Collaborative care, SCV/AC solutions, and more. Hello from Kicksaw!

Hi folks! I hope that spring has sprung in all the best ways for you, wherever you're located. Here in the PNW spring equals rain, of course, because every season equals rain...and this season, it's business as usual.

But spring has become one of my very, very favorite seasons for a really great reason — Kicksaw is gearing up for our annual company retreat next month! It's an amazing opportunity to connect with our coworkers and strengthen bonds that a remote work environment can struggle to maintain fully. This year, we're headed to Nashville, and I cannot wait. Yeehaw!!

I really hope you enjoy this month's newsletter — there's so much great stuff in here. Our Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Flows blog post just got a revamp, and we've got a couple of new blog posts for you to check out as well, including an excellent piece about digital engagement in the healthcare industry. This is a really important topic that I know many of our readers will resonate with. And don't gloss over Andy Szymas's breakdown of what you can accomplish with Service Cloud Voice and Amazon Connect (SCV/AC)— it's a great read that will probably spark some ideas for your own telephony setup.

~Kyle Morris, Co-founder

Turning Patient Engagement into Collaborative Care

For folks in the Health and Life Sciences world, the patient's experience with your practice's digital platforms has become more important than ever before. Creating the right digital experience for your patients can very well mean the difference between success and failure for your healthcare org?— and that hurdle might be more achievable than you think.?

In an era where digital behavior has been continuously evolving, patient engagement is now a hot topic that’s directly impacting healthcare providers. Patients have more choices than ever in the healthcare marketplace, so providers are needing to up their game in terms of quality of care, accessibility, and the patient experience — and the type of digital engagement they offer can serve as a key differentiator.

Kicksaw has been supporting providers looking for modern and innovative digital engagement strategies and solutions that set them apart. We’ve seen notable value in solutions that address communication challenges between patients and providers like: ?? ?

• Removing communication and information barriers
• Personalizing interactions and outreach?
• Improving collaborative care
• Enabling self-service
• Simplifying and automating processes for patients and providers

So, if you’re just getting started on the path of delivering personalized, relevant, and timely communication to your patients in their preferred digital channels — we’ve got your back.?

In this blog post we’ll be sharing what we’ve learned about how patient engagement is evolving, provide an overview of the digital engagement trends and use cases we see most frequently, and give insights to help any provider organization out there wanting to find the right kind of digital engagement to empower both themselves and their patients. Check it out!

Kicksaw's Approach to Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect

Let’s talk telephony integrations. Specifically, Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect (SCV/AC). Kicksaw Principal Solution Architect Andy Szymas knows a thing or two about getting the most out of the two solutions, and he's here to walk you through some of Kicksaw's approaches to getting the most out of this power couple.??

At Kicksaw, we love to flex our Salesforce consultancy muscles to pair clients with solutions and tools that fit their needs (and that they like to use), and our SCV/AC user base has been steadily growing in recent months. For good reason?—?when approached properly, this combination of services can be a huge asset to your Sales team.?

What is Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect?

SCV/AC is one of the more unique Salesforce products in the ecosystem. A telephony model inside of Service Cloud, SCV/AC is an incredibly useful solution, as it allows you to create a contact center and take/make phone calls within Salesforce.?

• For reps, this means being able to make a call directly from a record in Salesforce.?
• For managers, it ensures that calls are always reportable and trackable.

SCV/AC is a native Salesforce product, meaning it’s able to utilize Salesforce’s omni-channel functionality to connect to and integrate with the Amazon Connect telephony platform. While there are several options when it comes to telephony, SCV/AC is a popular option for folks across a variety of industries because it ticks the boxes for any organization needing a reliable phone call service that interacts directly with Salesforce.?

This solution certainly has its challenges, though. Both Amazon Connect and Service Cloud are incredibly customizable, which is, of course, a huge part of why both platforms are so useful, but some of that flexibility is lost in this managed partnership. There are plenty of Github repositories that explain cool things you can do with Amazon Connect, but unfortunately, those cool things don’t always translate nicely into Service Cloud Voice.?

Kicksaw’s Approach to Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect

So, how do you get the most from this pairing and avoid any challenges? Our goal when implementing SCV/AC (or any solution) is always to deliver products that empower Admins to make effective changes without leaving Salesforce. This frequently requires some creativity, as every business has its own unique set of processes and requirements, ?but that’s all part of the fun if you ask us — and definitely possible with SCV/AC.

For example, some of the unique solutions we’ve built for SCV/AC include:

• Holiday Schedule: Out of the box, Amazon Connect has no holiday management. We’ve designed a solution that uses Salesforce Holiday records to play a customized close message for any business holidays (whether that’s Thanksgiving or the annual company Jet Ski retreat).
• Phone Cleaner: Phone numbers can come into Salesforce in a variety of formats. Consider these two numbers: +15551234567 and (555) 123 - 4567. Those are the same number to the human eye, but they aren’t when searching the database. And let’s not even get started on folks who try to make 555.123.4567 a thing. To solve for this, we built out a small, invocable Apex action that runs in a flow and returns all the matches of the number. This enables you to match a voice call record to a contact regardless of how their number is formatted.
• Round Robin: One of the trickier elements of any telephony solution is routing — who gets the next phone call? The answer to that question is incredibly important and requires close attention. Amazon Connect offers routing based on who’s been online the longest, and Salesforce also offers omni-based routing. These both have their advantages, of course, but another option that is frequently overlooked (and not natively offered) ?is round-robin routing.?With this method, the next call is routed to the agent who has been the longest without a call. Kicksaw created a round-robin that leverages automation in both AC and Salesforce to get the call to the correct agent. We feel it’s the best of both worlds. (On a very related note, have you read our guide on how to build a round robin in Salesforce? Check that out when you’re finished with this newsletter.)

This is only a quick summary of some of the interesting tools and features that we’ve built for SCV/AC here at Kicksaw, and we’re always working on more, too! It’s a growing library of resources that we’re eager to share with you. If you’re interested in connecting your phone contact center with your contacts in Salesforce, give us a shout — we can deliver real value to your business, and we’d love to connect with you.

The Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Flows

Flowmaster General (and Kicksaw Admin on Demand Delivery Manager) Aaron Haag, with the help of some fellow Flownatics here at Kicksaw, gave The Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Flows blog post a good old fashioned spring cleaning! This fantastic resource is once again hot off the press, ready to answer each and every question you have about how to build your own flows.

If you've been following Kicksaw's newsletter for a bit (or if you're a customer), you probably know that we're very into Flow around here. Years ago, we published?The Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Flows, and it is far and away our best-performing blog post because?of the way it supports fellow admins building solutions in their own Salesforce org. We're so proud of the impact we've had on the greater Salesforce ecosystem via this resource.

We've done our best to keep this post up-to-date as Salesforce Flow has evolved, of course, but we're excited to let you know that the post just got a major overhaul this month. We strongly encourage you to give it a look (and maybe bookmark it for future reference) — your odds of learning something new, remembering something you forgot, or being inspired to rethink your current processes are very, very high.

The Art of Building Great Company Culture

The muse has struck again for Kicksaw Co-founder Kyle Morris. For this next run of inspiring blog posts spearheaded by our fearless leader, we're going to be learning all the ins and outs of what goes into creating great company culture.?

The team here at Kicksaw has shed our fair share of blood, sweat, and tears over the course of the last six years to create a culture that defines us in a unique, effective, and powerful way. The lived experience of this process was an arduous journey, with bumps, mistakes, and lessons learned. It was simple, but definitely not easy. Simple because we just built the thing that felt right — but with no single correct path to follow and no guarantees of success, it was certainly challenging (and still is!).

We say all this not to brag, but with pride and the hope to offer inspiration. With the right mindset and motivation, any business can build a world-class culture that employees dream of. And when you nail that company culture, you will attract the best employees, see less turnover, and be rewarded with happier customers who see better outcomes — it’s truly an enormous, if underappreciated, differentiator.

In this first installment of our four-part ultimate guide to company culture, we’re going to take a look at what it means to approach culture building as an art form rather than as a box to be checked.?

Kicksaw Appreciates You!

This past Friday, the team at Kicksaw had the day off for a holiday that doesn't appear on your average calendar. It was Kicksaw Appreciation Day! Paid time off is really, really important to us, and the April calendar didn't have any official holidays listed...so we made one up! All part of our commitment to transform consulting by putting people first. People need time off, so we give it to them.?

But we gotta say...we appreciate YOU too, dear reader! Thank you for following along with us, and for listening to what we have to say. Let us know if there's anything particular you'd like to hear about from our Salesforce/business process experts in this newsletter, or in other formats as well! We love answering your questions and doing the research for you. Keep on keeping on! You're doing great.

We appreciate you,

The Kicksaw Team