Blog

Salesforce Digital Engagement

2023-12-11 15:32
This article is prepared by our Salesforce Developer Aliaksandr Kliazovich.

What is Digital Engagement?

Salesforce Digital Engagement is a customer service product that helps companies communicate with customers via messaging apps, webchats, in-app chats, and social media channels. Messages are routed to Salesforce, where they are processed by the appropriate agent or chatbot. The main goal of Digital Engagement is to communicate with clients via their preferred channels with the native Salesforce Service Console.
What does Digital Engagement consist of?

  • Self-service community
  • Web-to-case
  • Email-to-case
  • Embedded Chat
  • Einstein Bots
  • Omni-Channel routing
  • Field Service

Self-service community

It’s probably not hard to believe, but often the last thing a customer wants to do is pick up the phone and talk to a customer service agent. The same goes for instant messages, SMS, and social. Sometimes customers just want to solve the problem on their own.

Most often, customers want to be able to solve their issues themselves before contacting support. That’s why it’s more important than ever for companies to offer not only a self-service solution for their customers but a single place they can go to ask questions of other users, access their accounts and request support.

Another reason for having a self-service portal is reducing the number of incoming requests from a customer to an agent, which can reduce the agent's workload.

Salesforce Experience Cloud opens the way for companies to do just that. They can offer partner sites, employee sites, or customer sites. But for now, we’re going to talk about Experience Cloud and how it can strengthen your business.
Create a Whole New Customer Experience with Experience Cloud Sites
Self-service has become the new welcome mat for a growing number of customers. This means it can be a customer's first service interaction with a brand.

With this in mind, a self-service solution should be much more than a place where customers try to troubleshoot problems on their own. It should be more useful than a beefed-up FAQ page. It should and can be:
  • A gathering place for your customers to help themselves and act as subject matter experts to help one another.
  • An account portal where customers can instantly access the information they need.
  • A support hub to engage with agents, ask questions, and get guided help.
You can create your own branded self-service sites and portals with Salesforce. With Experience Cloud, you can take a basic FAQ page and make a true self-service portal for customers, a place where they can find everything they need, from knowledge articles to user forums, and even opportunities to chat with support agents.
Integrate Service Cloud and Experience Cloud on One Platform with Salesforce
The big benefit of building your customer portal on the Salesforce platform is, of course, that you’ll have everything on the powerful Salesforce platform. That means that it’s fast and easy to seamlessly integrate the Salesforce features you need directly into your portal, including Service Cloud. There are tons of useful features Service Cloud brings to your customer sites. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Create a One-Stop Customer Experience: you can integrate business processes, including account balances and preferences, from Salesforce or other third-party systems so customers can find what they need without leaving the site.

Give Customers Access to More Knowledge: it takes just a few clicks in the Experience Builder to take previously internal how-to guides and articles and push them to your customer site. Now, customers have access to all your support resources at their fingertips.

Beyond providing another channel for your support team to deliver awesome customer service, sites can help solve other key business challenges.
Two reasons that your company can benefit from a customer site

1. Boost Customer Satisfaction

Sites let you make more information available to customers, so they don’t have to go through the process of contacting a support agent to deal with routine requests, such as resetting a password or checking on their account balance. They can do these types of things themselves quickly and easily, right on the site.

2. Decrease Call Volume

By using a customer site to deflect some of the more mundane service inquiries, companies can drastically reduce the number of incoming calls their agents receive. Agents are not only taking fewer calls but can focus their time and energy on more difficult and complex customer issues that may require more agent attention.

Web-to-Case

What is Web-to-Case in Salesforce?

Web-to-Case is a Salesforce Service Cloud feature that lets you automatically capture support requests directly from your website and turn them into cases. It uses a simple, customizable form that includes the fields you need based on your requirements.

Once a customer submits the form on your website, Web-to-Case sends an automatic email to let them know you’ve received the support request. Like the form, you can also customize this email. At the same time, Web-to-Case also creates a case in your org so you can track the request. If possible, it will also link the case to a specific contact.

By using Web-to-Case, you’ll improve your support team’s productivity and help them respond to customers’ support queries faster.

Email-To-Case

What Is Email-To-Case?

Email-to-Case enables us to automatically create cases and auto-populate case fields when customers send messages to the email addresses you specify. Email-to-Case (on-demand) service keeps email traffic outside your network’s firewall and refuses emails larger than 25 MB.

Key features and benefits for Email-To-Case:
  • Customer responses regarding a case are automatically associated with the original case, including any attachments the customer sends.
  • Case reporting measures both inbound and outbound emails by case so that you can see how many emails are exchanged before an issue is resolved.
  • Routing addresses allow you to create multiple email addresses from which the contents of customer emails can be converted to case fields.
  • Assignment Rules, Escalation Rules, Auto-Response Rules and Flow all work seamlessly with Email-to-Case.

Embedded Chat & Einstein Bot

What is Embedded Chat?

Embedded chat windows use a Chat deployment that you can quickly configure. Then, simply add the code snippet to the web pages where you want the chat window to be available. Setting up Embedded Chat doesn’t change how your agents chat with customers in their console.

What Is Salesforce (Live) Web Chat In?

Salesforce Web-Chat is a channel that helps connect customers to support agents so they can get the help that they need, where and how they want it. It’s made up of a few different parts in Salesforce.

  • Chat: the agent part. It gives your support agents the power of conversational messaging right in the console.
  • Omni-Channel: the delivery. It routes chat requests to the right agent.
  • Embedded Service: the customer part. It provides a chat window that’s optimized for mobile browsers too, so customers have a great chat experience whether they’re on their desktop or mobile phone.
What is Einstein Bot?

A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation either by voice or text communication and is designed to help solve a problem. Organizations use chatbots to engage with customers alongside the classic customer service channels like phone, email, and social media.

The main benefits of bots are that they can answer routine queries without an agent being involved, capture the necessary information before transferring to an agent and be served up to customers on their preferred channel.

The “Einstein Bots API” is used for your systems that are not natively supported, for example, Twitter/X. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or SMS are supported.

In the context of bots, when referring to “Chat”, this is talking about whether you are within your app or on the web via Web Chat.

The aim of a Salesforce Einstein Bot is to serve up what your customers need without needing a human agent (or Salesforce User) to be involved.

Some use cases where bot can be used:

  • Providing answers via Knowledge Articles
  • Creating new inquiries as Leads
  • Creating new Cases
  • Searching for Records and providing updates on these Records (e.g. Orders, Cases)
  • Templated document collection
  • Collecting feedback
Bots are a very powerful tool that you can use to automate your customer experiences. It's a great way to expand your operations without needing to grow your team, and they can be configured in clicks, not code. Although it’s possible to extend it via Apex.

Omni-Channel

Omni-Channel allows your customers to connect seamlessly with your support staff using multiple channels. At the same time, your support agents have immediate access to a holistic picture of the person they’re about to help.

In the service world, we think about omni-channel in terms of the three Cs: complete, consistent, and connected.

  • Complete engagement with customers on any channel
  • Consistent service across channels
  • Connected to one CRM for a unified view of the customer

How many ways can customers contact your organization for support? Phone, email, SMS, WhatsApp, webchat, social media and of course, manual creation are all ways that you want to offer to open up a two-way conversation.

  • Phone: Service Cloud Voice is the CTI tool for handling and routing incoming calls through Salesforce.
  • Email: Email-to-case allows your customers to send an email to your organization, which is turned into a Case record. From there, your organization can send auto-replies, distribute cases to your support team, and perform other automated actions.
  • SMS: Salesforce offers native SMS support. Customers can text while agents stay right within the Service Console.
  • Webchat: Salesforce-native Live Chat can be embedded on any webpage (not just Salesforce pages, i.e. Experience Cloud sites).

To assign support cases to the right people at the right time, all from one centralized support center, Omni-Channel caters to the following:

  • Queue-based routing (native Salesforce case routing): Agents are assigned to queues. Omni-Channel routes work to those queues.

  • Skill based routing (native Salesforce case routing): Agents are tagged with their skills (such as specializing in a specific product, etc.) and work is assigned based on the skills necessary.

  • Omni-Channel determines agent capacity in one of two ways: Tab-Based or Status-Based.
  1. Status-Based Capacity Model: Determines agent capacity using the status of work items assigned to the agent. For nonreal-time channels like cases, agents sometimes work on the same work item over multiple days, across multiple Omni-Channel sessions. The status-based capacity model checks the status of a work item to determine if the work consumes an agent’s capacity. If the agent closes a tab or logs out of Omni-Channel, their capacity is not reset until the work has a completed status. The status-based capacity model can be used only for cases, leads, and custom objects. It isn’t supported for real-time work items such as chat, voice, and messaging.
  2. Tab-Based Capacity Model: Determines agent capacity using the number of console tabs that are open in the agent’s Omni-Channel session. When the agent logs out, all the work that’s assigned to the agent is considered closed by Omni-Channel, and the agent's capacity is reset. Omni-Channel also considers the work to be closed when an agent closes the tab that Omni-Channel opened for the work item.

  • External routing: This uses a third-party tool for the routing logic (such as a third-party CTI) but still has work handled by Omni-Channel. It uses APIs to tie Omni-Channel to the third-party tool and is ideal if you have a third-party application that already has routing logic, and you wish to keep this logic with Omni-Channel.

Field Service

You can read an excellent article about this functionality by my colleague Pavel Bulyha.