Automatic Case Creation from Community Forums using SLA
With the web portal capabilities in CRM 2016 Spring Wave, you can extend CRM to the web to deliver exceptional customer service and increase customer engagement and satisfaction. With the community portal, you can enable peer-to-peer interactions between experts in the community, subject matter experts within an organization, and internal and external users. Communities organically grow the catalog of available knowledge from knowledge base articles, forums, and blogs.
Integration with Dynamics CRM provides the flexibility to automate business processes based on information originating from web portal that gets tracked in CRM. For example, you can use the SLA functionality to enable automated case creation in CRM if a forum thread has not been answered for 10 days (or if the forum thread size increases beyond a certain limit while it is still unanswered). This can help ensure that you are addressing all customer queries wherein a peer-to-peer interaction is unable to resolve it in a timely way.
Following are the steps using which you can enable this scenario:
Step 1: Enable Forum Thread entity for SLA
Navigate to Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System, and then enable the flag “Enable for SLA” on the Forum Thread entity as shown in the below screenshot.
Step 2: Create SLA KPI
Before creating SLA for a custom entity, you must ensure that you have created SLA KPI(s) for the custom entity. This can be done by creating a look up field with target record type set to SLA KPI Instance entity.
Create a new lookup field “Forum Thread Answered (SLA KPI)” (with target record type set to SLA KPI Instance) on the Forum Thread entity after navigating to Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System. This SLA KPI will be used to ensure that a forum thread gets answered on time. You may take a look at the below screenshot for reference.
Step 3: Mark Forum Thread and Form Thread Type entity fields as Searchable
Mark the field “Answered?” of entity “Forum Thread” as searchable as shown in the below screenshot.
Mark the field “Requires Answer” of entity “Forum Thread Type” as searchable as shown in the below screenshot.
Step 4: Create a field to check case creation on Forum Thread
Create a new lookup field “Case Created?” with type set to “Two Options” as shown in the below screenshot. This field can be used to check if a case was already created for a forum thread (to avoid creating duplicate records).
Step 5: Create a field to track associated forum thread on case
Create a new lookup field “Forum Thread” with Target Record Type set to “Forum Thread” as shown in the below screenshot. This is used to set the forum thread reference on the case that got created. You must publish customizations after you create this field.
Note: You can optionally use create a quick view form on forum thread entity, and show more information from the forum thread on the case form using this quick view form.
Step 6: Create an SLA
Navigate to Settings -> Service Management -> Service Level Agreements, and click on New to create a new SLA on Forum Thread entity.
Specify the general SLA information as in the screenshot below, and Save the record.
Create a new SLA Item in the SLA Details section to create a case if the post count in a forum thread (that requires an answer) exceeds or is equal to 5 posts, and a case hasn’t been created already.
You can use the following Applicable When condition for this:
Set the success criteria to check if the forum thread has been marked as answered.
Ensure that the failure after and warn after are set to 0 minutes. This will ensure that the case gets created as soon as the post count reaches 5.
Add a failure action to create a new case. Update the case title, customer, description, forum thread reference using dynamics values as shown below.
Add another failure action to update the forum thread record to set the field “Case Created?” to Yes. This will ensure that no multiple cases get created for the same forum thread using this SLA (when it gets re-evaluated).
You can add more failure actions e.g. Send an Email to the Community Manager regarding the case that gets created, etc.
From the SLA record form, add another SLA Item to create a case if a forum thread (that requires an answer) remains unanswered for 10 days.
You can use the following Applicable When condition for this:
Set the success criteria to check if the forum thread has been marked as answered.
Ensure that the failure after is set to 10 days. This will ensure that the case gets created only if the forum thread has not been marked as answered for 10 days after it got created. You can set warn after to 0 minutes.
Add failure actions as specified for the earlier created SLA Item.
Save the SLA record, and activate it. Make sure that you click on Set as Default to ensure that the SLA gets applied to all forum threads that get created in the organization.
This completes the setup of this scenario wherein case creation can be automated using SLA if forum threads do not get answered on time, or if the forum thread size increases beyond a certain limit.
Cheers!
Hemant Raj
