Migrating Service Console from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience

Until when do you think Classic will continue in the Salesforce environment?

Ask any Salesforce user from anywhere in the world, the only answer you would get is – “I don’t think it will be long, maybe until the next release.”. That’s the extent of uncertainty around the future of Classic.

But there is a perception building amongst the users that moving to LEX is as easy as a single click. But is it true?

Ask those who’ve moved to the Lightning Experience, you might be surprised that it’s not. That’s why it’s advised that one should not wait and move to LEX and get their users used to the new environment.

Let’s elaborate this with a success story involving the migration of Salesforce Service Console to the Lightning Experience.

An IT Security company based out of California, USA, uses Salesforce to manage their support and service operations. Their service reps use Service Console to log and manage customer cases.

They decided to move their Service Console to the Lightning Experience. Since we’re their Salesforce Consulting Partner, they asked us to ensure a smooth transition ensuring no existing functionality or data is lost.

After assessing their Org, we came across the following challenges:

• Page layouts needed to be developed incorporating the Lightning Experience requirements and without impacting the user experience.
• Lighting buttons needed to be created for the existing JavaScript buttons since JavaScript buttons are not supported in LEX.
• Preserving custom layouts that were there in the Classic instance.
• Ensuring no data loss while migrating.
• Routing Live Chat with Omni-channel, amongst others.

Considering the aforementioned challenges, our Salesforce experts devised a strategy to ensure a smooth and error-free migration. The details are as below:

• Firstly, we created the page layout keeping in view that it doesn’t distort the user’s experience. All the layouts were created in the LWC (Lightning Web Component).
• Then, we mapped the Live Chat functionality that was there on their customer community with Omni-Channel so that the queries can be routed straight to the service agents.
• We created a functionality named ‘Chat Transfer’ which enables the preview of the previous conversation if a case is forwarded to some other agent. This feature was not there in Omni-channel by default.
• There was a custom integration of CTI, which is used to manage phone calls, with the Service console. Since Lightning offers a managed package for CTI, integration was no longer required, so we enabled the managed package in their Lightning Salesforce Org.
• We made sure to preserve the custom layouts by converting them into the Lightning ones, which otherwise would have just disappeared.

Being their consulting partner, we knew that they wanted the ‘Capacity’ functionality enabled in the Omni-Channel feature for a more effective case routing. But they were not doing so because it used to identify the availability of a service agent based on the no. of tabs open on their screen.

But with the Winter ‘21 Release, the tab-based functionality was replaced with status-based availability. We informed them about the update and they asked us to enable that as well.

And with that, the migration was completed smoothly, ensuring zero loss of functionality or data.

Bottom line:

Lightning migration may seem easy but definitely isn’t. There are still many complexities involved in the process including the limitation that Lightning has in contrast with Classic. That’s what you need an experienced Salesforce partner to assist you through.

Don’t wait for official confirmation about the discontinuation of Classic. Because then it will be nothing but chaos. With that said, I’ll rest my case.

Looking to migrate to Lightning Experience? Contact us for a consultation.