"Critical Alert" The Dos & Don'ts of Critical Customer Service Comms in Salesforce
Guide Contents
6 reasons to move away from traditional messaging apps
Managing critical internal communications can sometimes feel like binge-watching the Star Wars saga — if you really hate Star Wars. You start out hopeful that this time will be different, but by the end of the day, you’re drained of energy and anxious that the next missed message could be the one to bring down the galaxy business.
Why does this happen? Because you’re…
- navigating a web of emails, Slack, Chatter, spreadsheets
- sending updates, requesting follow-ups, and chasing replies
- fighting for critical updates to be seen in a sea of emails and app notifications
Traditional communication tools are great for building relationships, getting quick answers, and adding context to discussions. But when it comes to high-priority updates, regulatory changes, or mission critical alerts, there are serious flaws that can cost everyone involved time, resources, and even customer accounts.
Here’s why — and what to use instead.
- You’re not really in control
In a fast-paced call centre and customer support environment, you want to be able to prioritise urgent and time-sensitive information. Be that critical system updates, new features, process changes, help material, or a short-term crisis situation, ensuring that key information reaches the right people at the right time is vital.
That requires the ability to select the relevant recipients (instead of spamming everyone on the team or in the company — and then having to explain why they received the communication).
It also means knowing:
- who has read the notice
- whether they understood it
- if they're following the new processes and guidelines
Without this data, you’re hoping, stressing, and losing time on manual work.
It’s like they say — when everything’s important, nothing is. So when people get “highly important” messages every other day, they start ignoring them. And end up missing the ones that do apply.
- You’re shooting in the dark… and critical communications are getting lost
Here’s a real life story.
A customer of ours was struggling to ensure critical changes were read, understood, and applied in practice. Mass emails proved to be distracting and often missed in people’s inboxes.
That lead to:
- User error and non-compliance
- High volumes of exceptions and manual follow-up
- Fall in Salesforce adoption leading to further process compliance challenges
Slacking and emailing critical updates is essentially shooting in the dark. Call centre agents are often too busy to check emails or visit the company’s intranet, so important updates can easily go unnoticed. And, as we know it all too well, if you forget to save a Slack message or notification, you’re out of luck. It will take you 15 minutes at best to dig it back up.
But what do you do when that critical notice was about a financial scam that you needed to be aware of, ready to respond to and deal with when customer calls start flooding in?
Not an ideal situation to be in.
- You’re losing time… on spreadsheets and follow-ups
At their best, process updates and critical communications should help improve customer service quality and efficiency, deflect requests, drive process compliance and Salesforce adoption. They should drive a culture of engagement and accountability.
The reality is often quite different — you’re updating spreadsheets, chasing responses, managing exceptions. As a customer once put it, there were “operational gaps in how we communicated critical updates on process, policy, or even customer incidents to our end users”.
Who said there wasn’t a better way?
- You’re losing time… on scrum meetings at the start of each new shift
Many call centres kick off each new shift with a 10-15 minute scrum meeting sharing essential updates and information.
While potentially great for team building and collaboration, these standups don’t always guarantee that everyone understands what’s expected of them or how to implement the next steps. (Let’s face it, how many of us would be ready to ask questions in public, in front of colleagues and managers?)
But what would the cost-benefit ratio be if you skipped those meetings altogether and allowed people to get right to work — while making sure everyone understands and follows the latest changes and updates?
- It’s harder to support remote and new employees
- Weakened internal comms & support
- Slow pace of sharing key information
- Reduced team efficiency and productivity
The challenges are even greater when adding remote and hybrid employees to the mix as they’re entirely reliant on the quality of online communication channels.
As a customer once put it, “Once all our users started working from home, we needed to set up some means of communication to our Salesforce users that was quick to set up and easy to use.” Fail to do that, and your remote staff will find themselves at an even greater disadvantage than their peers.
- You never know if and how well the updates have been understood not really in control
- Is the new process or feature clear to everyone?
- Do they know where to find more information?
- Are the existing resources helpful?
How easily can you answer these questions?
Some tools allow you to see who’s viewing and snoozing notifications, but they don’t provide the option to request a read receipt or accept employee feedback and questions.
Yet, without a simple, centralised way of gathering this information, you risk people missing or misunderstanding essential updates and causing:
- User errors
- Non-compliance
- Inefficiencies in customer service
- Increase in customer support tickets
Solution: Your own Salesforce-native Breaking News channel
Use traditional collaboration tools for what they’re best at — brainstorming, quick check-ins, low priority updates. Keep a separate internal Breaking News channel for time-sensitive, critical, and high priority notifications.
The best part — it’s easier to implement than you might think. And it will help you accomplish more with Salesforce (maximising its ROI) without adding tools to your employees’ tech stack.
These core capabilities that will make all the difference for you and your customer support and account management teams.
#1: Time sensitive communications
There’s a reason why a memo or process update is marked high-priority or even critical. You shouldn’t be spending precious hours on follow-ups. That time is better invested in answering employee questions, making sure your team is supported, and clarifying details to make sure changes are implemented as intended.
Improved Noticeboard, for example, lets you drive user behaviour by choosing the action you want the end user to take:
- UserRead and dismiss a pop-up errors
- Open and read the notice
- Click to open a link
- Acknowledge they’ve actually read and understood the update
- Respond by a specific time and date
No more opportunity for “I must have missed it” or “I didn’t see that, sorry” excuses.
Bonus tip — make sure each critical alert:
- Includes clearly defined next steps and links to additional resources
- The option to add a question or comment. That way, you'll have an automated way of evaluating the clarity and efficiency of your critical communications as well as a list of FAQs to answer and thus improve user engagement and process compliance.
#2: Exception management
There’s nothing like knowing that, if a memo or a notification pops up, it was definitely meant for you.
For one, your open rates will go up because people will no longer feel like they’re flooded with irrelevant notifications. What’s more, with effective recipient management and analytics in place, you can forget about manual status updates. All you need to do is create the notice, add your important information, select recipients, hit publish, and turn to user insights to monitor engagement and compliance.
With Improved NoticeBoard you can take it a step further. Its real-time statistics and insights allow you to:
- Track each user’s full lifecycle of engagement — from Draft, Issued to Displayed, Opened, and Acknowledged
- Analyse user behaviour over multiple communications (Anyone constantly missing the deadline, not clicking on alerts and in-app notifications, perhaps not using Salesforce often enough to spot them in time? Now you’ll know.)
“We love the fact we can target specific users or groups of users and manage exceptions with such ease now. Gives us agility and scale.”
#3: Salesforce-native app
This capability should be a given, but is unfortunately more rare than you might think.
There are immediate practical benefits to serving critical alerts right within the Salesforce Service Cloud:
- Time and money saved (by avoiding context switching and jumping between or being distracted by different apps)
- Higher open and click-through rates (as updates are delivered where your teams are already active)
- Improved process compliance (since next steps and instructions are visible right where they need to be implemented)
- You’re in control of your data — and it doesn’t leave your Salesforce instance
- The software has been subjected to stringent security checks by Salesforce
- There’s no risk of missed communications because of blocked browser pop-ups
- You don’t have to worry about a Chrome extension malfunctioning because of a Salesforce update
- It works across all supported browsers, Salesforce Mobile and Experience Cloud environments
- Install
- Set up
- Create and send your first notification
- Start monitoring engagement in real time
“I highly recommend the Noticeboard app to anyone looking to streamline their communication processes.”
Ben Heppenstall,
Corporate Communications Specialist
“If you need to drive audited, compliance type communications through Salesforce, then this is your app”
James Anderson,
Salesforce.com
About Improved Apps
Improved Apps is an award-winning Salesforce digital adoption solution, born out of the desire to drive Salesforce adoption through an enhanced, easy-to-use experience.
It has been developed by professionals with years of real-world Salesforce experience – implementations, developments, training, day-to-day administration and usage. Improved Help and Improved NoticeBoard remain the only digital adoption solutions fully integrated into Salesforce and reviewed by Salesforce security.
Improved Apps have been supporting customers’ Salesforce cloud strategies for over a decade, helping them create a unified experience across:
- Applications that are non-native but integrated for access by Salesforce users
- Standard Salesforce applications – CRM, Console, Communities, and mobile
- Third-party applications bought through the AppExchange
- Enterprise applications built on the Salesforce platform
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