership and closing change request issues with flows.
Reach many customers at once with broadcast communications.

Be Prepared for Next Time

After the incident is resolved, Ada and the incident team brainstorm how to be better prepared for next time. Here’s what they come up with.

Write a knowledge article so that the next team has more information.
Add a checklist item to their maintenance visit list to check the component that malfunctioned for evidence of overheating. If so, replace it before it causes problems.
Push to replace the S-1000 solar panels.
Research solar panels that can cool themselves off or automatically shut down when it’s too hot for future installations.
Explore other ways to use broadcasting to reach many customers at once to deflect cases, like broadcast site banners.

Ada is satisfied that she and her team helped their customers during a difficult situation. She’s also glad that they have a list of actions to perform to keep this issue from happening again. Hopefully, no more of Ursa Major’s solar panels will ever have this problem again.

Extend Functionality with Managed Packages

After Ursa Major Solar has been using Customer Service Incident Management for a few months, Ada wants to see how it’s working. She knows that she can build her own reports on incidents, but she’s heard of a free app on AppExchange with the perfect reports all ready to go. So, she asks awesome admin Maria to install the Incident Management Reports & Dashboard managed package.

You may not have permission to install the managed package on your Trailhead playground org.

Here’s how Maria installs the managed package.

From Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter incident management, and then click Customer Service Incident Management.
From the Incident Settings tab, under Integrate and Report, click to install the dashboard managed package.

After the managed package is installed, Ada checks out the new report.

Incident Management Dashboard showing Cumulative Incidents Created Over Time, Incident Status Breakdown, Incident Priority Breakdown, Open Incident Owners, Problems Status Breakdown, and Problems Priority Breakdown.

Maria tells Ada that she can use the same process to install other managed packages, such as partner integrations. Partner integrations make it easier to use Salesforce with software from other companies. Ursa Major Solar is interested in using Datadog’s event monitoring platform to help engineering and service teams stay in sync. Ada asks Maria to install the free Datadog managed package to get started.

Automate the Process with Flows

Ada’s been through a few incidents and discovered that parts of the process are repetitive. When she discusses this problem with Maria, she discovers that she can automate actions with flows. Maria describes some sample flows for Customer Service Incident Management.

First, when Ada starts an incident, she can use the Change Case Owner to Incident Owner flow to automatically change the owner of all related cases to be the incident owner. That can save her time, so she asks Maria to set up the sample flows. Sample flows make setup quick and easy. Once the flow is set up, Ada returns to the Actions & Recommendations section of the incident and clicks Change Case Owner to Incident Owner. Wow! That was so easy, she asks Maria about other flows.

Maria suggests using a flow to close change requests and related issues, including cases, problems, and incidents. Ada enthusiastically asks Maria to set up that flow, too. After Maria is finished, Ada opens the change request and in the Actions & Recommendations section, clicks Close Change Request & Related Issues. Then she selects the related issues to close.

Broadcast Communications

Incidents affect many customers, and it’s imperative to communicate with them as quickly as possible. In previous incidents, Ada sent out information to the #agent-urgent-communications Slack channel. Not all her agents have time to monitor that channel regularly though, so she’s hoping there’s a better way.

Ada discovers broadcast communications. With broadcast communications, she can easily create and edit a site banner or create mass emails to customers. Maria sets it up.

Now, when there’s a widespread incident, Ada can put up a site banner immediately to warn customers of the potential risk. And once her team creates a Change Request record, she can send out a broadcast email to all affected customers outlining the problem and the solution. She’s glad she can use these tools for the next incident.

In this module, Ursa Major’s service team used Customer Service Incident Management to track an incident, determine its root cause, and solve the problem. Then, they investigated improvements to Ursa Major’s processes to improve the long-term customer experience.