End-to-End Setup Entitlements & Milestones In Salesforce Service Cloud

In the world of customer service, meeting SLAs (Service Level Agreements) is critical. Salesforce Service Cloud’s Entitlement Management feature empowers organizations to define, track, and enforce these SLAs with precision. Whether you're building a support model from scratch or optimizing an existing one, understanding how to set up entitlements and milestones is essential.

What Are Entitlements?

Entitlements define the type and level of support a customer is eligible for. They can be based on:

• Purchased products or services
• Subscription tiers (e.g., Gold, Silver, Bronze)
• Service contracts or warranties

Entitlements ensure that support teams deliver service within agreed timelines, and customers receive the service they’re promised.

Key Concepts

Component	Description
Entitlement	A record that defines what support a customer is entitled to.
Milestone	A time-based metric (e.g., First Response in 2 hours).
Entitlement Process	A workflow that applies milestones to cases.

 

Here’s a step-by-step guide to implement Entitlement Management in Salesforce:

 Step 1: Enable Entitlement Management

1. Go to Setup.
2. Search for Entitlement Settings.

Enable Entitlement Management

Step 2: Create Milestone

This Salesforce screen showcases the Milestones setup. Milestones in Salesforce represent time-bound checkpoints used to track progress in support processes, such as case resolution and response times. 

A table listing three configured milestones:

• Case Closure Time – No Recurrence
• First Response Time – No Recurrence
• Waiting for Customer Response – Sequential

No Recurrence

• This means the milestone is triggered only once during the lifecycle of the case or entitlement process.
• Example: First Response Time – it starts when the case is created and stops when the first response is sent. It won’t restart even if the case is reopened or updated.

Sequential

• This means the milestone can be triggered multiple times, but only one instance runs at a time.
• A new milestone instance starts after the previous one completes.
• Example: Waiting for Customer Response – if the customer responds and the agent replies back, the milestone can restart when the case goes back to waiting for the customer again.

Step 3: Create Entitlement Process

This screen displays the Entitlement Process configuration.

 It is used to define how cases progress through an entitlement process. Key configuration fields include:

• Entitlement Process Name: Case Support Entitlement Process
• Process Type: Case
• Active: Enabled via checkbox
• Business Hours: Default  ( You can setup your own business hours)
• Case Entry Criteria: Based on case created date
• Case Exit Criteria: Based on when case is closed

This setup helps enforce SLAs by controlling when a case enters and exits the entitlement process, and aligns milestone tracking with business hours.

Step 4: Linking Milestones to the Entitlement Process

After defining the entitlement process details (such as name, type, entry/exit criteria, and business hours), the next step involves linking milestones to the process. Milestones represent key SLA checkpoints—like response or resolution times—and must be added to the entitlement process timeline. This ensures that each case passing through the process is tracked against these time-based targets, enabling automated monitoring and escalation.

Step 5:  After you enable entitlement there are some fields added to object like Account, Case for which we will need to enable access on the profile. So, I am assigning access to System Admin profile on this field on case object.

Field on which I have enabled access: Business Hours, Closed When Created, Entitlement Process End Time, Entitlement Process Start Time, Milestone Status, Milestone Status Icon, Stopped, Stopped Since.

Also, in the case layout add the section as shown.

Next by clicking on Feed View, add the milestone tracker as shown.

 

Step 6: Create Entitlement Record and define customer, start, end time and entitlement process. One you save the record you will be able to see the all the Milestones associated to this process as shown in image.

Step 7: Now under this entitlement create the case as shown below with High priority. You will be able to see the Milestone tracker on the detail page.

Note: You can also associate Success, Warning and Violation actions using Milestone associated to Entitlement Process as shown below.