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Right Work, Right Agent: Getting Started with Omni-Channel in Salesforce

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About Me - Lucas Peterson

Consultant at

Northstar CRM Consulting

9x years of experience
9x Salesforce Certifications
Serviceblazer User Group Co-Lead
Avid cyclist, dog and cat dad,

and general scifi nerd

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What will we be doing today?

Introduction to OmniChannel and Case Routing Automation in Service Cloud

Key components of OmniChannel
How OmniChannel works
Set up OmniChannel to route objects to queues and skills

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What is Omni-Channel?

Omni-Channel integrates multiple channels for a unified customer experience.
Unlike traditional routing, Omni-Channel breaks down channel silos.

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OmniChannel unifies all the different ways your customers contact you - from sales reps creating cases for customers; to customer reaching out via email, chat, text or phone; and even through social media. It’s all connected in Salesforce, which means that you have the entire power of CRM behind it allowing your customer services agents can get a complete view of the customer. CSRs can quickly see what cases have been recently opened and their current status to provide updates.

However, OmniChannel doesn’t just have to route work to human agents. It can also be used to route work to autonomous agents and with the magic of Agentforce, work can be handled automagically. Think of how seamless it could be if you could let your customers complete your Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) process automatically without human intervention.

OmniChannel can be the backbone of many business processes allowing Admins to ensure the work gets to the right person or agent at the right time.

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Why OmniChannel?

OmniChannel eliminates manual routing of cases to customer service reps
Ensure your customer SLAs are met every time they submit a query
Improve your customer service experience

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How familiar is everyone with OmniChannel?

If there audience looks hesitant:

OmniChannel is Salesforce’s out of the box solution to route “work” (cases, chats, emails, and any custom object) to a “team” or group of users defined as a queue.
It routes and distributes work efficiently based on parameters you set up, helping your team keep specific customer service level agreements.
The net benefit of leveraging OmniChannel automation is an improved customer experience because agents aren’t “cherry picking” cases and it can help you keep tabs on your agents; how much work are they taking, are they taking their minimum breaks, do you have enough agents to handle the workload, etc.

If the audience is more receptive:

Work the audience to get the answers to the following questions. Play some “yes and…” with their answers to add color, but make sure to watch your time.

How would you describe OmniChannel to a Customer Service Manager?
Can anyone describe how OmniChannel works?
What are some benefits to using OmniChannel?

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Real-Life Scenarios & Use Cases

Banking Scenario: A bank offers customer support through phone, email, and a customer portal. They implement OmniChannel to manage inquiries about loan applications, fraud alerts, and account updates.

Nonprofit Scenario: A nonprofit organization manages volunteer inquiries, donor support, and beneficiary requests through different channels.

Healthcare Scenario: A healthcare provider uses OmniChannel to

manage patient inquiries from web forms, phone calls,

and secure messaging within a patient portal.

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Key Components of Omni Channel

Presence Configurations
Routing Configurations
Service Channels
Queues
Presence Statuses

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The primary concept you need to keep in mind about OmniChannel is “capacity” - which is the idea of how much “work” can be done at any given amount of time. Taking your average handle time by the number of agents would give you an idea of how much “capacity” is available on your current team. Work is assigned a “units of capacity” when it gets routed to agents. Agents have a maximum amount of capacity that can be consumed. If a customer service agent doesn’t have enough capacity to take on a case, OmniChannel will “re-route” the work to the next available customer service agent.

Let’s talk about how each component of omnichannel and how it relates to the concept of “capacity”.

Presence Configurations = these are what defines an agents maximum capacity. You can have several different Presence Configurations to meet the needs of different teams or individuals. Example, let’s say you have a junior customer service agent, or someone in training, they can have a different capacity than your more experienced customer service agents.

Routing Configurations = these are defines the capacity each work item consumes. You assign these to queues which tells OmniChannel how much capacity each work item will need. OmniChannel then automatically finds the agent that has the capacity to handle that work and assigns it.

Now, if an agent declines the work, OmniChannel will find the next available agent and so on. If all agents reject the work, the item remains in the queue. Work will not get re-assigned to an agent who has previously declined the work item.

Service Channels = allows you to define from where the work is coming from, bet it a chat or text channel, an email inbox, a phone line, or even social media. Here is where you identify how the work is delivered to the agent. Do agents get an opportunity to decline the work? Is there any secondary routing of the work? Etc.

Queues = these are simply groups of users. Think of a “queue” as a literal line of customers waiting to talk to your customer service team. In Salesforce, a “queue” can also own records which means queues can factor into your record visibility. Your org wide default sharing settings will prevail. If cases are private, that means that your customer service agents can’t see a case in a queue unless they are members of that queue.

Presence Statuses = these are simply what allows your customer service agents to be able to take work. They can be available for one or multiple queues at the same time, allowing the work to naturally get distributed across your team. You can also set “busy” statuses to provide a way to agents to remain logged into OmniChannel and not accept work from the queue.

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Step-by-Step Build Along

Prerequisites for OmniChannel

A Demo Org - bit.ly/OmniChannelDemo
Turn on OmniChannel
We need to add Omni-Channel to the Service Console
A user with the Service Cloud User checkbox checked
Setup case assignment rules

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Step-by-Step Build Along

Create a presence configuration
Create a routing configuration
Create a service channel
Create a queue and assign the routing configuration
Configure presence statuses for agents
Testing the setup with a sample case

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Step-by-Step Build Along

Setup a Presence Configuration

A default presence configuration is automatically set up for you out of the box. This presence configuration is automatically assigned to all users who have the Service Cloud User checkbox checked.

Let’s explore it!

Click on Presence Configurations on the right, then select the Default Presence Configuration.

We can see that the capacity is set to 5, it will play a notification sound for work requests, and play a notification sound when Omni Channel loses connection.

Let’s explore some of the other settings:

Interruptible Capacity = the amount of the total capacity that can be usurped for higher priority work.

Automatically accept work requests = is force feeding work to your customer service agents. Great for busy call centers or companies that have very strict SLAs, perhaps not so great for smaller teams as it feels a bit heavy handed.

If you select “Automatically accept work requests” you can’t also allow agents to decline work requests.

Allow Agents to decline work requests = allows you agents some control over the work they take on. It’s a best practice to update the agent’s status on when they decline the work. I also recommend checking “Allow agents to choose a decline reason” which will provide you with information (via reporting) on why work is being declined by agents.

Work can “timeout” when being routed to a customer service agent before getting routed to the next available agent. If that happens, you can update the agent’s status to a specific value.

Under Audio Settings, you can…

Select whether to play a notification sound when work gets assigned through Omni-Channel. You can use the default sound or bring your own notification sound.

Typically the sound pings twice, but you can have it play continuously for up to 30 seconds.

Additionally, you can turn off the notification sound for when Omni-Channel loses connection.

After conversation work time allows you to…

Control how long agents have to “wrap up” their work before getting the next case. This is set to a number of seconds and you can allow customer service agents to extend that time. You might want to use this if they customers service agent is required to document their work in detail.

You can anonymize your agents in messaging channels by giving them an alias such as “Support Agent” but this only applies to messaging channels and will be set for all assigned users.

You can also control to where a customer service agent can transfer messaging sessions. You might use this to ensure that customer service agents aren’t transferring work to a non-skilled or lower skilled agent.

Assigned users will tell you who is assigned to this particular presence configuration. If you create a custom presence configuration, you can assign specific users to the configuration or assign the configuration to all users of a particular profile.

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Setup a Routing Configuration

You may or may not already have a routing configuration set up. Remember, routing configurations control the amount of capacity a work item consumes from a customer service agent.

Let’s take a deeper look at the settings found under a routing configuration.

Under basic information, you have the routing configuration name and developer name (which automatically populates after you set a name) and the “overflow assignee” who will accept any work that is above the Omni-Channel limits.

Routing Priority and Routing Models are important to understanding how Omni-Channel will work.

Routing Priority indicates in which order Omni-Channel will send work to your customer service agents.

Routing Model indicates how it will decided which customer service agent to route the work to based on a CSRs current capacity.

Most Available vs. Least Active are different sides of the same coin. Most Available simply means the agent with the most amount of capacity will get the next work item. Least Active means that the agent with the least amount of work will receive the next available work item. You can also use an external routing model if desired.

Capacity Type indicates whether this work can be interrupted by other priority work in the queue. If it is interruptible, then this work will consume the interruptible capacity assigned to the CSR through their presence configuration.

Work Item Size indicates how much capacity the work items routed will consume for the CSR. You can choose either a set number of units (which can include decimals) or a percentage of the total capacity of the CSR.

Remember, the total capacity assigned at presence configuration cannot be superseded by the Routing Configuration. Thus if CSRs are too busy with other work, the work item will remain in the queue until an a CSR becomes available.

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Setup a Service Channel

Setting up a service channel is less about creating an avenue for which your customers to reach you and more about how and which work gets assigned to your customer service agents.

You start by setting up a Service Channel Name and the Developer Name will automatically populate. You must assign a specific Salesforce object which will be the “work” you are assigning to your CSRs.

You can assign a custom footer component that will display in the utility bar in Service Console when the work is assigned to an agent. This could be helpful if you need to provide additional functionality to agents. Perhaps, a component that brings in functionality from a third party tool or external database to suppor the customer service agent when handling the customer.

I recommend that you check the Minimize Omni-Channel component when work is accepted to help get the Omni-Channel widget out of the CSRs way when they are working. You can also check whether the work should be automatically accepted and if the work is interruptible.

If you mark the work as interruptible, that means that other work can usurp this work’s capacity it occupies for the CSR.

You can override the agent’s audio settings, which will allow sounds to notify agents even if their presence configuration has the sound turned off.

You set the secondary routing priority at the service channel level. This allows you to control a secondary priority for the work within this “channel” which can be helpful if you have a high priority work item enter the queue or work for a customer that has a higher priority SLA. You use a picklist field and it’s values to set the secondary priority. Remember, the first priority is set by the Routing Configuration.

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Setup a Queue

Queues are groups of users, but they are not “public groups” because queues operates similarly to a user in that it can grant access to the records assigned or “owned” by the queue.

To create a queue, simply give it a Label, the Queue Name field will automatically populate.

You can assign a queue email and check the Send Email to Queue members checkbox, however, this is a bit of a misnomer. OOTB an email will be sent to ALL QUEUE MEMBERS INDIVIDUALLY if you do not set an email for the queue. If you set an email address, you must check the checkbox to send emails to that email address, otherwise emails will be sent to ALL QUEUE MEMBERS INDIVIDUALLY. Not setting a value or not checking the checkbox does not limit email notifications from being sent.

However, email notifications are only sent when the case is routed through your Case Assignment Rules and the Active Assignment checkbox is checked when a case is created. Your email for the queue must be a valid email address or it must have “.invalid” at the end in order to prevent your org’s email from getting disabled by Salesforce.

You can control which objects can be assigned to a queue. It’s a best practice to only assign one object to a queue at a time.

Lastly, you assign users as individuals or as a member of the role hierarchy and/or public groups to the queue membership. If a user is not a member of a queue, they cannot accept work out of that queue through Omni-Channel.

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Assign the routing configuration to a queue

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Setup Presence Statuses

Presence Statuses allow agents to make themselves available to accept work through Omni-Channel.

You have two “types” of statuses - Available and Busy.

Available = the agent is available to accept work out of the queues to which they are assigned.

Busy = means they are not available to accept work out of the queues to which they are assigned.

I recommend creating a minimal number of statuses. You can combine different availability statuses for each inbound channel or combine channels into a single availability status and let Omni-Channel control the routing.

Creating multiple availability statuses for each channel will give agents more control over which “channels” the sign into and can also give you some reporting on which channels your users are spending most of their time.

As for busy statuses, a few necessary statuses might be one for a breaks, one for lunches, and one for meetings. If you are allowing agents to decline work or need to reassign a status when the Omni-Channel routing times out, you could have a “working other cases” busy status.

Statuses are important for reporting purposes, however, the more statuses you have the more cumbersome it can be for your CSRs to find the correct status. As with most things in Salesforce, the simpler you can set it up, the better.

Before CSRs can use the statuses, they must have access to those statuses through their profile. Let’s go assign the presence statuses.

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Testing

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Optimizing Omni-Channel

Setting up secondary routing priorities
Setting up interruptible capacity
Advanced routing with Omni-Channel Flow

We briefly touched on secondary routing priorities, let’s go back and set that up.

If the case priority is High priority, then the routing should be 0 (or the highest priority); if Medium priority, then the routing should be 1; and if Low priority then the routing should be 2.

Let’s test that. Start by signing out of Omni-Channel. Next let’s create a few cases with different priorities. Create a case with a Priority of Medium > set the subject line as Case #2. Then create a case with a Priority of High > set the subject line as Case #1. Lastly, create a third case with a Priority of Low > set the subject line as Case #3.

When you sign into Omni-Channel, you should receive the cases in the priority order. Case #1 was created second, but routed first because it’s a higher priority.

Next, let’s play around with interruptible capacity.

Remember, interruptible capacity is a way to physically interrupt an agent currently doing work to focus on a higher priority work item. This might be used to allow agents to accept chats from an infrequent chat queue, while working on lower priority work such as email.

Let’s set the interruptible capacity to 5 for the presence configuration we set up. Next we go to the routing configuration we want to have interrupted and mark that routing’s capacity type as interruptible. And we are done.

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Q&A Session