Customer happiness is a key success factor in CRM. If your customers are not satisfied with the support they are receiving, they may give your services and products a bad review, and that's not good for business.

Even if a customer has a problem with a product or service, being able to solve the issue quickly changes the customer's perception of the issue; they know that the business' support has prioritized them and that the issue will be fixed soon.

While multi-channels give the customer the freedom to choose their preferred channel (web, SMS, phone, chat, a email), Omni-Channel featured services allow agents to be delivered to the most important cases from all the channels. That's why we say that the Omni-Channel is an agent-facing feature.

The following diagram shows how Omni-Channel works:

Here's how it works:

1. Requests come from multiple channels.
2. Work items are created (cases, leads, chats, incoming calls, and more).
3. Work items are assigned to queues or skills.
4. The Omni-Channel engine routes the work items to the proper agents, who may be awaiting in a specific queue that corresponds to their skill set.

The cool thing about Omni-Channel is that agents don't have to pick their work items anymore because the Omni-Channel engine decides what they can handle automatically. This is a great improvement in call center efficiency.

To enable Omni-Channel with default values, go to the Service app from the App Launcher, click on the Setup icon, and then click on Service Setup. From here, go to the Recommended Setup section, click on View All, and look for Omni-Channel Setup.

The wizard will ask for the following information:

• A queue name to handle the work items and the agents to be added (depending on the available Service Cloud licenses)
• The work item's cost (or size) and total capacity for each agent (how many work items they can handle concurrently)

Let's go over what this flow does in the background:

1. Enables Omni-Channel (Setup | Omni-Channel Settings).
2. Creates a Service channel for cases (Setup | Service Channels), which states which object should be routed.
3. Creates presence statuses for the agent (Setup | Presence Statuses), which state whether users are online or not.
4. Assigns presence statuses to users (using the Omni Setup Flow permission set).
5. Adds the Omni-Channel utility to the standard Service Console (this is the console utility where agents accept incoming work items).

If you open the Service Console using the App Launcher, you will see something similar to the following screenshot:

By changing the presence to Available - Case, our user is now ready to accept incoming work items. If we want to add more users to the high-priority cases queue, go to Setup | Queues | High-Priority Cases and add the required users.

In the Omni-Channel setup flow, we set the following:

• Work item size to 5
• Agent capacity to 10

This tells Omni-Channel that, given an agent's capacity to handle work items (10 is just a number; we could have put 100, 1,000, or anything else), a single work item (1 case, in our scenario) consumes 5 unit of capacity.

These values are stored in the Routing Configuration (go to Setup | Routing Configuration; this holds the work item's size) and Presence Configuration (go to Setup | Presence Configurations; this holds the agent's total capacity).

There is one more thing you need to know about routing decisions: the Routing Configuration holds the Routing Model and Priority fields. Let's go over these now:

• Priority (an integer number, where 1 means higher priority) tells Omni-Channel which work items should have priority in routing (a chat may have higher priority than cases because we have a customer that is waiting for an agent's response).
• Routing Model can be set to Least Active or Most Available; that is, routing is made to the agent with the least amount of open work or to the agent with the least amount of work item capacity compared to open work items.

What happens when a new work item joins the queue? Agent Francesca has just started work (she arrives to work early; she's all alone in her company's big open space) and activated the online presence status so that she's ready to receive new work items. At this time, she has a full capacity of 10.

A new work item comes in and she is notified about the new item in the queue. She takes charge of the new case. At this time, she has received a size 5 work item, so her total capacity is now 5 (if the case is closed, she'll have a capacity of 10 once more).

Then, another case joins the queue; she's notified of this and she accepts it. Her capacity is now 0, which means she cannot receive work items until her capacity has been reduced.

If another work item comes in, she won't be notified about it, and Omni-Channel will try to notify another agent or wait until Francesca has closed at least one of her cases.

To try this out, go back to the Service Console app, click on Cases, and then click the New button to create a new case. Put in whatever information you want and click Save. You'll notice that nothing happens; why? This is because our user already owns the record.

Click the Change Owner case button and move the case's ownership to our high-priority cases queue.

A sound notification should warn you that a new work item is incoming (the Omni-Channel components will start blinking).

Click the Omni-Channel and accept the case:

By accepting this case, its ownership goes back to the current user and it is now listed on the MY WORK tab of the Omni-Channel component.

Repeat these steps again and accept another case; you will see that you have no capacity.

If we try this for the third time, no notification will be sent, but once we close one of the two cases we own (the capacity will become 5), the components will start notifying you about the third item. This is because you have enough capacity to accept new cases.

Let's summarize all the configuration steps:

• A Service channel turns (almost) any Salesforce object into a work item.
• Routing configuration is used to determine how work items are routed to agents.
• Presence configuration tells us how many work agents can take cases from Omni-Channel's engine (a user can only be assigned to one presence configuration; being assigned to a new presence configuration overrides the previous one for that given user).
• A queue is created as a waiting room for incoming work items and users are related to queues, so they are allowed to receive new work items (the queue object is related to the Routing configuration; in this case, from the queue edit form).
• Presence statuses state whether the user is available to receive new items, or whether they're busy or offline (each presence status can also be enabled for specific Service Channels). We can customize Presence statuses from Setup | Presence Statuses and they must be assigned to users using profiles or permission sets.

What if I have high-priority cases and low-priority cases? Create a new Routing configuration with lower (higher in number) priority, create a new low-priority cases queue, and then use automation (workflows, the Process Builder, Apex triggers, external API integrations, and so on) to assign incoming cases to the right queues.

So far, we've looked at queue-based routing. This is suitable for smaller Omni-Channel setups with a few users and queues, but if we need more fine-grained tuning, we can use skill-based routing or external routing. We'll cover these in the upcoming sections.