Get to Know Service Catalog

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe what Service Catalog is.
  
• List the building blocks of a Service Catalog.
  
• Explain how Service Catalog automation can help your organization.
  

Before You Start

This module is designed for intermediate Salesforce admins who are familiar with basic Salesforce customization features and have some experience using basic flows. If you’re not there yet, that’s OK. Before you begin this badge, we recommend that you complete the Flow Builder Basics and Flow Builder Concepts badges. In these badges, you learn when and how to build flows that you use to automate service processes with Service Catalog.

Unlock Service Automation and Efficiency

Service teams across industries want to decrease call center cases, increase customer self-service solutions, and automate their business services. Doing so helps them increase agent productivity, reduce operational costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

Service efficiency is top of mind for Rachel Jones, service operations manager at Ursa Major Solar, Inc., a fast-growing company selling solar components and systems. As the new kid on the solar company block, Ursa Major Solar needs an online help center that gives customers self-service options that they can use before opening a case or contacting the call center. Rachel also needs an efficient way for her service teams to automate, build, and manage their business services.

Rachel worries she’ll have to spend money on consultants to architect a solution. Then, her IT department needs to build automations that create cases for each business service, assign it to an agent, and send a service request record to the customer. Let’s also not forget the web development and code required to create a help center. Yikes!

Luckily, Ursa Major Solar uses Service Cloud, which has an easier solution: Service Catalog.

What’s Service Catalog?

Ursa Major Solar’s Salesforce admin, Maria, tells Rachel that they can use Service Catalog to:

• Build a portfolio of their business services.
  
• Organize them into categorized hierarchies.
  
• Manage them directly within Salesforce.
  
• Provide customers access to Ursa Major’s business services through self-service portals.
  

And Service Catalog offers even more. Service Catalog is a powerful automation hub with point-and-click tools that Maria can use to customize Ursa Major's existing flow automations used in business services such as Technician Appointment. Specifically, with catalog fulfillments, Maria can configure a flow’s input variables to:

• Collect detailed and customizable information from customers in the form of questions.
  
• Initiate catalog item processing.
  
• Generate a customer service request record.
  
• Track the progression of a customer’s request.
  

Maria can also build an Ursa Major help site on Experience Cloud where customers can use self-service solutions for their inquiries.

Service Catalog can help Rachel’s support teams spend less time handling frequent and simple support requests and more time solving complex issues. Meanwhile, customers can spend less time waiting in the call center queue by accessing self-service resources in an Ursa Major help portal. It’s a win for everyone!

Here’s how Service Catalog helps Rachel’s support organization.

Service Catalog Building Blocks

Service Catalog consists of three building blocks that remove the tedious technical efforts and dependencies required for building custom business service automations.

Catalog Items

Catalog items are the foundation of a Service Catalog. These are pieces of metadata that represent a business service like Technician Appointment. You create catalog items using the point-and-click Service Catalog Builder–no coding required. And you can add eligibility rules that control which customers have access to the item.

Catalog items must have a flow and fulfillment. Catalog fulfillments are metadata enhancements to a flow’s input variables–you can use fulfillments to customize a flow’s input variables that pass to catalog items. Fulfillments enhance the intake and processing automation of catalog item requests.

Catalog Fulfillments

Let’s take a closer look at how fulfillments can be useful.

Like catalog items, Maria can build fulfillments with a point-and-click tool, the Fulfillments Builder. Fulfillments require a name, description, and an optional fulfillment mapping (a customization to a flow’s input variables). Maria can use fulfillment input mappings to modify a flow’s input variables to pass fulfillment inputs that are mapped to specific objects and their fields.

Maria thinks of fulfillments as basically a connection layer between flows and catalog items that she can use to customize and enhance flows. Let’s look at an example.

Maria uses a screen flow with an Input_Priority variable to create a Technician Appointment fulfillment in the Fulfillments Builder. From the flow’s input variable and type (1), Maria sets these fulfillment configurations (2):

• Fulfillment Field Name: Priority.
  
• Input Type: Picklist.
  
• Input Type object settings: Priority field of the Case object.
  

Once she defines the fulfillment inputs, Maria uses the Service Catalog Builder to set the inputs as included or customer-defined.

Included inputs are default values for the item that the customer can’t change and doesn’t see, such as when the Priority input is set to Medium (1). Customer inputs require additional information from customers in the form of questions, like when Maria sets the Subject input as customer-defined (2) and then adds a question to it (3) .

From the question editor, Maria enters What do you need help with? (1). She can also edit the way the input is presented to customers based on a type (2) and mark the question as required (3).

Let’s look closer. Maria originally mapped the Input_Subject flow variable as a Text fulfillment input type. In the question editor, Maria selects how the input type displays as a question to the customer. For example, she sets the input type as a question in the form of single-line text or a picklist (2).

Maria’s excited that the question editor provides multiple ways to display questions based on the objects and fields mapped in her fulfillment.

Let’s recap: Fulfillments enhance Ursa Major’s flows by modifying a flow’s input variables to capture more detailed information from customers. With catalog items, fulfillments, and their point-and-click tools, in minutes Maria can create automations for business services that drive customer self-service case resolution.

Catalog Categorization

The final building block is catalog categorization. Categorization allows Maria to organize catalog items within logical groupings so that customers can easily find them in Ursa Major’s self-service site. For example, Maria groups the Technician Appointment catalog item under Maintenance Services.

Catalog items can belong to multiple categories. Service Catalog supports two categorization methods: Catalog Categories and Data Categories. Here are the differences.

Maria has to determine which categorization method is best for Ursa Major’s purposes, but she likes that she has two options. She can even switch between the two anytime before she builds her self-service site without losing data. In addition, she can choose not to associate an item with a category. Categories aren’t required for items.

Even better, there’s no technical setup involved. All Maria has to do is select her preferred method in the Catalog Settings page, and then create categories in Data Categories Setup or the Service Catalog Builder.

Drive Service Automation and Processing

Rachel and Maria think Service Catalog is a great fit for Ursa Major Solar. In summary, Service Catalog:

1. Links catalog items, categories, and fulfillments together into Service Catalog automation.
   
2. Generates and processes customer requests without agent interaction.
   
3. Creates cases and exposes them to the customer in the Ursa Major self-service site.
   

Rachel loves the fact that she can use Service Catalog without any complex coding required. In addition, items and fulfillments enable Ursa Major to use their standard flows as is or modify and re-use them across business services for enhanced automation and capturing detailed customer information.

Knowledge Check

You just learned about some key components and features of Service Catalog. Use these interactive flashcards to review what you’ve learned before taking the quiz.

Read the information on each card, then click or tap the card to reveal related information. Click the right-facing arrow to move to the next card, and the left-facing arrow to return to the previous card.

Resources

• Salesforce Video: Automate Your Business Process with Service Catalog
• Salesforce Help: Enhance Service Automation with Service Catalog