Before you set up Service Assistant, plan your use cases, choose a plan type for Case, set eligibility controls, prepare your grounding data, and plan your agent assignment strategy.
Required Editions
| View supported editions. |
Determine Use Cases
We recommend taking time to think through which issue types are most relevant for Service Assistant. Here are a few planning considerations.
| Planning Consideration | Questions to Consider |
|---|---|
| Identify pain points and opportunities. |
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| Define use cases. |
Should Service Assistant handle simple, straightforward cases and messaging sessions, or does your company need assistance with more complex scenarios? Try to prioritize case types and conversation types that are likely to see the greatest improvement in efficiency and accuracy. Service Assistant reduces the need for reps to dig through company policies and documents by grounding service plans in your company data through subagents, instructions, and data libraries. |
| Determine who uses Service Assistant. |
Is Service Assistant intended to accelerate onboarding for new reps or to enhance the productivity and accuracy of experienced reps? Guidance plans are well suited for training newer reps because they produce a structured, step-by-step checklist that walks reps through repetitive, predictable case types. Tenured reps managing complex cases benefit from dynamic plans that adapt in real time, surfacing next best actions without requiring manual plan redrafts. |
Define Your Service Plan Experience
Each plan type delivers a different experience for service reps. Messaging only supports dynamic plans, the real-time, conversational experience. Case supports both guidance and dynamic plans, and different features are available depending on the plan type you choose. You can only have one type enabled at a time.
Here’s an overview of the differences between guidance and dynamic plans to help determine which fits your team's workflow and case types.
| Comparison Category | Guidance Plan | Dynamic Plan |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Static, checklist-style plan organized into resolution phases. | Real-time, conversational workflow that adapts as the record evolves |
| Availability | Case-only. Guidance plans are the default plan type and enabled automatically. |
Case and Messaging Session To use dynamic plans for case, turn on the feature in the Service Assistant setup page. You can’t use dynamic plans and guidance plans at the same time. |
| Best suited for | Case types with stable, predictable resolution workflows where the steps are consistent across records. | Case types where the resolution path changes as information comes in, or where reps benefit from real-time adaptation. |
| Agent Chat | Not available by default. Enable the chat feature in the Service Assistant Setup Page. | Available by default. |
| Adaptability to record updates | Updates to the case are tracked through your Service AI grounding configuration, but the plan isn’t actively updated. To manually update the plan, a Service rep clicks Redraft Plan. |
Steps automatically update when new information arrives.
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| Agent action support | Available through Agent Chat only. Service reps must ask the agent to launch an action. Service Assistant isn’t proactive. To surface task automation directly in plan steps, add quick actions, which appear as buttons that service reps can manually launch. | Actions appear automatically in plan steps. Reps can execute them manually, or they can run automatically based on your configuration. |
Set Controls for Service Assistant
After defining your use cases, configure eligibility criteria for each object you plan to support. Eligibility criteria are a set of rules defined in an autolaunched flow that control when a record can have a service plan.
Each object requires its own eligibility flow. If you’re setting up Service Assistant for both Case and Messaging Session, you must create and configure a separate eligibility flow for each object.
- For case, your eligibility flow controls which cases receive a service plan. For example, you can set conditions that make service plans available only for cases that originate from email or are assigned to a specific queue. We provide a flow template to get started: Check Service Plan Eligibility. The flow is available in the Flows Setup page.
- For messaging, your eligibility flow controls which messaging sessions receive a service plan. An important difference from Case is that the service rep handling the session must have direct access to the eligibility flow. Unlike Case, where the flow runs under the ServicePlanner User's permissions, eligibility criteria for messaging requires that your grant service rep direct access permissions to the flow.
For more details, see Service Plan Eligibility Criteria.
Plan for Multiple Service Assistant Agents
If your business spans multiple products, services, or business units, you can create multiple Service Assistant agents and route records to the appropriate agent based on record data. Each agent can be configured with its own specialized subagents, instructions,and data libraries. You can create up to 100 Service Assistant agents. Creating multiple Service Assistant agents is optional.
Agent assignment requires an agent assignment autolaunched flow that runs after a record meets your eligibility criteria. The eligibility flow determines whether a record gets a service plan. The assignment flow determines which agent handles it. The two flows must be configured independently.
Each supported object requires its own eligibility flow and its own agent assignment flow. Unlike eligibility criteria, we don’t provide a flow template for agent assignment. You must create a flow that's based on your specific business requirements.
| Planning Consideration | Questions to Consider |
|---|---|
| Define your agent scope. | Decide how many agents you need and what each one specializes in. Each agent can be configured with its own subagents and instructions. For data libraries, you can assign each agent its own library grounded in specific files using the Files data type, or you can reuse the same knowledge data library across agents and set different filtering conditions using data categories from the Knowledge Settings table. This allows you to make sure that articles surfaced in plan steps are tailored to the specific business unit or issue type each agent handles. |
| Define your routing criteria. | Determine what record data you want to use to route records to agents, such as record type, case origin, related records, or custom fields. Your routing criteria drive the Decision element logic in your assignment flow. |
| Plan your default agent. | Every record that meets eligibility must be assigned to an agent. You must designate a default agent that handles records that don’t match any condition in your flow or whose matched agent is deactivated. Configure the default agent as a generalist rather than a specialist because it may receive a wide range of record types. |
Prepare Your Data
Prepare your grounding data to make sure that Service Assistant has the information it needs to create accurate and trusted service plans. Each grounding source requires planning before setup. This section covers the grounding spaces supported across all objects and plan types..
Prepare Your Subagents
Subagents and instructions are required grounding sources for both Case and Messaging session. They define the overall resolution context for Service Assistant, establishing the issue type, the scope of what Service Assistant should address, and the high-level resolution flow it follows throughout the plan. Service Assistant reasons within these boundaries at every step, so your subagent design is the foundation that everything else builds on.
When a record comes in, Service Assistant matches it to a subagent based on the subagent description, which drives which instructions and knowledge articles are used to build the plan. The subagent description is the reasoning anchor for the entire plan. It tells Service Assistant what issue it's resolving, which knowledge articles to search, and what boundaries to stay within at every step.
You don't need a separate subagent for every variation of an issue type. By listing specific subtypes and keywords in the subagent description, one well-structured subagent can cover a wide range of related variations. For example, one Payroll Issues subagent can cover missing paychecks, direct deposit errors, and incorrect deductions. Service Assistant uses the description to match the record to the right subagent and pull the relevant details from your grounding sources at run time.
Dynamic plans also require at least one standard subagent, either General CRM or General FAQ, to provide Service Assistant with conversational abilities and let reps complete general tasks like updating a record or drafting an email, since the standard actions for these tasks are included in the standard subagents.
Because subagent structure directly drives the quality of the service plan, invest time in design before setup. Before setup, review these resources:
Prepare Your Knowledge Articles
With Agentforce Data Libraries, you can ground Service Assistant in your knowledge base. Service Assistant chunks and indexes your knowledge articles so it can search for and select relevant information to include in service plan steps. The structure, formatting, and data quality of your articles have a direct effect on the information surfaced in plan steps.
In dynamic plans, retrieval is fresh at every step. Rather than retrieving once at plan creation, Service Assistant runs a new search against your knowledge articles and instructions each time it generates a step, incorporating the most relevant information available at that moment. This means plan quality improves when your articles are detailed, well-structured, and aligned to the issue types your subagents cover.
Producing high-quality service plans grounded in your knowledge base requires that you configure your data library to our recommended guidelines and that your knowledge base is optimized for retrieval and grounding.
We provide recommended guidelines for configuring your data library. In addition, we provide general knowledge authoring principles and information on structuring articles to help make sure you receive the most detailed and contextual plans from Service Assistant.
Our guidance covers Salesforce Knowledge only. Knowledge is the only data type officially certified for use with Service Assistant. You can use other data types such as custom retrievers and file uploads, but we do not provide guidance on permissions, setup, or testing for those data types.
Before setup, review these resources:
- Grounding Service Assistant with Knowledge
- Best Practices for Grounding Service Assistant in Knowledge
Knowledge grounding is optional. If you decide to use Agentforce Data Libraries, take the steps in Set Up Knowledge Grounding.
Prepare Your Agent Actions
Service Assistant supports standard and custom Agentforce Actions to automate plan steps. Unlike subagents, there is no Service Assistant-specific configuration guidance for actions. Action setup and use follow the standard Agentforce guidelines.
Before setup, identify the tasks in your use cases that are good candidates for automation. Take stock of your existing flows, Apex classes, and prompt templates that could serve as the basis for custom actions so you're not starting from scratch during setup. Make sure each action you plan to use has a clear description, inputs, and outputs. Service Assistant uses action metadata to match actions to plan steps, so precise descriptions are important for accurate matching. Custom Lightning component action types are also supported that you must configure to your business requirements.
How actions surface to reps differs by plan type. In dynamic plans, actions are surfaced automatically within plan steps when Service Assistant determines an action is available to complete the current step. In guidance plans, actions are available through Agent Chat only. Reps must ask Service Assistant to run an action rather than having it offered proactively. Service Assistant isn’t a proactive agent when using guidance plans.
For more details,see these resources: