Speaker 1: What's the best way for Salesforce admins to organize and manage user requests? 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 Jillian Bruce, Principal Admin Evangelist at Salesforce, and today I am joined by awesome admin, Andrew Russo. Welcome Andrew.

Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here, Jillian.

Speaker 1: 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?

Speaker 2: 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 feels seamless and natural to use. It's about protecting the org's security and making sure that all of the data is secure and people who should have access can access it and people who shouldn't can't access it. It's also about delivering value to your company through scalable solutions that can grow with the company.

Speaker 1: 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?

Speaker 2: 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.

Speaker 1: 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?

Speaker 2: Let me show you how I solved it.

Speaker 1: 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?

Speaker 2: 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.

Speaker 1: All right. So as a salesperson, let's say I just chatted with my contact at 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. When I update the address there, I noticed 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?

Speaker 2: Well, Jillian, I've created an easy way for you to submit a request to change that right 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.

Speaker 1: 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?

Speaker 2: 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.

Speaker 1: Okay, so then what happens next, Andrew, after I get that confetti?

Speaker 2: 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 the 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.

Speaker 1: Oh, I get this awesome screen flow that just popped up.

Speaker 2: Yes, 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.

Speaker 1: Okay. So now that I've gotten a little bit of education about how to 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.

Speaker 2: 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 can 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.

Speaker 1: Andrew, more confetti. I love it. I also love how you created a really streamlined process for capturing user requests 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?

Speaker 2: 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.

Speaker 1: That's awesome. I love that you're capturing when the cases are changing status. How do you know this is all going to work, Andrew?

Speaker 2: 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.

Speaker 1: Okay, so now that you've got all this data, I love how you've captured this. What else can you do with it?

Speaker 2: Yes, we've actually made a dashboard so we can display all of the data. So once we look at the dashboard, we'll 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.

Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, Andrew, this dashboard is dazzling. Thank you for showing us how you solved it. I know admins everywhere are going to want to replicate this app just to get that dashboard. Now, Andrew, when we talk about user management in the context of Salesforce, we often hear the term designer's 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 because you showed that you use it, like the user request app you just showed us. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Speaker 2: 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. When users 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.

Speaker 1: 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?

Speaker 2: 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. 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 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 that they can go into at any time, 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.

Speaker 1: 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 on today's episode, please visit admin.salesforce.com. With that, I'm Jillian Bruce, and I'll catch you next time in the Cloud.