Discover Catalog Items and Service Processes
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define catalog items, categories, and products.
- Explain how service processes provide the data foundation for catalog items, service requests, and fulfillment.
- Identify the included service process templates and how to use them.
- Describe the steps for creating a service process in the Unified Catalog.
Build Your Catalog Items and Service Processes
So far, you learned the basics of the Unified Catalog. Now it’s time to dig deeper into how its components work together to provide an enhanced experience for employees in need of services and the IT teams that deliver them.
In this unit, you explore catalog items and service processes, and discover ready-to-use templates to accelerate your catalog configuration.
Along the way, you follow the Salesforce admin at Orivian, a global holdings company, who’s determined to create a comprehensive catalog to facilitate faster IT service delivery. The Orivian IT team is responsible for provisioning hardware and software, VPN access, password resets, and a slew of other technology services. To keep things simple, the admin starts by creating a catalog item for a laptop replacement service.
Catalog Items, Categories, and Products
Catalog items are the employee-facing, requestable offerings that appear on the Employee Services Portal, or wherever your catalog lives.
Within your catalog, you can organize your offerings into categories, such as Hardware, Software, or Access and Permissions, and subcategories, such as Mobile Devices or Software. These groupings help employees sort available items when browsing the catalog.
Using the PCM data model, each catalog item is built on top of a product record, which stores information about the service’s name, description, attributes, and versioning information. When you create a catalog item, a corresponding product record is created or referenced. You don’t need to manage product records directly–the platform handles that for you. This architecture is designed to support versioning and governance for your IT services (similar to how commercial products work in Agentforce Sales).
Service Processes
Perhaps the most important component of a catalog item is its underlying service process (not to be confused with service management processes, such as Incident Management, Request Management, and the other bedrock Agentforce IT Service workflows). Each catalog item connects to a single service process that defines how the request for the item is handled and resolved by IT teams.
In the Unified Catalog app, you build and manage your service processes through the Service Designer, a guided setup where you can create, preview, and publish your offerings, and control their supporting data.
As you learned in the Request Management for Agentforce IT Service badge, each service process includes:
- Connections to data models and context attributes
- Intake forms for capturing requester information
- Fulfillment flows that define end-to-end resolution steps
- Links to associated knowledge articles
- Connected Agentforce agent actions
- Product list attachments
This is all important information to know, but there’s a shortcut to creating your catalog service processes: using templates!
Service Process Templates
Rather than building each service process from scratch, we recommend that you start with one of several readymade templates included in the IT Service Domain Pack. The out-of-the-box (OOTB) catalog items and templates are designed to help you get your catalog up and running in a few hours, not months.
Each template includes the associated data model, metadata, intake form, service attributes, and fulfillment flow dependencies.
Here are just a few examples of the available service process templates in Agentforce IT Service.
Template Name |
Use Case |
|---|---|
Laptop Replacement |
An employee requests a replacement for a lost, damaged, or end-of-life device. |
Hardware Upgrade |
An employee requests an upgrade to a higher-spec device. |
Peripheral Request |
An employee requests accessories, such as a monitor, keyboard, or docking station. |
New Employee Onboarding |
IT provisions a laptop and equipment package for a new hire. |
Loaner Device Request |
An employee requests a temporary device while their primary laptop is being repaired. |
Reset Account Password |
An employee requests a password reset in a system. |
To view the full list of service process templates in Agentforce IT Service, visit the IT Service Catalog Library article in Salesforce Help.
For example, the Orivian admin can install the Laptop Replacement template, customize it to include necessary fields, and then activate it–no heavy lifting required.
But wait! Don’t go off building out your catalog just yet. In order to customize these templates or create unique offerings, it’s important to build your understanding of service process components and how they’re configured. So, let’s explore how to set up a service process. By the end of this badge, you’ll be ready to create the ideal service catalog for your organization.
Service Process Setup
To create a new service process, you start by entering a few foundational details, including a name and description. Then you’re ready to set up the fundamental components of the offering in the Service Designer, which gives you a guided configuration path to follow.
Anchor Entities
First, set a target data model to define the anchor entity. This entity represents the type of record that’s created when a user requests the service.
There are three anchor entity types to choose from.
Anchor Entity |
Best for |
Examples |
|---|---|---|
Service Request |
Standard IT requests that don’t map to a customer case or disruption |
Hardware requests, device upgrades |
Case |
Customer-facing issues or escalated interactions |
Account access issues, billing inquiries |
Incident |
IT disruptions affecting service availability or performance |
Network outages, system failures, major outages |
The Orivian admin sets the anchor entity for the laptop replacement and similar services to Service Request.
Attributes
For each service process, you also set attributes, which define the characteristics of the offering and gather information from the requester. There are two types of attributes: service attributes and context attributes.
Service attributes are the data fields you include on a service process to capture the information needed to fulfill the request. For the Orivian laptop service process, the admin includes the device type, operating system preference, and employee address. These attributes appear on both the intake form and the anchor entity.
Context attributes pull data from Salesforce records to reduce friction for the requester and improve data accuracy for IT. Instead of asking the employee to type in their name, department, or manager in an intake form, context attributes automatically prepopulate that information using employee or user records.
In summary, Agentforce uses services attributes to surface questions to ask the requesting employee, and context attributes to populate the intake form and anchor entity with existing information. These attributes are also essential for grounding your AI agent.
Intake Forms
Next, configure the intake form that users fill out to request the service. The information that the intake form collects is stored in the anchor entity record and travels with the request throughout fulfillment.
You can use one of three methods to build your intake form.
-
Screen flow-based intake forms use Salesforce Flow to capture requester information. They’re a great fit for straightforward requests with a clear set of fields, such as choosing a device type or software option.
-
Omniscript-based intake forms offer a more guided, step-by-step experience. They’re better suited for complex requests with branching logic, conditional fields, or multi-step interactions.
-
Auto-generated intake forms are the fastest option. You can quickly create a form directly from service attributes, which you explore in a moment.
Knowledge Articles
You can associate a service process with one or more knowledge articles. This way, when an employee opens an article–say, How to Request a New Laptop–the related catalog item appears directly on the page. The employee can then submit a request for the catalog item with a single click.
If you haven’t already, check out the Knowledge Management in Agentforce IT Service Trailhead badge to learn more about capturing IT resolutions and managing knowledge articles.
Eligibility Rules
Not every catalog item is appropriate for every employee. With eligibility rules, you can determine who can see and submit requests for services in your catalog. If an employee’s eligibility doesn’t meet an item’s criteria, it simply doesn’t appear in the catalog.
For example, the Orivian admin uses eligibility rules to conditionally show high-end laptop models only to those in more technical roles.
You can build eligibility rules based on user attributes, such as role, location, or any field available on the user record. Your rules can be simple (single-condition) or layered (multiple conditions with AND/OR logic).
These rules help you keep catalog data clean and relevant. Instead of employees scrolling past items that don’t apply to them, they see a personalized list of available services.
Wrap It Up
In this unit, you learned about the building blocks of a service process, including anchor entities, attributes, intake forms, and eligibility rules. But there’s one more important component we didn’t cover: fulfillment flows.
Next, you explore what happens after an employee clicks Submit on a catalog item and learn how fulfillment flows carry requests all the way to resolution.