One of our B2C Service* customers has a single requirement that is head and shoulders above the rest.
The ability to track all conversations from the customer and 3rd parties on the same case.
*aka Service Cloud, formerly known as RightNow.
The Challenge
A customer raises a case through their preferred channel; the advisor reviews the case and reaches out to a company who is supplying something to the customer, as well as the ombudsman; input from from those 3rd parties is collected so the advisor has a perfect view of the situation and can then move into resolution mode.
The out-of-the-box B2C Service product nearly does that...but not quite! We worked closely with the B2C Centre-of-Excellence team who helped to determine what was required to fulfil the requirement completely.
The Out of the Box Solution
The first part of the process is delivered using Forward functionality that is available in the Browser User Interface, or BUI for short. Basically the advisor clicks the Forward button from the context of the case:
Then enters a note for the 3rd party, their email address, and clicks Send:
Off that email goes and we wait for a response. Emails can be fired off to other 3rd parties as well, there's no limit on that although you may want to consider being sensible about this as responses from more than a couple of 3rd parties could become unmanageable.
Anyway, the 3rd party receives the email:
When those 3rd parties do reply the responses are logged as company responses on the case, not as private notes. This means that the customer can see them over email and within the portal. Our customer did not want this, they wanted the responses from 3rd parties to always be private notes because the responses could be sensitive and because it's up to the advisor to decide, ultimately, what to share with their customers.
Magia's Magic
This is where we had to apply a small customisation to recognise that it's a 3rd party that has replied, rather than the customer, and to then mark the thread as private (ok, it's slightly more complicated than that as thread types can't be changed so it involved using a temporary incident, copying the thread, changing the type, and saving it to the original case; and we also had to ensure that attachments could be moved as well. This was achieved through a Custom Process Model (CPM) and a cURL call. There were also some B2C settings that needed to be adjusted).
Here's a reply that's come in from a 3rd party. It's clearly marked so the advisor knows where it's come from, and it's set as private (which is the crux of the requirement):
It’s difficult to encapsulate in a single screenshot what the end result is when there’s been lots of activity on a case, so here’s a mash up to get the point across. A single case can consist of:
A 3rd party response private note (grey banner) where an attachment has been included in the response:
Another 3rd party response, this time from someone else - private note (grey banner):
The advisor response, represented in bluey-green, that was sent prior to the 3rd parties being contacted:
The initial customer entry, represented by the light blue bar, that kicked the case off:
The result
All communications on a single case.
And when further communications go out to the customer, the 3rd party inputs won’t be visible.
To conclude, the requirement was delivered through standard functionality and through a small customisation.
If you’d like to book a discovery call, then we’re just a few clicks away: https://magiaconsulting.com/contact-us
