DevelopingWithServiceAndSupport
Making the Most of the Real-time Service Cloud
Many customers are currently using salesforce.com's Service & Support product to run their customer service in the cloud. Also known as the Service Cloud, this fast-growing application enables customers to manage the customer service operation 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:
- Processing incoming cases
- Working with a case hierarchy
- Integrating data with other systems
- Enhancing agent workflow
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
Coming soon: Parsing Info From Incoming Emails Using Email Handlers
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
Quickstart: Retrieving External Data From Other Systems Using Apex Callouts
Coming soon: Other data integration scenarios using the API
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
Coming soon: Creating Mass-Update Pages using Visualforce and Apex
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:
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!