What are Milestones & Entitlements?

Salesforce has two out-of-the-box functions that help organizations manage cases efficiently: Milestones and Entitlements.

Entitlements are rules governing the type and level of support your customers are entitled to receive. Milestones are the steps your agents need to take to respect the entitlements.

Let’s start with Entitlements: You might have a base level of support for all customers and then a certain customer-tier level entitled to more expansive support from your team. In this case, you’ll want to set different entitlements for the accounts that fall into those two buckets.

Here’s an example of what that might look like:

In addition to attaching Entitlement to your accounts, you’ll want to build out Milestones within the Entitlement processes so you know your support agents are taking the necessary steps to meet the entitlements outlined in your SLA or service contracts. 

Milestones define the important steps of your case management process, like Initial Response Time (IRT) or Time to Resolution (TTR).

Here’s an example of what Milestones within an Entitlement might look like:

Once your Milestones are set up within your Entitlements and attached to the correct accounts, you can add the Milestone tracker to the case field to let users see a Milestone countdown on cases. This helps keep agents on track and ensures you’re not breaching your SLAs.

The Salesforce community often refers to these features as interdependent. As this Salesforce help guide notes: “Milestones are added to Entitlement processes to ensure that agents resolve support records correctly and on time.” Essentially, Salesforce Milestones and Entitlements equip support teams with a defined support process, outlining how each case should be handled.’

Where Salesforce Milestones & Entitlements Fall Short

However, the two functions do not adequately account for the dynamic nature of today’s best support teams and the back-and-forth that happens when your customers respond.

Pairing Entitlements and Milestones works well for tracking significant steps in a straightforward or linear process, but how often is customer service straightforward and linear? They can be reliable for tracking service levels but limited to marking key points in a case's timeline rather than handling complex workflows.

One of our customers put it this way:

"What we ran into with Salesforce Milestones by itself is that the Milestone was only considering one factor. It was only telling an agent how much time was left before the case breached. But, say an agent has 10 cases about to breach in 10 minutes; now they have to consider other factors like the tier level or the account level to help with the decision-making process. That's why Milestones, at least from my perspective, while it is good, it only gives you that one factor that goes into deciding which case to work next, but there are so many more that go into it."

This is exactly why we built Case Flags; for scenarios where different customers deserve different response times, initial response SLAs are faster than follow-up communication, and agents need to know exactly which case to respond to next without wasting time considering all the criteria involved. Custom aging speeds allow you to account for multiple factors in your case prioritization, so your agents know exactly which of the 10 cases about to breach are the most important to tackle first. 

Additionally, Salesforce Entitlements are based on a customer’s initial interaction, and Milestones emphasize the timely completion of certain steps of the support process. This encourages support teams to prioritize Time to Resolution over other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), so agents strive to respond quickly and often close cases before the issue is resolved.

By accounting for each interaction, Case Flags promotes responsiveness with a simplified list view that displays cases by priority according to entitlements and the most recent customer interaction–not merely the first.

With Case Flags, agents can easily see the cases waiting for a response. Flags are cleared as agents respond, and the goal is to work through all flagged cases until each is addressed.

This process shifts the emphasis from First Response Time to what we call “responsiveness metrics,” including the time between interactions, measuring both the time with support and time waiting for the customer, as well as specifics about each interaction.

By revealing a more nuanced view of the service experience, managers can utilize resources more efficiently.

By having a clear view of what is actually happening when customers and agents interact, organizations can improve agent productivity and boost their metrics.

Using these metrics, an industrious support manager can not only shift resources when appropriate but can coach his/her team to succeed across a variety of interactions with customers of all service levels:

If you are looking for a simpler and more consistent system for prioritizing cases, Case Flags just might be the answer.