Learn About Messaging
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Understand the benefits of Messaging.
- Climb the Messaging experience pyramid.
- Define key terms related to Messaging.
Meet Your Customers Where They Are
Customers expect to interact with businesses the same way they do in their personal lives—on mobile devices through text messages and social media. At the same time, companies have dramatically shifted from in-person customer service to offering help through online chat, messenger apps, and video. Salesforce knows that for you to keep your customers and potential customers happy, you must engage with them in a consistent and meaningful way. Enter Salesforce Messaging, a key part of Service Cloud.
Messaging combines a few different puzzle pieces to create a smooth, efficient conversation experience for your customers and service agents. Messages from mobile devices or messaging apps, information-gathering bots, routing tools, and the Service Console all come together to create the messaging experience for your agents and customers alike.
The flood of communication and service requests coming along with this digital engagement push can feel overwhelming. Have no fear—Messaging is here. Messaging offers a portfolio of channels and capabilities that help you meet your customers where they are.
Simply put: Messaging allows you to satisfy your customer’s service needs on their preferred channel of communication. Messaging creates a consistent and personalized experience between your support agents and customers. It allows you to move away from a more traditional service that uses phone or email toward service interactions that can happen asynchronously from anywhere.
Benefits of Messaging include:
- Self-service options that give your customers flexibility and control over their service experience.
- Faster alternatives to voice calls, email, and chat.
- Freeing up live-agent time with automation so they can handle more complex service issues.
- Decrease in resolution times.
Climb the Messaging Pyramid
It can be helpful to think of the Messaging experience as a pyramid. Everything rests on the foundation of Messaging’s conversation platform, powered by Hyperforce (the Salesforce super-secure information architecture). Atop this foundation sits a suite of core capabilities (components, routing, and bots) that super-charge your messaging strategy. These capabilities support–and enhance–our portfolio of messaging channels.
These three levels: the conversation platform, advanced capabilities, and channels, all support the capstone of the messaging pyramid—the agent-customer service experience.
The Messaging Pyramid:
- The Conversation Platform
- Enhanced Capabilities
- Messaging Channels
- The Agent-Customer Experience
Pyramids, channels, components, routing, and bots? We started talking about digital communication and helping customers, and now it sounds like a mashup between ancient history and robotics. Not to worry; let’s define some key concepts and terms to get you up to speed.
Key Messaging Concepts and Terms
You may know or even use different names for these terms, but we’re using them throughout the rest of this module to talk about the messaging experience. This table helps you get to know them.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
|
Channel |
A way for customers to contact your business. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS text, and Messaging for In-App and Web are all examples of messaging channels that you may already be contacting your customers on. |
|
Routing |
The logic that determines how customer inquiries are addressed. The Salesforce routing tool is Omni-Channel. You can configure it to route customer messages to queues, AI bots, or live agents. Queue-based routing is ideal for simple routing scenarios, while Omni-Channel Flows let you use Flow Builder to dynamically route messages to the most qualified available agent. |
|
Inbound Messaging |
Messaging sessions initiated by your customer. For example, a customer sends you a message in Facebook Messenger. |
|
Outbound Messaging |
Messaging sessions initiated by an agent or automatic process. For example, an agent contacts a customer in your WhatsApp channel, or a flow sends an automatic notification. |
|
Enhanced Messaging |
A new, multichannel platform that supports a wider range of content formats and more efficient operations. You can create both standard and enhanced messaging channels in your org. After a channel is created, you can’t change its type. |
|
Messaging Component |
A reusable, interactive component that agents can send to customers in an enhanced messaging session to share or gather information. Several types of components are available, including enhanced links, questions with options, and time selectors. |
|
Messaging Session |
An exchange of one or more messages between your business and a customer that takes place over a messaging channel. |
|
Messaging User |
A record representing a user who communicates with your company over a particular channel. When a customer sends a message to your company, a messaging user record is created for the customer to track their activity in that messaging channel. |
Now that you’ve taken in the grand view of the Messaging pyramid from afar, we can examine some of those building blocks in a bit more detail. In the next unit, you get to know the Messaging portfolio of channels and learn how to get started.
