[Salesforce] Developing With The Service Cloud

Developing With The Service Cloud

Many customers are currently using salesforce.com's Service Cloud product to run their customer service in the cloud. This fast-growing application enables customers to manage their customer service operations using the salesforce.com platform.

One of the powerful aspects of this product is that it's built on the underlying Force.com platform and therefore has a very rich programmability model that allows customers to adapt the technology to fit their unique business environment. This could be as simple as adding a field to a page, or changing the way users enter support cases, all the way to creating a brand new call agent experience with custom pages and workflow.

This quickstart serves as a place for new developers to gain access to the foundational knowledge and code examples they need to learn to build some of these customizations.

Structure of the Quickstarts

The quickstart is structured into four core areas. These categories represent the most common use cases of developing with Service & Support. They are as follows:

1. Processing incoming cases
2. Working with a case hierarchy
3. Integrating data with other systems
4. Enhancing agent workflow
5. Working with Service Contracts and Entitlements

Developing with Service & Support

Note: As you work through this material, you may want to experiment with the code but are unsure as to whether you should do this in your production org. The good news is that anybody interested in doing development can sign up for a free Developer Edition. This special edition gives developers their own environment to do any kind of development in.

Processing incoming cases

One of the most common ways that support cases get created within Service & Support is via electronic communications, whether those come from a web form or email. Often developers want to customize how these incoming communications are handled. There are several extension points that developers can use to implement custom logic around this process. Below are quickstarts for the most common scenarios of doing this.

 Quickstart: Customization of Case Creation Process With Triggers

 Quickstart: Creating custom Web-To-Case forms using Visualforce and Sites

 Quickstart: Autocreating Contacts from Web-To-Case forms

 Quickstart: The Get Next Case and Get Next Lead buttons

Working with a case hierarchy

A case hierarchy can be a very powerful tool to manage sets of related cases. The setup of a case hierarchy is described here.

Case hierarchies become particularly powerful when one adds automation. Below are quickstarts that detail some common automations that customer service organizations apply to case hierarchies.

 Quickstart: Synchronize A Parent Case's Status To the Status Of Its Children

Integrating data with other systems

As with any system, data is key. The more relevant data customer service agents can have at their fingertips, the higher value the system will have. Below are quickstarts that cover the key scenarios in exposing and consuming data between salesforce.com and other systems.

 Quickstart: Exposing Service & Support Data to Other Systems using Apex Web Services

Enhancing agent workflow

The productivity of customer service agents is something high of the radar of any customer service operation. Anything that can enable these agents to take a few more cases by the day's end is very valuable. The quickstarts below cover various scenarios of enhancing the workflow of these agents.

 Quickstart: Creating Compound Views Using Visualforce

 Quickstart: Creating Custom Actions Using Visualforce

 Quickstart: Creating Custom Screen Pops Using Visualforce

Working with Service Contracts and Entitlements

 Quickstart: Milestone Utilities Class

 Quickstart: Auto-Complete First Response Milestones with Triggers

 Quickstart: Auto-Complete Resolution Time Milestones with Triggers

 Quickstart: Default Entitlement with Triggers

The Service Cloud Console

The Service Cloud Console is a game changing user interface that goes beyond just an Agent Console 2.0. It is optimized for

• High Volume Tier 1 agents
• Tier 2&3 Technical/Product Support Users

You can learn about it here.

 Quickstart: Open Multiple Subtabs

 Quickstart: Set Tab Title

 Quickstart: Mini Page Layout Custom Console Component

 Quickstart: Custom Search Visualforce List View

 Quickstart: Custom Interaction Log

 Quickstart: A Quick Create Toolbar

List of Service Cloud Console Blogs

• The Service Cloud Console: Not just Agent Console 2.0
• The Service Cloud Console: Providing More Context For Your Agents
• The Service Cloud Console: Where's my Home Tab?
• The Service Cloud Console – Working with Buttons and Links
• The Service Cloud Console: 0 Click Data with Custom Console Components
• Service Cloud Console: Working With Lists
• The Service Cloud Console – Building a Custom Interaction Log
• The Service Cloud Console - A Quick Create Toolbar
• Open CTI: Moving CTI Integrations to the Cloud

Next Steps

If you've gone through the Quickstarts and would like to learn more about using and building on the Force.com platform, the following two free downloadable books would be a great place to start:

• Force.com Platform Fundamentals

Also, if you haven't already done so, don't forget to Signup for a free Developer Edition account so you can start learning and building today!