If you are leading a Contact Centre in the Energy and Utilities space, you already know the challenge: high volumes, strict regulatory oversight, and the constant pressure to reduce the cost to serve. When it comes to routing work, a standard setup is rarely enough. Most contact centres using Salesforce will be harnessing the power of Salesforce Omni-Channel, or so they think they are.
In actual fact, they are missing out on some basic, yet key configuration, that transforms you from a contact centre that just gets by, to one that is thriving in efficiency.
I caught up with Angus Brown, Senior Developer and Omni-Channel expert at Desynit Limited, a Salesforce consultancy based in Bristol, to get the low down on the struggles that contact centres face when using, or in most cases are not using, Salesforce Omni-Channel.
Having completed a contact centre overhaul for the UK’s leading green Energy and Utilities provider, Ovo, Angus has seen first-hand what it’s like for a company to reach a crossroads with Salesforce Omni-Channel. Is it a simple tool for distributing work, or is it the engine for your entire operational strategy?
I asked Angus to provide his expertise and advice to help companies move from a basic queue to an engineered system. He has broken it down into 5 critical technical and operational decisions:
Standard Omni-Channel routing is often too rudimentary for the complexities of the Energy sector. You need to decide how priority is actually defined in your business.
The Desynit Approach: We often move beyond standard settings, using Apex to calculate a unique priority score based on complaint status, customer vulnerability, or Ombudsman deadlines. This ensures your advisors aren’t just busy, but are working on the right cases.
Allowing advisors to browse a list of cases (the pull model) inevitably leads to cherry-picking. This often means the easiest tasks are handled, and the complex, high-risk complaints sit idle.
The Decision: Shift to a Priority-Based Push Model. This forces accountability. By tracking decline reasons within Salesforce Omni-Channel, you gain visibility into advisor behaviour and process bottlenecks that were previously invisible.
What happens to an advisor’s capacity when they are waiting for a customer to call back? If that case stays assigned, that advisor’s throughput drops to zero.
The Solution: We implement a Hold status logic. This temporarily pauses the case, freeing up the advisor’s capacity so Salesforce Omni-Channel can immediately push them a new, active task. It’s a simple change that dramatically increases daily throughput.
Regulatory reporting depends entirely on how work is categorised at the point of entry.
The Engineering: Use Screen Flows to guide advisors through the intake process. By building in mandatory distinctions between feedback and formal complaints, and layering in duplicate detection components, you ensure your regulatory numbers are accurate from day one.
If your Salesforce instance and your softphone (like Amazon Connect, Genesys) aren’t talking, your advisors are performing swivel-chair data entry.
The Goal: Fully automate the outbound call log. When the system automatically links the call to the case and generates the communication record, you reclaim minutes of advisor time on every single interaction.
Angus finished by saying, “Optimising Salesforce Omni-Channel isn’t just a technical exercise; it’s about protecting your margin. Every duplicate complaint prevented and every minute of idle time recovered directly lowers your Cost to Serve.
It’s more than just turning on features. It’s engineering Salesforce to meet the specific, high-stakes demands of the Utilities industry. How? Focusing on the architecture that makes your team faster, more compliant, and more effective.”
We have been there first-hand to see what impact these changes can have on contact centres. Let’s take our partnership with Ovo Energy. By implementing the strategies above, the success was huge:
Perhaps the question to ask yourself: Is your current Srouting logic helping your team, or just keeping them busy?
If you like this, why not check out Mike Spencer, Solution Architect and Unified Routing expert at Desynit’s Vlog on Unified Routing: Operational Excellence in 60 Seconds.
Desynit Limited | Expert Salesforce Engineering for Energy & Utilities.
Our independent tech team has been servicing enterprise clients for over 15 years from our HQ in Bristol, UK. Let’s see how we can work together and get the most out of your Salesforce implementation.
