Push Notifications to Agents

Have you ever worked on something only to discover that someone else was working on it too? All of that time and effort...wasted. Doing unnecessary work can be so frustrating that you want to either cry, lie in bed with the blankets pulled up over your head, or stick your head out a window and scream, “Why!”

In addition to all that frustration, when members of your support team work on the same customer case without knowing it, time, effort, and money are all wasted. Think of how much a support agent is paid hourly, and that’s the price of multiple agents working on the same case unnecessarily. Perhaps you can’t put a price on frustration, but you can tally up a cost for the duplicative work of support agents.

To prevent support agents from duplicating each other’s efforts, the console includes a nifty feature named push notifications. Push notifications are visual indicators that show agents when something that they’re working on has been changed by another user. Think of push notifications as a warning sign on the great highway of work—they draw an agent’s attention to an immediate change that might be important, without pulling them away from what they’re doing.

To get a better idea of push notifications, let’s see what they look like.

Note

In this module, we’re only covering push notifications for a console. Push notifications are also available for the Salesforce Mobile App.

Depending on how you customize push notifications, your support agents can see a variety of visual indicators that say, “Watch out! Someone else just changed what you’re working on!”

First, there are push notifications for detail pages.

These warnings help an agent understand that a record they’re looking at was just updated by another user. For example, an agent might be reading a case’s details when another agent updated a field on the same case.

Then, there are push notifications for lists.

Push notifications on lists show as (1) yellow when a record changes, (2) blue if it’s the last item you viewed, (3) bold and italic when a field specified by an administrator changes.

These warnings help an agent working off lists understand that one or more of the records on the list have suddenly been changed by others. For example, an agent might be working off a case queue for Platinum Support when other agents working in the same queue changed a few of the cases.

Of course, some support teams might not like seeing visual indicators. It’s possible that a few of your agents may say, “Hey, we’re trying to work here. We don’t want the distraction of seeing all these warnings pushed at us!” If that’s the case (pun intended again), you can set up both detail pages and lists to automatically refresh when records change. Like magic, an update can make pages or lists to refresh so that an agent can see the latest and greatest changes without doing—or seeing—a thing. How’s that for pushing the most current information to your team?

There’s a few questions that you should ask before you push visual notifications to your support team. In the Planning a Console for Support Agents module, we mentioned that you can create all the consoles in the world, but if they’re not useful for your agents, they won’t use them. Well, that same principle applies to push notifications. If you don’t customize push notifications according to how your agents work, then the notifications won’t be useful.

Let’s say that you’ve explained to your support team how push notifications can prevent them from duplicating each other’s work, and consequently, boost their productivity. They’re thrilled to learn that a console feature can prevent them from wasting their time. But they’re even more ecstatic to hear you ask, “How can I set up push notifications to work best for you?”

An agent, named C.U. Ondatrail, says, “We live and breathe cases and case lists. Case Priority, Case Status, Case Origin, and Date/Time Opened. Cases are our lives. We need to know when these case fields change. Please help us. You’re our only hope!”

That’s it! Your support team now has the push notifications that they’ve requested for case lists and case detail pages.

To see these push notifications in action, log in to Salesforce as two different users on two different types of web browsers (like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox), then have the two users view the same case, but have one user change the case’s Priority. This is what you’d see.

• Help: Configure Push Notifications for a Salesforce Console
• Help: View Push Notifications in a Salesforce Console
• Help: Modify Session Security Settings