Plan a Console for Support Agents

In the Service Cloud Basics module, we showed you how a Salesforce console increases support agent productivity, and we even configured some console features. In this module, we're going to customize a console even further. That's right. Buckle your seat belt and get ready to turbo-boost your console for agents!

Before you create a console for your support team, we recommend that you ask this question:

We suggest that you introduce a console to your agents, help them understand that it’s a unified help desk with multi-channel support (what you learned in the Service Cloud Basics module), and then ask them a similar question:

Take notes. Listen thoughtfully. Plan accordingly. Even though you can change a console at any time, it’s best to roll out a console to your support team when it’s most useful for them. The more time you spend planning a console, the less time you’ll spend responding to agents’ requests: “Please change this. Please change that. Hey, can you please change this and that?”

A Console Customized for Support Agents

As you can see, there are a few things to think about. But planning to create or customize a console isn’t that hard, and it won’t strain your brain. That’s why in this module, we’re going to show you a handful of console features that you can easily set up with a few clicks. And that’s the Salesforce way: a few clicks to cool! To get your support team on the trail to increased productivity (see what I did there?), we’re going to learn to customize these console features:

1. Highlights panels
2. Pinned lists
3. Push notifications
4. Keyboard shortcuts

Before we dive right into clicking our way to a customized console that boosts agent productivity, let’s take a step back. A tiny step back. What are the most common ways your support team “works” and “views” a case? Do they respond to inbound emails 70% of the time? Do they search and review articles in a knowledge base before responding to customers? Do they need to see specific information about a customer, whether the case arrives from email, the web, live chat, or some other channel?

You might be thinking, “There are a lot of questions in this module,” but understanding how your support team works will help you build a console that boosts agent productivity. You can build as many consoles as your org’s limits allow, but if they don’t match your support team’s workflow, all the consoles in the world won’t increase agent productivity. And what we mean by “workflow” here isn’t the time-based workflow or process automation features in Salesforce. What we mean by workflow is how efficiently your agents work with cases.

For example, let’s take the case (pun intended) of a support team that primarily reads and responds to cases converted from customers’ emails. Their workflow looks like this:

Now, let’s see how the workflow looks for a support team that reviews articles in a knowledge base, and selects an email template, before responding to cases from customers’ emails:

Notice how the workflows look a little different? That means the console for each workflow should look a little different too. In other words, if your support agents rarely use a knowledge base or email templates, then adding those features to a console won’t boost productivity. In fact, it might hinder productivity because the agents have to stare at a screen cluttered with features that they rarely use.

To prevent a clutter of rarely-used-features for your agents’ console, we recommend that you follow these simple steps:

1. Identify your support agents’ workflows
2. Sketch out the workflows to visualize them
3. Use these sketches to create your console’s layout

As you saw in the Service Cloud Basics module, a console layout focuses on page layouts. Page layouts include highlights panels and custom console components that let you determine how records appear in the console. In the next exercise, we’re going to add fields to a console’s highlights panel to change the console layout and boost agent productivity.

Note

If your org was created before Spring '15, you might see console layouts in Setup. This is not what we're talking about here. Salesforce console improved on and replaced console layouts. Just say no to console layouts.

The easiest, most impactful customization that you can make to a console to boost your agents’ productivity is to add the fields they use most to the highlights panel. As you probably remember from the Service Cloud Basics module, the highlights panel helps agents see key information at a glance without having to leave their current page or dig through other pages.

If customized correctly, the highlights panel boosts agents’ productivity because no one has to search or scroll to find the fields they need to understand and close a case. To do this, let’s first assume that you’ve chatted with your support team and learned that their workflow relies on glancing at these case fields in this order:

1. Priority
2. Status
3. Case Origin
4. Case Owner
5. Subject
6. Description
7. Contact Name
8. Contact Email
9. Contact Phone
10. Account Name

Let’s add those fields to the highlights panel on cases, and lay them out in priority order so that they look like this:

Tip

To further assist agents with their workflow, you can streamline the items that appear on a console’s navigation tab so that your team only sees items that they work with most, such as cases, contacts, or custom objects. Since we covered how to customize the navigation tab in Service Cloud Basics module, and it’s super easy to do, we’re not going to rehash it again here.

• Salesforce Console Implementation Guide
• Blog: Creating a Desktop Your Agents Love
• Help: Configure Highlights Panels for a Salesforce Console