Learn About Messaging
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List the benefits of Salesforce Messaging.
- Describe 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 reps. Messages from mobile devices or messaging apps, information-gathering bots, routing tools, and the Service Console all come together to create a streamlined messaging experience for your reps and customers.
Instead of an overwhelming flood of communication and service requests in different digital channels, Messaging gives you a single place–the Service Console–to meet your customers where they are.
With Messaging, you can meet your customer’s service needs on their preferred channel of communication. Messaging creates a consistent and personalized experience between your service reps 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.
- Automation that frees up service reps so they can handle more complex service issues.
- Decreased resolution times.
Climb the Messaging Pyramid
It can be helpful to think of the Messaging experience as a pyramid. The foundation of the Messaging pyramid is the conversation platform, powered by Hyperforce (the Salesforce super-secure information architecture). A suite of core capabilities (components, routing, and bots and AI agents) that super-charge your messaging strategy sits on top of that foundation. The capabilities at that second level of the pyramid support and enhance our portfolio of messaging channels–the third level.
These three levels: the conversation platform, advanced capabilities, and channels—all support the capstone of the messaging pyramid, which is the service rep-customer service experience.
To review, the four levels of the Messaging pyramid are:
- The conversation platform
- Enhanced capabilities
- Messaging channels
- The service rep-customer experience
Pyramids, channels, components, routing, and bots? We’ve covered a lot of ground here. Not to worry; let’s take a moment to define some key concepts and terms.
Key Messaging Concepts and Terms
You may know or perhaps use different names for these terms, but this table defines the terms that we use throughout the rest of this module to talk about the messaging experience.
Term |
Definition |
|---|---|
Channel |
A way for customers to contact your business. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS text, LINE, and Messaging for In-App and Web are all examples of messaging channels that you may already use to contact your customers. |
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, routing flows, AI agents, bots, or service reps. 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 rep. |
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 a service rep or automatic process. For example, a rep contacts a customer in your WhatsApp channel, or a flow sends an automatic notification. |
Enhanced messaging |
A new, multichannel platform that supports AI agents, a wider range of content formats and more efficient operations. You can maintain both standard and enhanced messaging channels in your org, but we’re phasing out the option to create standard channels. |
Messaging component |
A reusable, interactive component that your team can send to customers in enhanced channels 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 have some key definitions and explored the Messaging pyramid, you’re ready to 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.
Resources
- Salesforce Help: Provide Conversation Support with Messaging in Service Cloud
- Salesforce Help: What's Service Cloud Messaging?
- Trailhead Module: Digital Engagement