I'm Gillian Bruce, Principal Admin Evangelist
at Salesforce, and you're watching "How I Solved It"
where we dive into a business challenge
and show how one awesome admin chose to solve it.
Today I am with awesome admin Preena Johansen.
I'm so excited to be here.
about how you were using your data analysis skills
to solve a particular business challenge.
Sure, so it was recently brought to my attention
that our account teams were frustrated
that there's no quick and easy way
for them to get a complete picture of their customers.
They want to close deals.
They don't have time to be digging around for hours
all of the information that they need.
So in essence, it sounds like what they needed
was a full and complete picture of the customer
and I was determined to help them find a solution.
I built a customer 360 dashboard with CRM analytics
and created a snapshot dashboard
that we embedded right into the account page.
All right, now I'm very intrigued, Preena.
Why don't you show us what you built?
Sure, Gillian, let me show you how I solved it.
Let me start by showing you the Customer 360 dashboard
I built in CRM Analytics Studio.
It brings together multiple data points
for our customers in a single view
so our sales teams can get an idea of focus areas
or potential opportunities for their customers.
The dashboard allows filtering by different criteria
like account name or industry.
I had a request to change the service insights
to make them more actionable.
So let's jump in and edit this chart
and change it to customer cases by priority.
Most changes can be done with clicks and not code.
It's as simple as using the onscreen editor.
I can also create a new query in Number Widget
to provide an overview of Total Pipeline for our customers.
Well, that was pretty quick, Preena.
I love how you were able to edit the chart
to show which customer cases were the most important
So now that you've got this great dashboard,
I bet everyone was using it a ton, right?
So we noticed that the dashboard usage
wasn't quite where we wanted it,
and after running some user sessions,
the feedback that we received
was that they were either not navigating to the studio,
by the amount of data in the dashboard,
or there were just too many clicks
to get to the insights that they wanted.
Well, nice work running user sessions
That's some serious awesome admining right there, Preena.
What did you do to help people
get the insights they wanted easier?
So, Gillian, from the user sessions,
we decided that we needed to bring the insights
to where our users were spending the most time
which was the Salesforce account pages.
So we decided to create a Snapshot Dashboard
which brought together the key insights from Customer 360
into a pre-filtered dashboard embedded on the account page.
Cool, okay, that is a great solution.
But what about that full Customer 360 Dashboard?
This snapshot is just a little taste
of what's in your full dashboard.
We still wanted to be able to allow our sales teams
to dive into the details though.
So we added a link to the Customer 360 page
and pre-filtered it with the account
that they were navigating from.
Before we dive into the link,
let me show you how we set up the Snapshot Dashboard
So by navigating to the Lightning App Builder
for the account record page,
we're able to add the CRM analytics dashboard component.
select the dashboard and using the filter builder
select the parameters to allow filtering
to the account page that the user is viewing.
Okay, that is some pre-filtering in action.
Great way to serve each user the insights they need
without requiring them to take any further steps.
Now what about that link, Preena?
Let's jump back into the Studio
and dive into that link with the URL.
there are a few steps such as creating a custom component
and creating the Customer 360 app
which need to be completed first.
But once that's done, from the dashboard
we create a SOQL query which outputs a URL.
With the pre-filtering on the component,
it inserts the account name that the user is viewing
So to be able to create a valid URL though,
we must use the replace function to remove things
like spaces and special characters.
But then we create a binding on the link widget
which passes a result of the URL query into that link.
I just saw some SOQL, some json.
How difficult was it to figure this piece out?
So it was actually pretty easy
and simple to create the query.
As you saw, I was able to quickly navigate
to the query editor to write the query for the URL,
and for the binding, there's some great blogs
which explain each part of the binding.
So once we set the properties for the linkage to the URL,
we then use the advanced editor to add the binding
and pass the URL with the correct account name.
Okay, thanks for helping all of us
up level as awesome admins.
Can you show us your full solution in action?
So here on the account page and the snapshot dashboard,
when we hover over that link,
we can see that there's a URL.
So if we click that link,
we can see in the URL bar
that the account name has already passed,
and that the name filter is already filtered.
Boom, amazing insights customized for each user,
surfaced where they do their normal tasks.
That's being an Awesome Admin, Preena.
Thank you so much, Preena,
for that great demo and showing us how you solved it.
Now Preena, we saw how you customized
each user's experience to provide insights
in Salesforce right there on the page
where they do do their day-to-day tasks.
Very efficient, I must say.
of another really important admin skill, user management
which at its heart is all about designing
and implementing a customized user experience.
What are some of the benefits of doing this?
So customizing the user experience
creates memorable and positive experiences for our users
which means they become advocates in the business.
It also boosts productivity by removing the need
for our users to continuously set up workarounds,
and it makes it easier for our users to do their job,
and in turn this creates better customer relationships
Now Salesforce has a lot of very powerful tools
that admins can use to drive success in their organizations.
Developing great product management skills,
that is being able to demonstrate knowledge
of multiple products across the Salesforce platform
is really important for admins.
What are some ways that admins can develop
their product management skills to help drive success?
So having great product management skills
ultimately allows us to better understand
both the business and our customers.
I definitely recommend exploring Trailhead
and learning as much about the platform as possible.
in the local Salesforce community groups
and keep up to date with new products and features
and help to drive adoption.
Now, Preena, before we wrap,
can you tell us your top three data analysis tips?
Absolutely, so number one, understand the end goal.
This allows you to understand what your users
You may even give them insights
they never knew that they needed.
Number two, be a storyteller.
Data needs someone to simplify and clarify it
so that a non-technical audience
can understand and act on it.
And number three, be a change champion.
and you need to sometimes be able to take your users
on that journey so that they believe it and understand it.
Oh, this was so much fun.
Thank you again, Preena, for being our guest today
If you'd like to learn more about what you saw
in today's episode, please visit admin.salesforce.com.
With that, I'm Gillian Bruce,
and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.
