Tips for Passing the Service Cloud Specialist Superbadge

Was this badge FUN or what?! I learned so much doing it. I feel I can very confidently now teach people about Service Cloud productivity in Lightning – and now also have some practical experience in setting up Omnichannel!

So here’s some advice on how to get through this most super of Salesforce badges – it’s great for:

• functional people looking to brush up on their Service Cloud skills
• developers who would like to know more about how Salesforce can be used in the front end
• Anyone studying for their Service Cloud consultant certification

As with any Superbadge on Trailhead, you’ll do better if you work through the instructions step by step rather than going by the errors you get from Check Challenge. You also increase the likelihood of achieving First Ascent – meaning you got every step right the first time!

Items you’ll be checked on include:

• Support processes
• Page layouts (Classic AND Lightning)
• Assignment rules
• Escalation rules
• Entitlement management
• Omnichannel
• Email-to-Case
• Knowledge
• Process Builder
• Macros
• Quick Text
• Reports and Dashboards

If it’s been a while since you did them, it’s SO worth going over the pre-requisite badges again before you start. If you did them recently, try not to leave it too long to attempt this superbadge. They’re such a useful way to remember what needs to be done before you start.

Initial Setup

• Think back to the pre-requisite badges – there’s something you have to enable before allowing emails to be sent from a Case
• Case organizers – think about the language. How would you enable people to select cases from an organised list?
• Remember you can only have one assignment rule per object and the instructions specify two routes.
• Intermediate case users can access both lists of cases
• The instructions for configuring these rules are given directly to you – don’t skim read the paragraphs because the odd word will tell you how to configure what’s needed. E.g. “hours of inactivity” vs “hours of being created”.
• Clone the Case Layout page layout – you’ll need the Feed View for it later
• Don’t be tempted to get rid of any existing Case Status values
• Think carefully about the language – it talks about pushing cases UP and pushing cases TO. These are instructions on the types of rules you need to make.

Support Level Management

This is where you start building out the ability to manage support levels. For example, Basic vs Premier support. These have different SLA milestones an agent has to hit – it’s the same in this section. You’ll need to enable this whole feature before you start – I won’t give away what it’s called!

• The names you need are given in bold
• Think about the number of times you need to reuse a milestone – the business rules are not the same for each occasion
• Make sure your profile can see the specific fields on the Case that deal with the SLA management process
• You can track progress through the process through a standard Lightning component which needs to go onto the record page

Email and Case Routing

I recommend that when you’ve finished this superbadge, TURN THIS OFF unless you want to be inundated with auto-response emails!

• Email to Case would already be on if you’ve followed the instructions carefully – now it’s a “case” (ahem) of establishing a routing address and making sure it doesn’t need a firewall agent to work.
• Test it first by using real email addresses before you hit that button!
• The next requirement is to enable a specific feature that enables the pushing of cases to a user based on availability. Still not sure what I’m talking about? Sounds like you need this in your life.
• The instructions mention that agents should be able to decline requests. Don’t forget to add the decline reason to the configuration
• Adding statuses to Profiles is key for ensuring this all works and can be tested
• Your queues need to be linked to your routing configurations respectively
• When it works – it plays a sound to tell you that a case has been assigned to you. I’ve always thought this was pretty cool.

Knowledge

• Activate your knowledge groups and sub-groups. You may find it easier to set this up using the “Set Up Knowledge” setup flow
• Create your article (I found that my custom fields were already there, which helped)
• You’ll need to make changes to your Case Lightning page and actual record page to complete this part – this might also help

Automations

• The first requirement smacked of full automation – bear in mind to stay “modern” in your approach
• I had to put {!recipient.name} in my email template for it to work – it fusses over fields
• I started the whole of the following steps in this section with the objective of creating a macro. Luckily, the macros module was very fresh in my mind. It’s awesome once it’s all working.
• Remember to include your Submit actions
• And name it correctly!

Analytics

• As with all the reporting superbadges, it’s important to take note of how the data is to be organised and sorted.
• There’s the possibility of sorting by one column then the next – get to know the dropdown menus at the top of each column
• The report has to be a summary report. I accidentally made it a matrix, however, no matter how many times I saved and ran it, Lightning reverted it back to my original matrix report, so I had to start afresh (deleted it, switched to Classic, emptied the Recycle Bin…etc…urgh)
• I just filled my dashboard with a single chart and it seemed ok