Entitlement Management
Entitlement Management in Salesforce is the process of configuring an Entitlement and Milestone process that ensures proper case resolution steps and adherance to SLA’s with customers.
Components of Entitlement Management
Entitlement Process
The Entitlement Process is the high level configuration that is the basis for Entitlement Management. You can determine when a record enters the process (based on a date or other criteria), when it exits the process (criteria based as well) and business hours for your reps to work the case. These help align to SLA agreements and also set expectations for the customer to the reps working hours.
Entitlement Settings
Entitlement Settings allow you to enable Entitlement Versioning, add lookup filters based on Entitlement criteria, add Milestone feed items, Milestone time settings and Milestone trackers.
Entitlement Templates
Entitlement Templates allow you to create templates that can automatically be applied to cases when created by customers. This can help quickly align support to different models like Standard or Premium support.
Milestones
Milestones are “steps” to the Entitlement Process that track duration and time to complete. They automatically update as the agent moves the case through its process.
How to Utilize Entitlement Management in Salesforce
Similar to Approval Process, the Entitlement Process is configured from the Setup menu. Here Admins can define varying Entitlement Processes and ensure they hold the business accountable to the SLA’s they have in place with their customers.
To get started an Entitlement Process must first be created, multiple processes can be created if you have varying levels of support, Standard and Premium for example. The entitlement process will dictate when a case enters and exits the process, generally based on a created date or some other date field for entry, and then a status update or action to a Case for it to exit the process.
Within the process, you can define the support hours, a team who works from 8am-5pm Eastern for example, as well as the duration of the Entitlement process (in minutes).
After the process is created, Milestones can then be created or added to it. As with approvals, you can have multiple milestones associated to a single Entitlement Process.
Here you can define steps, like Initial Response time, Follow Up time or Escalation and Case Closure.
Milestones can have time triggers and duration, for example, an Initial Response milestone can be configured to begin counting down as soon as the Case is created, and a duration (in minutes) to when it should be resolved by.
Within the milestone you can create actions for success, warnings if the milestone isn’t complete and you need to take action (escalate the case) and finally actions when you are in Violation of the SLA timeline.
With Milestones configured and actions in place, the Milestones should be added to the Entitlement Process in the correct order.
From here you can use entitlement settings to display milestones in the chatter feed, change the time to display in total duration instead of business hours if wanted and enable “Stopping” milestones.
This is useful if you are waiting on customer response and you can then pause the Milestone. This allows you to see how long you have been waiting on the customer as well as the milestone duration itself, and make decisions about non-response situations.
As mentioned earlier, Entitlement Templates can also be created. These allow for efficiencies and consistency in adherence to the Entitlement Process. Templates help in defining Entitlements, allowing you to use a template instead of creating each Entitlement from scratch and having to configure each step and milestone(s).
For companies that have SLA’s, Entitlement Management is extremely beneficial to the success of the platform. It ensures proper governance and response times, customer satisfaction and helps streamline support processes.
Who is Impacted?
Admins
Admins are responsible for their Orgs Entitlement Process and should ensure they have the correct processes in place for governance, legal, finance etc.
End User
Entitlements help ensure reps are servicing the customers to their contractual obligations and that cases aren’t stagnating/are prioritized and resolved efficiently.
Management
Management should lean into the design process of Entitlement Management to ensure they don’t breach contract with customers/are servicing them as expected.