Solution Management in Salesforce

Solution is a detailed description of a customer’s issue and the resolution of that issue. Solutions can streamline the communication of common case resolutions, improving support agent productivity and response time to customers. Thus, Salesforce Solution Management is very important.

Solutions are used to document and communicate common resolutions to cases.

For instance:

• If customer A calls in with a problem and steps 1-5 must be taken to resolve the issue, these steps can be entered into a solution.
• When customer B calls in with the same problem, instead of retyping steps 1-5, the customer support agent can reference the solution to quickly communicate the resolution.

Solutions tab displays a homepage that lets you quickly locate and manage solutions. If your organization uses solution categories, you can browse for and find solutions by category.

Important Fields:

Status:

This field defines the status of a solution whether it is saved as a Draft or as an Un-reviewed solution or as a reviewed solution.

Public:

It indicates whether the solution has been published or not as a public solution.

Visible in Knowledge Base:

It makes the solution visible in the public knowledge base where customers can see the solution without logging in or without registering the case.

Title:

Specifies the title for the solution.

Description:

Steps that will help to resolve the case using this solution.

Solution Management –  Permissions

Solutions do not use sharing rules instead, object-level security and the “Manage Published Solutions” privilege determine what access the user has to solutions. Each solution can be optionally marked as “Reviewed”. To edit/delete solutions in a “Reviewed” status, the user must have the “Manage Published Solutions” privilege.

Solution Category

Solution categories allows us to group similar solutions together. Create solution categories to keep solutions organized and to allow users to easily navigate your public solutions. Users can then browse and search solutions based on categories.

To add solutions under a category, add the solution category related list on the page layout and add the category on the solution.

Solution Management Process

You can set up different solution processes to control the steps your users follow for solution reviews because there is a different level of knowledge in each solution type, the review processes and values in the Status field could be different. By implementing different solution processes, you can have different review cycles for each kind of solution.

Setting up each process takes several steps:

Step1: Create the opportunity stages needed in the sales process.

Step2: Name the sales process, and select what opportunity stages are included in that particular process.

Step3: Create a record type for the sales process. Record types link the sales process to the page layout that goes with it.

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