The 17.5 Release includes a new Support Case Portal, which integrates with your existing Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Now, when your customers or partners open new Support cases, be it from your Community, your brand's social network pages, phone, or email, all of these cases are accessible (for viewing or correspondence) to your community members from a Case Portal community page.
New Features
Announcement – EOL of Private Support Manager
Starting with the Community platform 17.5 release, the Private Support feature is no longer available. It’s being replaced by the Case Portal (described below), a new component in the Community Connector for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics that enables community members to access and interact with all the support cases they have open with the brand, independent of the originating support channel. The new Case Portal is one way we enable you to unify your digital customer support experience and funnel customer engagement into the community.
Customers who have already set up a Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration with their community can now take advantage of the new Lithium Case Portal. With the new Case Portal, permitted community members can:
- Open Support Cases directly from the community.
- Correspond with Support agents on cases via threaded conversations in the community. Cases can be discussed in public and private areas of the community.
- Access and add comments to all of their open and resolved cases from a single, private community page, regardless of where that case originated.
For example, you might have a customer who opened several support cases via different channels (phone, email, Facebook, Twitter, and/or the community). The Lithium Case Portal enables your community members to access and respond to all of their cases from one place, regardless of how they were originally opened. All interactions between the Support agent and the community member are captured in threaded conversations in this area.
Note: To use the main Case Portal features, you need to be using the Connector for Salesforce package version 3.0 or greater or the Connector for Dynamics package version 1.0.17.2 or greater.
After you have the Case Portal enabled, you can set it up on your community by doing these tasks:
- Enable and configure the Case Portal in Community Admin
- Set up Case Portal user permissions
- Add the Case Portal widget to your community pages
- Set up custom columns and fields
Enable and configure the Case Portal in Community Admin
To enable and configure your Case Portal:
- Go to Community Admin > Features.
- Click Case Portal.
- Configure the following fields:
- Turn on Case Portal: Check this option to enable the Case Portal. You must already have a valid integration with Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM to use this feature.
- Allow creation of support cases from the community: Check this option to enable users to create new Support cases directly from the community. The Create Support Case button appears in both the Case Portal component and on the My Cases page. If this option is not checked, the button is not displayed.
- Number of cases to display per page in the My Cases list: Enter the number (1-100) of cases to list for each page in the My Cases list before pagination begins. By default, this is set to 20.
- Custom Columns for Case List: For instructions, see the section below entitled "Add custom columns to your Case Portal integration"
4. Click Save.
Set up Case Portal user permissions
To grant Case Portal permissions to users with a particular role:
- Go to Community Admin > Users > Permissions.
- Click Roles.
This page shows the existing roles in your community. - Click Edit next to the role you want to edit.
- For full Case Portal access, grant all permissions under Case Portal.
Note: If you also plan to use the community's message escalation features to create cases, be sure to review the permissions in the Escalation section. Learn more about community escalation options and escalation permissions. - If you want to provide more controlled permissions, adjust the Case Portal permissions (Grant or Deny, or Default) for the role as necessary. (Choosing Default leaves the permission set to the community default, which is Deny for these permissions.)
- Click Save.
The My Case Portal component
The My Case Portal component provides a link to the CRM Support Page, where the customer can find and act on support cases associated with their user account. Depending on configuration settings in Community Admin > Features > Case Portal and the user's permissions, the customer can optionally create a new case directly from the component.
If Allow creation of support cases from the community is enabled in Community Admin and the user has been granted the Create new case for Support permission, the component displays a Create Support Case button.
If the Allow creation of support cases from the community setting is not selected or the current user does not have the Create new case for Support permission, the button does not appear in the component.
You'll find the My Case Portal component under the User Profile section of the Components list in Studio > Page.
The Case Portal Page
The Case Portal page displays all Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics support cases pertaining to a member. Clicking a case opens the Case Details page for that case. Cases can be sorted by Creation Date or Last Updated Date. Members can filter by Origin, such as cases created via Facebook or Twitter, and also toggle between Open and Resolved cases.
For Support Case Account Supervisors
If you are using the Connector for Salesforce package version 3.6 or later, the Case Portal page includes an additional menu for members set up as Account Supervisors in the CRM. Supervisors see an additional Case View menu.
From this menu, Supervisors can choose to have the Case Portal page display only their cases (My Cases) or any case they have permission to view (My Organization's Cases).
Supervisor permissions are set up in the CRM.
To grant a contact access to their organization's cases:
- In the CRM, go to the contact you'd like to make a supervisor.
- Check the Is Supervisor checkbox on the contact record.
Note: The Is Supervisor option is available in the Lithium Connector for Salesforce package version 3.6 or later. - Click Save.
This setting grants this contact access to all cases associated with all contacts with the same Account as this supervisor. You can see all an account's supervisors by going to the Account and reviewing the Contacts component.
Note: You need the Connector for Salesforce package version 3.6 or later to use the Supervisor feature. If you have upgraded your package to version 3.6 from a previous version, you will need to manually add the Is Supervisor field to your page layouts.
Case Details page
The Case Details page shows details about the case and enables a user with the Read and reply to own cases permission to add comments.
New Case Page
If the Allow creation of support cases from the community setting is selected and the current user has the Create new case for Support permission, they can use the New Case Page to create a new private case directly in the community. This page essentially acts like any other message post page in the Community UI, but it is a private thread started in the Case Portal.
Add custom columns and fields to your Case Portal integration
With the 17.5 release, if you are using the Connector for Salesforce package version 3.5 or later, you can customize your Case Portal to correspond to specific fields in your CRM. Specifically, you can add (or remove):
- Columns to the Case Portal page
- Display fields to the Case Details page
- Fields to the New Case page form and Escalate Topic form
For example, you might want to display Priorities or replace the default Status field with a custom CRM Status field.
You need to contact your account team or Lithium Services for assistance with some of these customizations, as described below.
To add custom columns to your Case Portal page:
- Go to Admin > Case Portal > Custom columns for Case list.
- Enter the field names from your CRM in a comma-separated list. They must match the field names in your CRM.
- Click Save.
If you'd like to remove default columns, change the order of columns, or use Lookup type fields, please Contact your Lithium account team or Services to have them make these changes to your community server configuration.
To add display fields to your Case Details page:
Contact your Lithium account team or Services to have them added the desired fields to your community server configuration.
- List of the field labels you want to display on the page and the corresponding field names from your CRM.
- The desired order of all fields on your Case Portal detail page.
To add new form fields to the New Case form and Escalate Topic forms:
Contact your Lithium account team or Services to have them added the desired fields to your community server configuration.
- List of the field labels you want to display on the page, the corresponding field names from your CRM, and the length constraints of each field. The target CRM fields must handle the STRING data type only.
- All possible values for each field in your desired order (if it's a pick list). Values will display in a drop-down menu.
- The desired order of all fields on your form.
About Case Portal notifications
With the 17.5 release, if you are using the Connector for Salesforce package version 3.6 or later, when cases are created or updated in any way (new comment, status change, case closure), the community member receives an email indicating the change. These email notifications come directly from the CRM, not the Lithium community.
Specifically, the Salesforce email templates used are:
- Notify_customer_when_new_case_comment_is_added_with_access_html: Emails the Contact who has Case Portal access when a case comment is added. This email includes a link to the Case Portal.
- Notify_customer_when_new_case_comment_is_added_without_access: Notifies the Contact without Case Portal access when new case comment is added. This email does not include a link to the Case Portal.
- Notify_customer_on_case_status_change_without_URL: Notifies Contact on any case status change. This email does not include a link to the Case Portal.
- Notify_customer_on_case_status_change_with_URL_html: Emails Contact who has Case Portal access when case status is changed. This email includes a link to the Case Portal.
- Notify_customer_on_new_case_creation_without_URL: Emails customer when a new case is created but doesn't include a link to the case in the email.
- Notify_customer_on_new_case_creation_with_URL_html: Emails customer when community case is created and includes a link to the case in the email.
To customize your email notifications, you must edit these email templates in your CRM.
We have released Reviews feature version 3. Version 3 provides design and compatibility updates to the Reviews for Lithium Responsive, including:
- View More link works as expected
- Removed number display in star rating
- Community members name and avatar displays properly
- Comment button style updated
- Helpfulness button appears only when enabled and works as expected
- Report abuse action moved to the message menu
When moving to Reviews V3, compare any custom versions of the Reviews Message quilt (ReviewsMessage.quilt.xml) against the default version. You will likely need to reset that quilt to the out-of-the-box version and then add custom components and styling changes, as needed.
Here is the new Reviews Message quilt
API updates
Prior to 17.5, we exposed the klout_topics resource to access different topics of interest associated with a Lithium user account connected with Profile Plus. Due to changes in our Recommendation Engine, we now expose only the topics that a user has defined as a signature topic to display in their user profile and Profile Plus hovercard. As a result, we have deprecated the klout_topics resource and added the signature_topics resource.
signature_topics resource
With the signature_topics resource, you can return the ID, display name, and user who has selected the topic of interest as a signature topic.
Queries to signature_topics collection must be constrained by a user ID.
This example returns the ID and display name of signature topics for the user with ID of 1.
SELECT id, name FROM signature_topics WHERE user.id = ‘1’
user resource
You can now filter the Users collection signature topic ID.
This example returns the id, login, view_href, and href fields of users who have signature topics with the id or either 640 or 33.
SELECT id, login, view_href, href FROM users WHERE signature_topics.id IN('640','33')
We have deprecated the klout_topics field and klout_topics.id constraint from the user resource.
- We have deprecated the klout_topic resource.
- We have deprecated the klout_topics.id constraint on the user resource.
- We have deprecated the klout_topics field on the user resource
You Found It. We Fixed It.
- We have fixed the REST APIv1 issue where the message_status/set query was producing an error. (Note: if you were using a workaround in your res/input.cfg plug-in to fix this issue, you can now remove it.)
- Previously, when you had Featured Thread Sorting set to Manual under Community Admin > Content > Featured Threads > Ordering and had the Featured Threads component on one of your community pages, merging two topics and leaving a placeholder for the merged topic resulted in a page loading error on the page with the Featured Threads component. This issue has been fixed.
- We have fixed the issue where using multiple Facebook Connect buttons resulted in multiple registration dialog boxes being displayed. Now, only one registration window appears.
- Previously in the Connector for Salesforce, when an agent in Salesforce inserted a link to a Salesforce knowledge article in their postback to the community, the article was typically not accessible to the community user. Now if the linked Salesforce knowledge article is in the "published" state, clicking on the link in the postback will load the article from Salesforce into a community page. This capability requires the Connector for Salesforce package version 3.6 or later.
- Previously in the Connector for Salesforce, the user sync process might have created records in the attached CRM using data for all partially-registered community visitors (as well as data for fully-registered community members). However, since partially-registered visitors do not have verified email addresses, the data about these visitors is not considered reliable and is no longer loaded into the CRM.
- Some customers who went through a data migration see a different Members count in the Community Metrics component when the li-metric-name XML parameter is set to completed_registrations than the registered user count returned from a query like: SELECT count(*) FROM users
This was due to a bug during migration. We now provide a new value to pass to the li-metric-name parameter(completed_registrations_computed) that displays the fully-registered member count via the Community API instead of from Community Admin metrics.
Customers who see a discrepancy between the Members count in the Community Metrics component when set to "completed_registrations" and the result of the LiQL query SELECT count(*) FROM users WHERE fully_registered = true should change the value of li-metric-name from completed_registrations to completed_registrations_computed.
To check the member count returned from the API, test the LiQL query above in Studio > API Browser.
To make the change to the Community Metrics component, open the quilt where you see component in XML View and change <component id="community.widget.metrics-display" li-metric-name="completed_registrations"/> to <component id="community.widget.metrics-display" li-metric-name="completed_registrations_computed"/>. Then, click Save.
