Documents and content carry information, but also act as triggers to move business processes forwards. With access to large amounts of data comes great responsibility, and the more efficient a business handles its data, the more productive and profitable a business is likely to be. The faster documents are moved and processed, the sooner a business outcome is achieved.
What keeps my cases going?
Resolving cases involves a variety of potential workflows and activities spanning across the organization. The case managers determine the best route a case will go, and which employees will be required to solve the case.
The time spent to accomplish the case and the quality of the outcome is highly dependent on the accuracy of the knowledge and information available to the case managers and employees involved.
We are using case management in Salesforce Service Cloud – don’t we have this covered?
Partially, yes. The challenge lies in the cross-functional, cross-organizational nature of solving cases. If all employees involved in solving cases are regular users in Salesforce, the answer would be yes. However, the reality is that there is a plethora of business applications where processes, tasks, documents, and knowledge are managed.
Equipping all users with a Salesforce license just to occasionally work on cases comes would cause significant costs. Using Salesforce to store documents and content is also very expensive.
The following example demonstrates this challenge.
A mechanical engineer needs to review a case and submit a certain revision of a drawing. The engineer typically will not have access to Salesforce and the revision of that drawing will not be filed in Salesforce at that stage.
Emails will be exchanged, drawings sent as attachments, and copies of those drawings will now be in at least 3 systems. The result is files used in and stored across several file storage solutions with duplicate files and assets across different platforms.
The main trigger will be the email inbox, and we all know how difficult it is to not lose track given the flood of emails every day.
How do we include employees outside of Salesforce then?
There is a common ground in the above-mentioned plethora of business applications for most organizations. A virtual place where all employees come together to collaborate, chat, meet, store and share documents, as well as content and knowledge.
More employees are using Microsoft Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, and OneDrive than ever before.
By integrating Salesforce with Microsoft 365, cases can be shared with everyone in the organization, and. documents are automatically stored in SharePoint. Versioning and co-authoring will facilitate working together on one mutual document, instead of managing multiple copies of the same document, there will be one single point of truth governed by the Microsoft 365 that was designed to keep documents safe and ensure compliance.
At the same time, Salesforce users can still access all the documents from within the solution.
Removing the platform boundaries allows to exchange information such as documents much quicker. Active notifications will trigger the next step faster streamlining the overall processing time of the case. By integrating Salesforce with SharePoint there are even more benefits organizations can leverage as shown below.
