The digital world we live in today is prone to service disruptions. There are instances when corrupt data or faulty code causes servers to malfunction. A disruption in operations can result in downtime, productivity loss, and data loss. Whenever incidents like this occur in your organization, you want to figure out what went wrong, standardize operations, and reduce downtime.  

In these situations, Salesforce Service Cloud, Incident Management allows you to do all of these things. As a result of the multiple benefits of incident management, organizations are increasingly taking it seriously. 

The Salesforce Service Cloud solution, Incident Management, allows your team to ensure your business meets customer expectations by keeping track of major disruption and delegating tasks to the appropriate experts. IT agents and end-users communicate effectively through a competent Incident management process. In this post, we will go through step by step process of incident management in salesforce:

How does Salesforce incident management work?

Salesforce service cloud encompasses Incident management techniques whose primary goal is to ensure a smooth and seamless operation with minimal or minimal downtime. Salesforce incident management helps IT operations and DevOps teams to take steps in unplanned events, record, investigate, and resolve outages and service interruptions. 

An ITIL incident management workflow reduces downtime from incidents and minimizes their impact on employees’ productivity by restoring the service to its normal operations.

Benefits of Salesforce Incident Management:

The ITIL Incident Management framework enables organizations to track major disruptions, analyze the causes, make service operations more efficient, and assign tasks to appropriate experts to minimize downtime. It includes the following benefits:

• Centralizing tracking and management of incidents for response teams and agents.
• The unified console allows you to keep track of cases, incidents, and customers.
• A proactive approach to identifying and responding to incidents.
• Maintain service level agreements (SLAs).

Step By Step Guide To Incident Management In Salesforce

We will discuss salesforce incident management in detail with their steps to create incidents, create problems, linking incident problems. The following points will be discussed:

1. Enable incident management
2. Giving access to incident management to users
3. Creating an incident
4. Logging the problem
5. Linking incident with problem

Step 1: Enable Incident Management on Salesforce

The Salesforce service cloud feature Incident Management is automatically facilitated for all organizations formed after the Winter ’22 release. Otherwise, it can be enabled in the setup area in Salesforce.  Here are the steps to enable Salesforce incident management on the existing salesforce.

• Search Incident Management inside the Quick Find box under Setup, and afterward select Incident Management.
• Activate Incident Management.

Step 2: Allow Users to Access Salesforce Incident Management

To enable Salesforce Incident Management features, users must be granted access to problems, incidents, or change requests.

• Navigate to Setup, and choose the profiles from the Quick find option to grant authorization for incident management. Then click Edit
• Make sure the problem, incident, and change request tabs are set to the Default On setting.
• Select the level of access you want the user profile to have for the Incident object under Standard Object Permissions. 
• The user profile permissions include creating, editing, reading, and deleting incidents.
• Repeat this step for the other two incident objects in Incident Management.
• If necessary, repeat the process for the other profiles.

Step 3: Creating an Incident

Create an incident management record for tracking and identifying a large disruption. The best use of incidents is when they are necessary to resolve widespread customer issues requiring team collaboration.

• Click on the apps tab then search service console on the search bar.
• Go to cases and click on incidents.
• Click on New Fill in the necessary information and save.

Step 4: Logging the Problem

As you begin to investigate the incident, record the problems that are identified as the root cause. Here are the steps to follow:

• Go to incidents on the search console.
• Select problems then click New.
• Fill in the necessary details.
• Select Status as new then gives priority to the problem as(Critical, moderate, high, low).
• Pick urgency level (High, Medium, or low).
• Click Save.

Step 5: Linking the problem with incident

• Go to the incident and click edit.
• Update the resolution summary.
• Click the related tab then change the status to the problem created.
• Click save and next go to the problem incident relationship option, click new, and choose the relationship type and save.

Once you have created a problem and linked it with the incident, you can collaborate with stakeholders to fix it.

In case there were any issues left to be resolved, what would be the next steps to take on Salesforce incident management:

Step 1: Creating a change request

After the management team has identified and resolved the issue, you can utilize change requests for grant service teams to perform the required procedures and assure that problem or event does not reoccur. Here are steps to create a change request for a problem:

• Navigate to the problem and select change request.
• Click New.
• Fill in the mandatory details.
• Select status, priority, impact, and risk level from a picklist.
• Click Save.

Step 2: Link the change request with the incident ticket

• Select incident, and navigate to the related tab.
• Go to change request-related issue and Click New.
• Select change relation type as per the requirements.
• Click Save.

Step 3: Link the change request with the problem ticket

• Select the problem ticket tab, and navigate to the related tab.
• Go to change request-related issue and Click New.
• Select change relation type as per the requirements.
• Click Save.

Once you have created a problem and linked it with the incident, you can collaborate with stakeholders to fix it. Be sure to document the alterations and plan their implementation with a change request.

Final Thought

So, by implementing Salesforce incident management, incidents will be less likely to impact activities, resulting in improved performance. Additionally, it will help prevent the appearance of new incidents by providing faster detections and resolutions. It further allows companies to better utilize their resources as per the type of event, whether human, physical, or intangible.

At isyncSF, We have a team of ITIL and ITSM that can handle incidents that occur when something disrupts service or instability of service quality, requiring an immediate response.