Omni-channel Considerations

Omni-Channel in Salesforce is one of the awesome point-and-click feature which saves lots of coding and maintenance for us, Salesforce Dev/Admins. The blog is inspired by my session at Salesforce Dev Group, Bangalore. You can check out the slides I used during the session here.

This article concentrates on Considerations or Limitations, not about setting up or anything else. I have suggested and implemented in couple of projects for my clients, mainly because the considerations were not roadblocks. Considering how much time it would take to implement using custom solution, these considerations were ignorable for me. Also Spring'17 release had great feature announced - Omni-Channel Supervisor Tab, which also helped in reducing the effort required for creating multiple reports and dashboards (the feature does much more than that).

Image credit - Summer'15 Release Notes

If you are not familiar with Omni-Channel, NOW is the time. Learn more about it from the best place to learn Salesforce - Trailhead - there is a module for this. I highly recommend completing the module and practicing it for better understanding. Trust me it is very easy.

For step-by-step instructions and deep-dive, please check the Help Article.

Now… Assuming you know about Omni-Channel, let me come to the agenda of the blog - Considerations. I have listed them below. Please note that these are applicable as on today, 7 April 2017 (you know the speed of Salesforce, they would have added the feature while you are reading this).

• Deployment - This is probably the biggest consideration. You cannot deploy the related configs using Change Set or Eclipse; I am sure even ANT Migration doesn't support. What does this means is that, you have to manually create the settings/configs in the org.
• Salesforce Console - Omni-Channel doesn’t work with normal Salesforce pages. To work with Omni-Channel you need to have a Console app created. You might need to buy Salesforce Console as add-on feature if your edition doesn’t include it.
• CTI Support - Omni-Channel cannot assign the cases originating from Phone/CTI. It means that in the console you will have 2 component - one for Omni-Channel and another for CTI/SoftPhone. Slight inconvenience, I know :)
• Capacity - There are 2 considerations:
• Work Item (a case, lead, etc.) is considered to be closed when the tab is closed NOT when the Case is closed (Status=Closed). When the agent closes the tab, his/her overall load is reduced, so they would be assigned with new work item.
• The overall capacity or availability of the agent is calculated based on the work items that were assigned through Omni-Channel. In other words, if a case was assigned to an agent through a Trigger/Flow Definition/Workflow Rule, Omni-Channel will not adjust the overall capacity since it did not assign. Did you say, selfish? Currently, true!
• Supported objects - Omni-Channel is applicable to all the objects which can have Queues. So Account or Opportunity, for example, cannot be routed using Omni-Channel.
• Live Agent - There are number of differences how Live Agent handles the work item vs Omni-Channel. Please glance through the help article for details.
• SOAP API - Oh yes, this is kind of positive consideration. You can expand the Omni-Channel's capabilities using the SOAP API. Check out the Omni-Channel Developer's Guide.

One of the best way to check the limitation is to check the ideas. I myself have posted couple of ideas, here, here.

These are the various considerations that I have come across while implementing Omni-Channel. It will be great if you can comment on other considerations that I have missed.

As always, suggestions/feedback are most welcome.