Address Disruptions and Build Customer Trust

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain the value of Incident Management.
Describe how Incident Management helps you resolve incidents faster.

What Is Incident Management?

In today’s digital world, service disruptions are inevitable. Web outages occur. Code changes or corrupt data bring down servers. Severe weather causes power outages or delivery delays. When service incidents like these happen to your business, you need to analyze the cause, streamline service operations, and minimize downtime. Track this process with Incident Management from Service Cloud.

Incident Management is a Service Cloud solution that helps your teams track large-scale disruptions and delegate tasks to the right experts to ensure your business delivers on customer expectations. With built-in fields, page layouts, and best practices, Incident Management helps your service teams respond to any disruption and keep customers informed. Plus, with release management features, your team can implement changes to prevent the problems from happening again.

Incident Management is available to you right out of the box. With the Service Cloud license, you’re just a few clicks away from restoring services faster and keeping customers in the know.

To see Incident Management, watch this video.

Do You Need Incident Management?

How your company responds to a disruption can make or break your brand. Fast resolution is good, but how you communicate and manage the customer experience during a service disruption is equally important. Turning a disruption into a positive experience can strengthen customer loyalty. Does your business have the tools it needs to do the following?

Proactively identify and address incidents.
Find the right experts and collaborate in real time.
Centralize communications to keep internal stakeholders and customers informed.
Provide agents and response teams a centralized place to track and manage the incident.

Service agents may not have the data they need to provide answers at the right time during a disruption. And service ops teams may not have the framework to address incidents quickly. An incident management solution changes that. Here’s how.

A unified console where incident, customer, and case data is easy to find.
Machine learning and no-code workflows to automate incident detection and response.
Slack integration to bring in the right internal and external experts to diagnose the root cause.
Broadcasts to update customers across their preferred channels and to meet service level agreements (SLAs).

Incident Management includes a number of tools to streamline service during a disruption. Let’s check them out.

How Incident Management Streamlines Service Incidents

Incident Management gives your service teams the tools and workflows they need to provide greater visibility and faster responses to disruptions. Here’s how.

Incident Management Objects & Records	Service Step	Tools & Capabilities
Incident Create an incident record to track and identify the disruption impacting a large number of customers.	Identify the issue.	Simplify service visibility. Allow service and ops teams to work together with a unified workspace—the Service Console—so everyone has visibility into incident, case, and customer data. Proactively address disruptions. Monitor spikes in cases and external systems to identify issues before impacts occur. Then use AI and automated workflows to trigger incident creation and internal notifications.
	Create a plan.	Assemble a team of experts. Use Expert Finder to add the right people to the incident to help identify the cause and resolution, and surface Knowledge articles for known errors or workarounds. Identify impacted customers. Automatically classify and route existing and incoming cases to an incident queue so you can track impacted customers and auto-respond to them.
	Create a plan.
Problem Create a problem record where managers and experts collaborate on root cause analysis.	Investigate the problem.	Effectively swarm on incidents with Slack. Instantly connect the right experts across internal and external teams with native Slack integration in the Service Console. Broadcast workarounds and root cause resolution. Post real-time updates and troubleshooting attempts on Slack, and push information to other channels—like email, messaging, mobile apps, and self-service portals—to keep all stakeholders informed, including internal teams, customers, vendors, and partners.
Change Request After the root cause is identified, create a change or release request record to deploy the fix and resolve the issue.	Implement the solution.	Document and deploy the fix. Capture the steps to implement the resolution from Slack and get the right approvals to deploy the fix. Dispatch mobile workers with Field Service. Schedule field service workers for any resolutions required off-site or at customer locations.
	Continuously learn.	Act on your findings. Update teams as to what was fixed and how to prevent similar issues from happening again. Automatically close all related incidents, problems, and cases, and notify impacted customers that the issue has been resolved. Publish the resolution across channels. Share Knowledge articles about the incident and its resolution on any of your service channels, such as email, messaging, mobile apps, and self-service portals.

Access to Incident Management

If you’re a Service Cloud customer, you can access Incident Management. To get started, enter Incident Management in Setup, and turn the toggle to On. In orgs created in Winter ’22 or later, Incident Management is turned on by default.

Incident Management Setup screen with toggle switched to On.

Get ready to handle service disruptions like a pro.

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