Upgrade Your Console

You’re interested in moving to Service Cloud in Lightning Experience, but you’ve already customized a console app in Salesforce Classic. You love the console. Your support agents love the console. The idea of re-creating it for Lightning Experience sounds like a chore. Luckily, re-creating your console is pretty easy, and we show you how to do it.

First, let’s say your console in Salesforce Classic has these things:

• Accounts, contacts, and cases on the navigation tab (1)
• Cases open as a subtab of accounts (2)
• Lists pinned to the left of the screen (3)
• The Softphone and History components in the footer (4)

We re-create—or rather, rebake—your Salesforce Classic console into a Lightning Service Console with similar things:

• Accounts, contacts, and cases on the navigation bar (1)
• Cases open as a subtab of accounts via navigation rules (2)
• A split view to the left of the screen for lists (3)
• The Phone and History utilities in the utility bar (4)

As you probably remember in Salesforce Classic, updating the navigation tab and how tabs appear in a console is done by editing the app. From Setup, you’d click Create | Apps | Edit next to your console app.

From the console app edit page, you’d choose which objects appear in the navigation tab, and which tabs open as subtabs, to help agents quickly access the records they use most.

In Lightning Experience, the click path is a little different. To select which items appear in the navigation bar, and to choose which items open as subtabs:

1. Click and select Service Setup or Setup.
2. Enter App Manager in Quick Find and select App Manager.
3. Click the dropdown arrow next to your Service Console app, and click Edit.

The Service Console app includes cases, contacts, accounts, reports, dashboards, Chatter, and Home by default. For our purposes, let's remove reports, dashboards, and Chatter, then click Done.

From Navigation Rules, choose that cases open as subtabs of accounts, and click Done.

Now when you click the App Launcher icon (1) in Lightning Experience and select Service Console, the navigation bar is all set up to your liking (2), and cases appear as subtabs of accounts (3).

Remember in your console for Salesforce Classic how pinned lists appear left of the screen? We’ve duplicated that for your Service Console in Lightning Experience. The idea is the same, but the terminology is different. Instead of a pinned list, you work with a split view. Each helps agents work from lists of items to support their daily workflows.

In Salesforce Classic, you set up pinned lists for a console in the same location you choose how tabs appear. We’re not going to walk you through that click path again because you just wandered over to the console app edit page in the last topic. But to refresh your memory, here’s how it looks in Salesforce Classic.

In Lightning Experience, you don’t set up this functionality. Yes, you read that correctly! You aren’t required to go to the App Manager. You aren’t required to edit a console app. You, as an admin, aren’t required to do anything (except perhaps treat yourself to a piece of chocolate cake).

Your support agents can choose whether to see lists in the split view by clicking the arrow on the left side of the Service Console.

That arrow expands to a list, and you just need to tell your agents about it.

You can also tell your agents that they can easily get to split view from a list view. Click the Display As dropdown and select Split View.

That’s it. No setup is a great setup, right? Keep in mind that unlike pinned lists in Salesforce Classic, split views only appear to the left of the screen and the width can’t be customized.

In continuing our theme of “You did this in Salesforce Classic, this is how you do it in Lightning Experience,” we head into call center territory.

Remember in your console for Salesforce Classic how the softphone component appeared in the footer? We’re going to duplicate that for your Lightning Service Console. Once again, the idea is similar, but the terminology is different. Instead of a softphone component, you work with the Phone utility. Each helps agents make and receive phone calls, and view records related to calls, in orgs where CTI (computer-telephony integration) is set up.

In Salesforce Classic, you set up components for a console footer in the same location you choose how tabs or pinned lists appear. We’re not going to walk you through that click path again. But to refresh your memory, here’s how it looks in Salesforce Classic.

In Lightning Experience, the click path is a little different. To select which items appear in the utility bar:

1. Click and select Service Setup or Setup.
2. Enter App Manager in the Quick Find box and select App Manager.
3. Click the dropdown arrow next to your Service Console app, and click Edit.

Let’s imagine that you’ve worked with your partners and developers to create a call center in Lightning Experience. From the Utility Bar page, click Add and select the Phone utility (Open CTI Softphone). Then click Done.

By default, the Lightning Service Console app comes with the History utility and the Notes utility (if your org has Notes enabled).

Now when you click the App Launcher icon () in Lightning Experience and select Service Console (1), your utility bar includes Phone and History (2). Keep in mind that the Phone utility won’t do anything since we didn’t create a call center in Lightning Experience.

That’s it! You’re ready to pull your Service Console cake out of the Lightning Experience oven. To recap what we did as your console cools off, we customized the out-of-the-box Lightning Service Console app to match your Salesforce Classic console with these things:

• Accounts, contacts, cases, and Home on the navigation bar (1)
• Cases open as a subtab of accounts via navigation rules (2)
• A split view to the left of the screen for lists (3)
• The Phone and History utilities in the utility bar (4)

You’re well on your way to baking a Service Console in Lightning Experience with ease.