Entitlements management
Entitlement management lets you and your support agents:
- Verify if your customers are eligible for support
- Create and maintain service contracts for your customers
- Specify unique service levels for each customer, such as first response and resolution times
- Enforce service levels with time-dependent, automated processes that instruct agents how to resolve cases
- http://www.infallibletechie.com/2013/06/entitlement-management-in-salesforce.html
Entitlement Management Features
Entitlement management includes the following features to help you provide the correct service levels to your customers:
Verifying Entitlements
Support agents can verify that customers are eligible for support before creating cases for them. Here’s an example of how support agents use entitlements:
- A customer calls support.
- A support agent searches for the caller’s account, contact, asset, or service contract.
- The agent verifies there’s an active entitlement on the Entitlements related list.
- The agents creates a case from the entitlement.
Defining Service Levels
Users can create and maintain service contracts that represent different kinds of customer support, such as warranties, subscriptions, or maintenance agreements. Each service contract can include the specific products covered under the agreement.
Enforcing Service Levels
You can add time-dependent processes to entitlements that specify the actions, or milestones, your support team must take when service levels on cases are near violation, violated, or successfully completed.
Providing Portal Access
You can add entitlement management to a Customer Portal or partner portal so that portal users can view their service contracts and entitlements, and create cases with the correct entitlements.
Reporting on Entitlements and Service Levels
Administrators can use custom report types to define report criteria from which users can run and create reports on entitlements and service contracts.
https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=entitleents_setting_up_entitlement_management.htm&language=en_US/
Notes and Limitations
- You can create up to 1000 entitlement processes and include up to ten milestones in each entitlement process.
- You can’t update or delete milestone actions on a process after it’s activated and applied to a case.
- You can only use contract line items if your organization uses products.
- You can’t create list views for contract line items..
- Entitlement processes only apply to cases with assigned entitlements.
- You can’t share entitlements. If an entitlement has an account, its sharing is inherited from account sharing.
- You can’t share contract line items. Sharing for contract line items is inherited from service contract sharing. For example, users with the “Read” permission on service contracts inherit the “Read” permission on contract line items.
- If you want your customers or partners to access their entitlements or service contracts, add entitlements or service contracts to your portals.
Don’t add the following entitlement process fields to case page layouts for portal users because portal users shouldn’t access information related to your internal support processes: Entitlement Process Start Time, Entitlement Process End Time, Stopped, and Stopped Since.
- If you use thePer Incident field to limit the number of cases entitlements support, we recommend setting field-level security on the Cases Per Incident and Remaining Cases fields to read-only for users who shouldn’t modify per incident support.
- Entitlements don’t automatically apply to cases created with Web-to-Case or Email-to-Case. If needed, you can add entitlements to these features usingApex
- You can’t add milestones to cases without using entitlement processes. Entitlement processes apply milestones to cases.
- Merge fields for entitlements on cases aren’t supported. For example, if you add theEntitlement Name {!Case.Entitlement} merge field to an email template, the field is not populated on the template.
How Cases Move Through Entitlement Processes
- A support agent adds an entitlement with an entitlement process to a case.
- The case enters the process based on its creation date or a custom date/time field. A custom date/time field lets users edit a date on the case to trigger when it enters the process.
- Salesforceassigns milestones with matching criteria to the case. For example, if a milestone’s criteria is Priority equals High, and a case has a Priority of High, Salesforce assigns it to the Priority equals High milestone.
A case associates with one milestone at a time; it can associate with many milestones as it moves through the process.
- Milestone actions determine when and if warning, violation, or success workflow actions fire for the case.
- A support agent updates the case to complete a milestone action.
- After a case is updated, it cycles through the entitlement process and initiates any milestones that match its criteria.
- The case exits the process based on custom criteria or when it’s closed.
Best Practices
- Set up lookup filters on cases to restrict the entitlements-related items returned. For example, when portal users create a case and select theEntitlement Name field, they can choose only entitlements registered to their account or contact.
- UseApex code to automatically mark milestones as Completed on cases that match unique criteria. For example, you can create an Apex trigger on EmailMessage that marks a first response milestone as Completed on cases when support reps send email from cases.
- Use the Mass Transfer Tool to transfer multiple service contracts from one user to another.
- Customize the values for theType field on entitlements to match the types of entitlements your team provides or sells, such as Web support or online training.
- Add theStatus Icon field to entitlements, service contracts, and contract line items page layouts so that users can easily see one of these three statuses:
- Active
- Expired
- Inactive
Additionally, you can add fields to page layouts.
- Use sharing rules to give users access to service contracts they don’t own; you can’t extend the organization-wide default sharing model for service contracts.
- If you use products, set up entitlement templates to predefine terms of support that users can add to products.
- Set up entitlement processes to enforce all the steps that your support team must complete to resolve cases.
- If you’re not using entitlement versioning, we recommend activating entitlement processesafter you’ve added milestone actions to them. This is because you can’t update or delete milestone actions on a process after it’s activated and applied to a case. We recommend creating new entitlement processes to replace existing, active ones applied to cases.
- If you’re using entitlement versioning, you can update existing entitlement processes, even when they’re assigned to active entitlements and cases.
- You can create up to 1000 entitlement processes and include up to ten milestones in each entitlement process.com for information on increasing the number of entitlement processes and milestones.
- Use custom report types to define report criteria from which users can run and create reports on entitlements and service contracts.
- You can view cases with milestones by creating case list views that filter on milestone fields.
- Use the entitlement process queue to view or cancel active entitlement process actions.
- You can add validation rules to case milestones so that when users update a milestone on a case, it must meet the standards you specify before they can save it. For example, you can create a validation rule that ensures users select milestone completion dates that occur after case creation dates.
To begin adding validation rules for case milestones, from Setup, click Customize | Cases | Case Milestones | Validation Rules.
Entitlement Model
Your Goal | Entitlement Model | Use If |
Support agents verify that contacts or accounts are eligible for customer support before they create cases | Entitlements Only | § There’s no need to manage your customers’ entitlements as part of a service contract§ Your entitlements don’t have a renewal process§ Entitlements aren’t purchased by your customers; they’re bundled with products (warranties)§ Your customers’ entitlements are short term and managed independently of each other |
Support agents verify that a contact is eligible for support based on a service contract | Service Contracts with Entitlements | § Entitlements are purchased and managed separately from the products they cover and are part of a service contract§ Your customers’ entitlements are renewed at a contract level§ You use Salesforce for customer support but not necessarily for service contract management |
Support agents verify that a contact is eligible for support based on line items in a service contract | Service Contract with Contract Line Items and Entitlements | § You use Salesforce for customer support and to manage your customers’ service contracts§ Your support team manages service contract transactions, such as transfers, mergers, and renewals§ Warranties, subscriptions, or other support products appear as line items on your sales orders and map to one or more entitlements§ Entitlements are created and updated through an integration with your order management system |
Entitlement Versioning
Entitlement versioning lets you make changes to existing entitlement processes, even if they’re assigned to active entitlements and cases. This can be useful if the business rules behind your entitlement processes change, for example, or if you need to create multiple versions of the same entitlement process that have only minor differences.
- On new versions of entitlement processes that are currently in use, you can add new milestones, but can’t edit existing ones.
- On new versions of processes that aren’t currently in use, you can both add new milestones and edit existing ones.
- Once you’ve created a new version of an entitlement process, you can choose to apply it to all entitlements and cases assigned to the previously used version, or only to new entitlements and cases.
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