Agent Alerts for a better and safer customer experience

I recently read a story about a travel agent who booked a high dollar Pacific island trip while failing to notice that all flights on the airline he was booking had been canceled, then he went about his life. Six months later the tourists arrived at the airport for a flight that would never existed and they were obviously furious when they missed their entire vacation. Justifiably, the customers complained to the travel agency which covered the costs for new first class flights and an all-inclusive resort for the customers. They promptly fired the agent for his costly mistake.

The agent may have been an incredible asset to the agency had he not lost his job, and what’s more is that the real issue still exists for the agency. The costly risk of missing critical information or a missed opportunity can however be mitigated by properly highlighting information to your sales and service agents so they have the proper tools to make their jobs easier and the experience for the customer to be as strong as it can be.

To solve this issue, we created a tool that can display important messages for your agents. This tool is easily configurable by any administrator with a setup interface that works similarly to workflow and validation rules that they’re already accustomed to. Out of the box, alerts can be placed on Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities but can be created for any object with a simple Visualforce page that can be created for any object you wish just by copying and pasting a few lines with no development experience needed.

Agent Alerts is now available on the Salesforce® AppExchange here.

Configuration Experience

Here you can see that the administrator has created an alert to show a list of open opportunities that have a value of less than $500.

Client Alert Configuration Screenshot

Agent Experience

Now that the alert has been created, when the agent is viewing the account, they can see from the related list that there are 4 opportunities, and the alert is highlighting that there are two open opportunities with an amount less than $500 and they can bring this up in the conversation with the client or send a reminder to sales that this account might need attention.

Client Alert Display Screenshot

Salesforce API Python Library

Organizations with complex installations of Salesforce often find themselves in need of hosting Salesforce application logic externally. To that end, we have created a Python library to help ease the burden you might be feeling internally. Why might you want to do this?

  • Do you have logic that does not need to be run instantaneously with triggers but still needs to be run frequently but you are out of scheduled classes and don’t want to hack something together to make it work? e.g. You have a dozen jobs you want to run hourly?
  • Do you need to make web service callouts but the challenges imposed by Salesforce are too cumbersome? e.g. You are working with Google or some other API where you have a limit and cannot make callouts to them more than once per second.
  • Do you want to create other tools that run on an ad hoc basis? e.g. You want a tool that can more easily migrate data among environments to make testing easier.
  • Do you have local databases on a domain that doesn’t have any external web service access? e.g. You need a job that can connect to both Salesforce and a database to help update those records with data that isn’t already stored in Salesforce.

These are just a few issues you may have already encountered or are running into now. Hopefully this framework can help in current state. If not, we will continue to work on it and add new features.

You can find PySalesforce here.