Solutions Overview

What is a solution?

A solution is a detailed description of a customer issue coupled with repeatable steps to resolve the issue.

Why use solutions?

Solutions can streamline the communication of common case resolutions, improving support agent productivity and response time to customers.

Example

ABC Software Company sells an application for Windows and Mac computers.  Version 5.11 for PC was released last month.  A bug was discovered in this release, where the file menu occasionally does not display correctly.

The support staff are aware of the bug, and the development team have since released Version 5.12 which fixes the bug.  However, the customer service team regularly responds to customer inquiries about the file menu.

To streamline the communication process to customers experiencing this issue, a solution has been created outlining the steps for resolution:

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When a customer service rep works a case, they can find and attach relevant solutions to the case:

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Email Templates

The solutions attached to the case can be referenced via email templates and sent to the customer:

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This allows your support agents to quickly and effectively communicate potential solutions to the case submitter:

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Closing cases

When closing cases, users can submit new solutions for review.

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Solution Permissions

Solutions do not use sharing rules.  Instead, object-level security (as determined by the user’s profile and permission sets) and the “Manage Published Solutions” privilege (see below) determine what access the user has to solutions.

Each solution status can be optionally marked as “Reviewed”.  To edit/delete solutions in a “Reviewed” status, the user must have the “Manage Published Solutions” privilege.

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Other Solution Features

Solution Categories

Create a solution category tree (navigate to Setup –> Customize –> Solutions –> Solution Categories):

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Solutions can be associated with multiple categories:

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Users can browse solutions and search for solutions by categories.

HTML Solutions

Once enabled, HTML solutions cannot be disabled.  This will allow your organization to use rich text fields (formatting, images, etc.) within solutions.

Public & Portal Solutions

Solutions can be published to your company website via iframe (Setup -> Self-Service –> Public Solutions), or exposed through self-service or customer portals.

Multilingual Solutions

When enabled, solutions can be translated into multiple languages.

 

15 thoughts on “Solutions Overview”

  1. John, can you please outline the exact steps to send solutions attached to the case to the customer via email templates? I’m completely lost in this section and can’t seem to find a way to do it in my Summer ’16 developer edition.

  2. Jim, can you please outline the exact steps to send solutions attached to the case to the customer via email templates? I’m completely lost in this section and can’t seem to find a way to do it in my Summer ’16 developer edition.

  5. Just confirming: Using Solutions (i.e., creating and then attaching Solutions to a Case) counts against Data storage limits while attaching files counts again File storage limits. (We don’t use Solutions because we have support documents stored elsewhere that we sometimes attach to Cases.)

    Which begs another question (kind of): When a file has been uploaded to a Case once, a subsequent attachment of that same file to other Cases doesn’t increase the file storage usage?

  7. Hi John,
    A question from exam.
    Where to enable multilingual solutions? (select 2 answers)
    I could remember only one option which is 1. solution settings.
    Where could be the other place on Salesforce platform to enable it?

    1. Language settings under company profile – you would need to enable the language there. And use the translation workbench to translate picklist values and field labels. Tough Q, especially considering that solutions is being phased out by knowledge.

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