Stop Losing Track! Bringing Order to Case Follow-Ups in Service Cloud

Is your team struggling to manage customer cases that require follow-up at a later, specific time? We faced the challenge of agents manually tracking these cases, setting reminders, keeping cases open in their own name, or creating tasks. This often led to missed follow-ups, longer handling times, inconsistent handling, and the risk of cases falling through the cracks, especially when specific reactivation times were promised.

We needed a more integrated and reliable way for agents to schedule these future actions directly within Salesforce Service Cloud. We explored several options:

1. Native Salesforce Entitlement Management & Milestones: While essential for tracking SLA compliance, using Milestones for flexible, agent-driven “follow-up reminders” felt cumbersome. They aren’t primarily designed for agents to easily schedule an ad-hoc follow-up at a specific time and choose who should own the case upon reactivation.
2. Leveraging Project/Task Management Apps (e.g., TaskRay): These powerful tools are excellent for complex tasks but felt like overkill for simply scheduling a case follow-up. While they can track the need for action, they don’t inherently manage the temporary holding and subsequent reassignment of the Case ownership itself within the Service Cloud workflow without potentially adding complexity or requiring extra automation setup.

But in the end we ended up developing a solution ourselves: Journey Builders Case Scheduler! 

This managed package hit the sweet spot. Here’s why it became our best-in-class solution for this specific problem:

• Agent-Driven Scheduling: Empowers agents to effortlessly schedule a Case for follow-up at a specific future date and time directly from the Case page.
• Automated Reactivation: The tool automatically checks (at configurable intervals, e.g., every 15 minutes) and presents the case for action precisely at the designated time set by the agent.
• Smart Ownership Management: When scheduled, the case is temporarily assigned to a dedicated ‘Case Scheduler queue’. Crucially, the agent specifies during scheduling who the owner should be upon reactivation – themselves, another user, or even an Omni-Channel queue, enabling flexible routing.
• Eliminates Manual Work: Replaces the need for manual reminders or separate task creation, ensuring consistency and saving agent time.
• Context & Visibility: Agents provide a scheduling reason for context, which appears in the case feed along with scheduling/reactivation messages.
• Respects Existing Automations: Importantly, JB Case Scheduler focuses on managing the timing and ownership for follow-up. It does not automatically change the Case status, preventing interference with existing status-based automations your org may have configured.
• Seamless Integration: Works natively within Service Cloud and complements Omni-Channel routing well.

By implementing Journey Builders Case Scheduler, we provide you with a simple, reliable way to manage time-based case follow-ups, ensuring promises made to customers about specific follow-up times are kept and freeing up agents to focus on resolving cases.