Salesforce Incident Management Guide

This article was originally published at Twistellar.com

From system outages and data breaches to product malfunctions, the way organizations respond can make all the difference in maintaining customer trust, ensuring operational continuity, and safeguarding their hard-earned reputation.

In today’s article, we want to introduce you to the concept of Salesforce incident management, the functionality called Salesforce Customer Service Incident Management available in the Salesforce Service Cloud, and how it can change the way your team handles incidents.

What are Incidents in Salesforce?

Incidents are multiple disruptions or unplanned events that influence multiple users and cause poor workflows, disrupt service, reduce its quality, or lead to undesirable consequences.

Usually, the criteria used by organizations to recognize incidents are approximately as follows:

• Damage can quickly increase as a result of an event
• Unless it is resolved quickly, it can become a bigger problem
• Key customers are affected, or they could be affected

These incidents can manifest in various forms, such as:

• Service outages: Website crashes, app failures, or system downtime that inconvenience customers
• Delivery problems: Delays, lost packages, or damaged goods that impact customer satisfaction
• Product issues: Defective products, malfunctions, or quality concerns requiring resolution
• Billing errors: Incorrect charges, payment discrepancies, or other billing problems needing correction
• Communication breakdowns: Misunderstandings and dissatisfaction due to poor communication
• Data security breaches: Compromised customer data or privacy violations that erode trust
• Support issues: Negative experiences with customer service representatives
• Technical glitches: Functionality issues, login problems, or app crashes disrupting the user experience
• Misleading information: Inaccurate advertising or product details causing customer dissatisfaction
• Employee misconduct: Incidents of employee wrongdoing that require careful handling for reputation management

Examples of Incidents in Salesforce

The complex nature of Salesforce environments makes it challenging to quickly identify incidents, potentially causing delays in recognizing problems.

On top of that, DevOps teams often struggle with determining the severity of an incident and its impact on business operations. The coordination needed to address intricate problems efficiently requires cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing among team members.

Timely and transparent communication about incident details and resolutions is often underestimated, leading to potential misunderstandings. DevOps teams can overcome this by establishing communication protocols for different incident severity levels, leveraging automated notifications for real-time updates, and developing post-incident communication plans to share insights gained during incidents.

In the modern world, finding any application or process that would work without failures is difficult. The shutdown of a business application is an incident. If a server is running, but its performance is greatly reduced, this can also be an incident. Incidents can vary in severity, from periodic errors in a small group of users to a failure in the operation of an entire web service.

What’s Salesforce Customer Service Incident Management?

Customer Service Incident Management is the Salesforce feature in Service Cloud that serves to track, diagnose, and prevent service disruptions’ recurrence.

This solution helps manage large-scale disruptions and delegate tasks to the right people to ensure that your business delivers on customer expectations. It offers built-in fields, page layouts, and best practices to enable service teams to respond to any disruption and keep customers informed. Plus, with release management features, your team can implement changes to prevent recurring problems.

By leveraging Salesforce Incident Management, IT and DevOps teams can conduct in-depth root cause analyses, optimize agent operations, and minimize downtime.

Salesforce Incident management is one of the most important processes that a product or service company must properly set up. Service disruptions can be costly for the company, so teams need to respond quickly and effectively to such problems and resolve them.

According to incident management docs by Salesforce, managers oversee incidents, which involve disruptions affecting multiple customers. These issues often originate as an influx of cases related to widespread disruption and require collaborative resolution across teams. Agents or monitoring systems directly create incidents, focusing on diagnosing and resolving service disruptions. Incidents also utilize common features like knowledge management and SLA (Service Level Agreement) management.

When dealing with an incident, the team needs a plan:

• Respond quickly and effectively to incidents to speed up their resolution
• Establish clear communication with customers, stakeholders, service owners, and other process participants
• Work on the problem as a team to overcome all obstacles to its solution as quickly as possible
• Continuously improve and learn from problem-solving, applying the gained knowledge to improve the service and work processes

What are the Benefits of Salesforce Customer Service Incident Management?

Centralized Incident Management

All incidents are tracked through a single interface, simplifying control and coordination. This reduces the complexity of managing multiple incidents and provides a clear overview for customer service agents and incident managers.

Linking Related Records

You can link Salesforce records such as Incidents, Problems, and Cases. For example, if multiple cases are related to a problem in Telegram, they can all be linked to a single incident, making it easier to identify root causes.

Process Automation

Salesforce Incident Management solution automates incident distribution, notifications, and escalations, increasing work efficiency. By reducing manual tasks, teams can focus on resolving incidents faster and more effectively.

— — —

…Would like to continue reading and learn how to set up Incident Management feature in Salesforce?

Read the full version at Twistellar.com