Omni-Channel Routing in Salesforce

December 16, 2021 Saketh

Salesforce provides a customer service feature that routes records to the agents intelligently. It does this based on availability to queues; the omnipresence takes care of all this. The primary reason behind Salesforce Omni-Channel is to help businesses break through the barriers to customer satisfaction. Many companies and industry leaders are investing in Salesforce Omni-Channel to attain a great customer experience.

You may explore Salesforce to brush up on your technical knowledge for a certification exam or a job interview. Regardless, it’s good to know the differences between the two main clouds of Salesforce: Service Cloud and Sales Cloud.

Service Cloud and Sales Cloud are both built on the core platform of Salesforce, and both have their unique features as well. So, what are the main differences between them?

The Service Cloud is geared towards service managers and agents; whereas the sales cloud focuses on sales managers and sales reps. one of the key features of the Service cloud is “Omni-Channel.” As per its name, Omni-Channel means “all channels,” which allows your customer service agents to handle the customer concerns through all channels. Let’s know how it works exactly from this article.

What is meant by “Omni-Channel”?

More than ever before, when getting support on their terms, customers expect flexibility. Some customers often prefer email, some like web chat or SMS, some like opening tickets in the service portal, and others prefer a phone call.

It is critical for you to provide all these options for customer satisfaction, but your agents can do it. How do they juggle the concerns of customers coming in from various directions?

Omni-Channel provides a comprehensive customer experience regardless of the channel. It also keeps work connected and ensures they have a consistent experience and unified for agents to manage. Omni-channel addresses all the four pillars of customer service: Utilization, Responsiveness, Personalization, and Feedback.

Salesforce considers Omni-Channel in terms of 3 C’s: 1) Complete 2) Consistent 3) Connected.

How to set up Salesforce Omni-Channel?

It sounds awesome to hear the benefits of Salesforce Omni-Channel, but do you know how to set it up in Service Cloud? Here’s the step-by-step process in setting up Salesforce Omni-Channel.

1. Enabling Omni-Channel

Implementing this step is very easy by just turning the feature on!

Initially, go to “Setup” —> Then click “Feature Settings” —> Go to “Service”—> Click “Omni-Channel”—> Click “Omni-Channel Settings.”

2. Omni-Channel Routing

Routing is one of the most important things about Omni-Channel, and basically, it has three routing options:

Queue Based Routing
Skill Based Routing
External Routing

Let’s know in detail about each routing.

Queue Based Routing:
In Queue Based routing, agents are assigned to queues, and the routes of Omni-Channel work to those queues.
It is pretty straightforward, and even Salesforce has a setup flow to help in starting the process. Just go to the Omni-Channel setup flow in the Service setup.
Then create a queue and must assign agents to the queue in the setup flow. Then leave the agent workload settings.
Queue Based Routing is ideal if you have simple product offerings.

Skill Based Routing:
In skill-based routing, agents are tagged with few skills like specializing in a certain product. It can be assigned based on the necessary skills.
Skill Based Routing can handle complicated customer service needs.
In the Omni-Channel settings, enable skill-based routing and then configure the skills for the agents and use “Mechanical” and “Programming” skills for your company. Initially, go to “Omni-Channel” and then click “Skills in Setup.” Later, create basic skills with all required names.
Now, create Service Resources to link agents to skills.
Finally, tell Omni-Channel how to use the skills in routing the work.

External Routing:
External routing in Omni-Channel allows the routing of third-party with a partner using standard Salesforce APIs.
When there are any issues, the third-party integration adds to the troubleshooting complexity.

How does the Salesforce Omni-Channel work?

You must associate a queue to the routing configuration; then, it’s easy to route the work to agents based on the routing size and model.
The presence of Salesforce Omni-Channel enables your agent to show when they are available for work in service channels. Here, the specialists set availability in order to correct the cases.
Also, the specialists get cases through a push model that can imply Omni-Channel to drive the records through a footer component of the service console. Also, it can assign work from various channels. The route cases of the businesses are completely based on oldest items first, highest priority, agent capacity, and availability of an agent.
The service managers manage the data related to their priorities of the business and track the data like open cases, wait times, who has the capacity for more cases, and who is working on what.

How can Omni-Channel be benefited?

Salesforce Omni-Channel helps in finding how much time an agent is spending on a single case, and it also makes sure how many cases the agents are declined.
Using multiple channels at the same time, the Salesforce Omni-Channel allows the customers to connect seamlessly with the supporting staff.
The support agents have access to holistic pictures immediately using their own choice of channel and to contact center routes cases to the right agent in such a way that the interaction becomes seamless.
In order to monitor the activity for queues and agents, the manager uses a tool called “Omni-Channel Supervisor.”
By using the same Omni-Channel console, you can sort and filter to find what you need exactly.

Conclusion:

Salesforce Omni-Channel helps in automating the routing of various kinds of work items to the agents. It helps agents get work items quickly, based on the capacity of the agents. Without any custom coding, we can set up the Omni-Channel, but Salesforce has slight configuration changes. If you want to assist the customers more efficiently, it is best to opt for Salesforce Omni-Channel.