Salesforce integration basics
Ticketing systems and CRM systems should be perfect partners. They are complementing each other and are quite different in many aspects: The fast, robust and flexible ticketing system should work like a firewall, catching the vast number of daily inquiries, emails, sms and web contacts, rooting them, assigning priorities and providing an intended finish times to the tickets.
Not all, but some cases need to be kept documented in the CRM, showing which agent communicated with which customer about what concern, uploading documents etc.
It's often helpful to identify the customer by his email address or caller id and to use his customer profile for adequate rooting of his case.
Salesforce offers a great programming interface which we have integrated seaminglessly into todo4teams. It gives full access to all business objects in Salesforce, e.g. searching, updating and creating all kinds of records. 'Records' here include the standard Salesforce objects like Account, Lead, Note etc. as well as all of your custom record types.
So, how to connect todo4teams to Salesforce in practice?
- Based on your company's Salesforce API definition we will compile a Java module and add it to your todo4teams appliance (in less than an hour), that handles the Salesforce sessions and offers common funtions to deal with Salesforce objects. Custom funtions can be added with minimum effort.
- Set the credentials of a Salesforce API user in the todo4teams server settings.
- Use the modules' functions in your script code, see below for an example.
Example: Let's say the costumers Salesforce ID is already known in the workflow and an agent now finishes a service request which is worth being documented as note in Salesforce.
An action object SFCreateNoteAction is created in the end action script in todo4teams, the note's parent id (here the customers' account id), a note title and the details are written into a parameter object and the action is executed:
var noteParams = java.lang.reflect.Array.newInstance(java.lang.String, 3);
noteParams[0]=parentId;
noteParams[1]="Hotline contact";
noteParams[2]="Comment: \n"+task.doneComment
+"\nAgent: (internal):"
+actionUser.firstname + " "
+actionUser.lastname;
var noteAction = new com.proxemo.force.base.action.SFCreateNoteAction();
noteAction.execute(noteParams);
That's all. When a ticket is closed in todo4teams you will see such notes in Salesforce within the same second.
Actions like SFGetContactsByEmailAction, SFCreateTaskAction, SFCreateAttachmentAction and many others are ready to use their names will tell you what they do.