Setting Up Digital Engagement for Digital Solidarity — Quick Field Guide
One of the french government’s responses to support citizens throughout Covid-19. This guide will showcase how we configured Salesforce Digital Engagement for outbound notification use cases on SMS channel.
A little bit of context
“Digital Solidarity” is a Contact Center initiate to provide citizen support during Covid19’s confinement in France. Citizens receive help on how to best live and organize their lives through out these difficult times. Customers can leverage many communication channels: Phone, Email, Communities, Chat and SMS.
This project was ready for go live in 3 days. And in 1 week it was running in production including almost 2 days of user feedback.
Main use case
- 90% of interactions are calls. Main use case involves phone + SMS.
- Upon receiving an inbound call, agents get [verbal] consent for outbound SMS notification (or not), and then proceed with case management activities.
- If citizens agrees over the phone for SMS notification: automatically, a Messaging User is created and related to the citizen’s person account.
- As a citizen’s case is being managed: at different key statuses the citizen is automatically notified along the way
- Optional use case: some citizens request that information (knowledge base article related) is sent to them via SMS. This is an outbound free text SMS leveraging “start conversation” & “quick text” capabilities.
Configuration Steps: Process Builder & Page Layouts
1_ Create Messaging User on Implicit Consent
Conditions to meet: Account is a Person Account type, Checkbox for allowing SMS notification is ticked (this is a custom field to be created), Messaging User for SMS does NOT exist, and Person Account does have a phone number.
2_ Reference Messaging User for Person Account
Salesforce Messaging User (MU) object holds 2 look up fields for both Account and Contact. Once that MU is [“artificially”] created on point 1_: we reference it with the relevant Account and Contact Ids. In other words, we consolidate the relationship between a citizen and his/her SMS number to send notifications to. Conditions to meet: both Contact & Account field on Messaging User record are empty.
3_ Send SMS Messaging Templates at Different Case Statuses
There is a prior step to this which is setting up a Messaging Template.
Make sure you have at least 1 Messaging Template to use.
In this example there are outbound messaging templates for 3 case statuses: new, working and closed.
Once that step is covered, you’ll then create a Process Builder similar to the ones we’ve been previously doing. But this time, targeting the Case object.
🔷 If there is NOT a citizen related to the Case (some people prefer to keep their anonymity), then send a Chatter Notification on the case warning that it isn’t possible to contact that citizen via SMS.
🔷 If the relevant change occurs on Case Status and there’s a Contact on the case withholding a Messaging User, then send the corresponding messaging template to it.
🔶 Another option put in place here goes through a 2 verification step from the Account perspective.
🔶 If There is a Person Account related to the case and it holds a Phone number, then send the automatic outbound notification to it.
4_ Update Case Page Layouts for Start Conversation Quick Action, Messaging User & Sessions
Last but not least is adding 3 elements to the case page layout. The Start Conversation Quick Action: this is an important one, it allows to proactively send links to knowledge base articles through SMS.
The final step is adding Messaging User and Messaging Sessions on the Case: this allows agents / advisors to follow up conversations as they deal with citizens.
In a Nutshell
Digital Solidarity is a Salesforce Service Cloud + Digital Engagement + AirCall initiative to help the french government in record time. Roughly 2000 Calls are received daily in the contact center. Citizens are helped around topics and best practices around staying in touch with family, food provisioning, administrative paperwork online, working from home, and homeschooling. Email, Chat, Communities and SMS channels are also available for french citizens through Digital Solidarity. A beautiful project to have been able to work on that leverages Salesforce’s out of the box digital engagement capabilities.
Next best quick wins for Solidarité Numérique are Einstein Bots. Because both Salesforce Chat & SMS are active as well as Communities and Knowledge. Enabling Chatbots is natural step for this initiative’s citizen experience IMHO :)
