Introduction to Salesforce Cases
According to Salesforce, cases are designed to "log customer issues" while giving us a "complete overview of our history with the customer". Substitute prospective student, applicant, school counselor, etc. for customer and we have the foundations of OAR's Salesforce Case Management system. Case management allows us to deliver consistent messaging, collaborate to solve student issues, understand context around issues, track communication, and overall provide great customer service to our applicants and their support members.
Case Queues
A case is created in one of two ways. Cases are manually created from a phone call or other interaction with a student, most often by our Front Lines and COD teams. Cases are also created from OAR service email accounts.
Salesforce interacts with public OAR email accounts ending in @admissions.wisc.edu (service accounts) to produce case queues. Instead of reviewing emails in Outlook, each email becomes a case in Salesforce. While we also have some specialized service accounts that convert to case queues (homeschool@admissions.wisc.edu, for example), the chart below describes our three main service email-to-case accounts.
| Email Account | Case Queue | Responsible Team |
|---|---|---|
| onwisconsin@admissions.wisc.edu | UGADM Support Queue All | Front Lines |
| invite@admissions.wisc.edu | UGADM Outreach Manager | Recruitment |
| visitbucky@admissions.wisc.edu | UGADM Visit Bucky | Events |
Viewing a Case in the Recruiting App
In the Recruiting app the Case object is laid out like our other objects - the main center-left pane has Details and Related tabs and communication is in the smaller right pane. Because cases are all about communication, this layout isn't optimal. As well, additional case management functionality has been built into the cases object in our Service Console app. For these reasons, we advise OAR team members to view and manage cases from the Service Console
Managing Cases in the Service Console App
The majority of our case management documentation is is developed and maintained by the Front Lines team in the Admissions Front Line Services Resource Canvas course. Please view the CRM section in the How To's: Step by Step Guides module. However, because we provide recruitment case management documentation in KB, we'll do a quick overview of the Cases object as viewed in Service Console.
After navigating to the Service Console app, enter a case number or contact name the top search bar, or open the Cases object in your drop down menu to see a list of recent cases you've opened.
The image below illustrates key functionality within the service console cases object. All information about the case is in the left panel, including student the case concerns, contact information, and case content. The center pane enables easy communication with both OAR team members via the Post function, and the student, via Email. [Remember that we can only send from admissions service accounts when emailing within a case. See the Outlook Email Integration section in Getting Started in Salesforce.] The right pane contains related information, including opportunities affiliated with the contact associated with the case, case comments, and email and case history.
