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(funky music)
What's the best way for Salesforce admins
to organize and manage user requests?
♪ Awesome Admin ♪
Welcome to "How I Solved It"
where we dive into a business challenge
and show how one awesome admin chose to solve it.
I'm Gillian Bruce, principal admin Evangelist at Salesforce
and today I am joined by awesome admin, Andrew Russo,
welcome Andrew.
Thanks for having me, it's great to be here, Gillian.
Andrew, I am stoked to have you on the show today
because we're talking all about one of my favorite topics,
user management, but before we get started,
I need to quickly share our forward looking statement.
This is a reminder to make all purchasing decisions
based on currently available technology.
Okay, now with that out of the way, let's get started.
Now Andrew, you are a Salesforce admin with over four years
of experience in the Salesforce ecosystem.
For those new Salesforce admins out there,
what exactly is user management
and why is it such an important skill for admins?
To me, user management is one of the most important skills
an admin can have to succeed.
Really it's about three different things.
At the core of it, it's about creating
a customized experience for the users that feel seamless
and natural to use.
It's about protecting the org security
and making sure all of the data is secure
and people who should have access can access it
and people who shouldn't can't access it
and it's also about delivering value to your company
through scalable solutions that can grow with the company.
Love those three points.
Andrew, as admins, you know, we know that managing
user requests can also sometimes be a huge challenge.
So Andrew, what can admins do to manage these user requests
in a better way?
Yeah, so you can actually build apps
using some of the different on-platform technology
that's already there.
So with Salesforce, you're going to have cases,
so we actually started out by getting user requests
through email and we realized, okay, this isn't scalable,
we'll get emails, we'll forget to go back to them.
So we decided to roll out cases.
We were using it for customer service to our customers,
so why can't we use it internally for our own
customer service to employees?
So we rolled out cases and we built some flows around it
and we pretty much made an app with no code at all.
I'd love to hear a little bit more
about exactly how you did this.
You know, you told us a little bit about
some of the different elements of the platform
but can you show me exactly what you've done to resolve it?
Let me show you how I solved it.
(upbeat music)
Awesome, I love show and tell, but Andrew, I want to play,
can I be a part of this demo?
Can I play a role in this demo?
Yeah, let's have you step into the role
of being a salesperson.
I'll play the role of being a Salesforce administrator
and let's go and step through the process
of submitting a case.
All right, so as a salesperson,
let's say I just chatted with my contact on an account.
I learned they have a new address,
so I'm going to just go ahead
and update that right here on the account page.
But when I update the address there, I notice that when I go
into the contact record, the address is still the old one
and it didn't update when I updated the account address.
So what's up with that, Andrew?
Well, Gillian, I've created an easy way
for you to submit a request to change that
right in inside of Salesforce.
If you look at the bottom left, you could click on
the create an internal case and you'll be able
to create a case.
Oh, I like that, right here in the app.
Okay, so here we go.
I'm going to go ahead and say
that when I update the account address,
I want the contact address to get updated as well.
So I enter the details.
I give you all this little information that's inside my head
and I click submit and hold on, did I just get confetti?
You definitely just got confetti.
We love adding confetti to Salesforce.
Adding a little bit of fun really keeps it interesting
and our users love it.
Okay, so then what happens next, Andrew,
after I get that confetti?
I'm going to get a notification inside of Salesforce
so I can quickly click on it in the top right
and I'm going to open up the case.
I even added a warning just so I don't forget
to take ownership of the case and change the status.
We got to keep those metrics really good.
So now once I click to take ownership,
it's just a small flow that updates this owner to myself,
as well as it's going to set the status to working
and then I'm going to be able to click request a user story
and it's got pre formatted text,
so I don't have to type it all out every time
and I can just click next.
It adds the case comment, and it's actually going to
then send you an email in the background through a flow.
You'll also see that I'm going to update the development status
to scoping because we're going to gather the requirements
for it and then we can add it to the roadmap.
Oh, I get this awesome screen flow
that just popped up.
Yeah, so let me walk you through
kind of the process of logging a case.
So you'll see the screen flow,
I've actually added in where you can click on
the module icon and it's going to open up in another tab,
the Trailhead module,
so if you're not really sure what a user story is,
you can actually go straight into Trailhead
and do a little bit of learning right before you log it.
Once you're done with taking the module,
you're going to be able to just click next through it.
Okay, so now that I've gotten a little bit of education
about how to use format a user story,
I see you've also got some coaching right here
in this screen flow, which is really great.
So I'm going to enter in my details.
So I'm going to say that as a salesperson, I want to make sure
that all the contact addresses are updated
when the account address is changed
and why do I want that?
Well, I want that because I want to know that all of the data
for the accounts and contacts are correct,
so I can spend more time selling
and less time updating data.
It looks like you just submitted a user story,
I got a notification inside of Salesforce.
I'm going to go ahead and click on it
and it's actually just going to open up the case for me.
Once I do that, I'm going to see the user story
on the side and I can open up that record
and I could see it took all the different parts
of the user story and it combined it into a single sentence
that's readable.
Now that I've read the user story and I think, yeah
that's definitely a feature we need to add.
I'm going to go ahead and create a case comment
so that I can let you know
that we're going to start working on that.
So once I add in the information
and let you know, Hey, it's an awesome feature.
We're going to add it to the roadmap.
I'm going to go ahead and click save.
Now you're thinking, how do you get notified of that,
it's just a case comment.
Well we created this flow
that's going to see when a new case comment is created
for an internal case.
We'll go ahead and send it off
as a notification to you in Slack, as well as in an email
so you can get it and be able to know that, Hey,
we're working on it and we've seen your request.
From there, we're going to go ahead and select
at the top that we're going to update the status
that's on the roadmap so we can keep track
of this case throughout the entire development process.
Andrew, more confetti, I love it.
I also love how you created a really streamlined process
for capturing user request and coaching them
through submitting a user story that prevents you
from having to go back and forth so many times to figure out
what the user actually wants.
Got a little flow, a little action, a little confetti.
So how did you know the average time to first response?
That's not the end of the story, we actually noticed
one of the big problems was that we needed to track
how long cases were in each status
so we could tell why they were in a status for so long
for different areas.
To do so, we actually created a flow that allows us
to keep track of all that information.
So kind of setting the stage with it,
we have an object, that's got the case,
as well as the start time and end time and the status.
This allows us to create a record
Whenever a case is created, that tracks the time it started
the status, what the status was
and then it has an exit time which isn't populated.
From there, we go through every time
and we'll get the most recent case status time.
We'll check if it has the exit time.
If it doesn't have an exit time,
we'll put a new exit time on it of the current time
and then we'll check if it's closed.
If it's closed, we do nothing.
If it's still an open case, we'll go ahead
and create a new case status time
with the start time and the new status that it's entered.
This allows us to keep track of all the information we need.
That's awesome, I love that you're capturing
when the cases are changing status
but how do you know this is all going to work, Andrew?
Well, that's one of the really great features
we've actually implemented.
We've got flow testing.
This allows us to create test cases
so that we know that it's going to work.
It allows me to sleep easier at night
knowing nothing's going to break.
Okay, so now that you've got all this data,
I love how you've captured this.
What else can you do with it?
Yeah, so we've actually made a dashboard
so we can display all of the data.
So once we look at the dashboard,
well see there's a couple different elements to it.
One of which we're able to see where cases are
throughout the process.
We've got our time to first response, which is captured
and we look at what departments have cases
and how long they're in each different status.
This allows us to look at which groups are responsive to us,
as well as which groups are a little bit less responsive.
We also have all of our backlog
for our development prominently displayed,
so we know what everyone's doing,
as well as the last big part is looking at how much value
we're bringing to the company through time savings.
So we look at how often our flows are run,
as well as what old processes used to take in terms of time
and how many times it's ran
and that allows us to calculate the ROI
that we bring to the company
which is definitely helpful during performance reviews.
Oh my gosh, Andrew, this dashboard is dazzling.
Thank you for showing us how you solved it.
Ugh, I know admins everywhere are going to want to replicate
this app just to get that dashboard.
So now Andrew, when we talk about user management
in the context of Salesforce,
we often hear the term designers mindset.
I saw you apply this skill in your demo, and this is all
about creating human centered experiences in Salesforce.
Now, I want to hear more about your approach
on this when you're building solutions in Salesforce
'cause you showed that you use it,
like the user request app you just showed us.
Tell us a little bit more about that.
When I start solving a problem,
I really like to ask myself how can I build a solution
that will not only solve the problem
but also improve the experience of the end user.
That's a big part of creating helpful apps
that really users feel connected to.
The other part of it is creating prototypes early
and showing users and getting the feedback.
Don't wait until the end to bring them the finished product,
get them involved in early so that they feel connected
and invested into it.
The third part of this is really about creating things
that feel intuitive and familiar to use.
If someone can just open up the screen and know what to do,
what to type in and it just feels natural,
they're more willing to accept and use that new feature.
So Andrew, I want to talk a little bit more
about another core skill that I saw demonstrated
in your demo, change management,
which is all about managing changes to business processes,
technology and people within Salesforce.
What are some things that an admin can do
to help manage change?
Documentation is one of the biggest things,
it's document, document, document.
By utilizing help text, users can know what to put
into different fields without having to ask the questions
of what the field's for
and by using the different descriptions
throughout Salesforce, other admins can come in
and understand why stuff was created and why it was done.
The second big part is setting up in-app guidance.
It's available on the Salesforce platform
and it allows users to get real time training
and understanding of what different features are available
right where they're working,
so they don't have to leave to go to another place
to learn about the Salesforce platform that they're using.
The third big thing is really let users test stuff out
and have a sandbox that they can go into.
What we've done is set up a full sandbox
so they can go into it anytime and it's got fresh data
and we try and keep it ready for them,
so if they want to do something to test out,
they can go there and play with it, test
and there's no risk to changing production data.
It really helps to keep our org clean and running properly.
Ooh, I love that idea
of using a sandbox to let your users play and test around.
This was so fun, Andrew, thank you so much
for being our guest today on "How I Solved It".
Now, if you want 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.
(upbeat music)
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