(upbeat music)
- How do Salesforce Admins
customize the Salesforce platform
to solve business problems?
♪ 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, Karmel James.
Welcome, Karmel.
- Thanks for having me, Gillian.
So happy to be here.
- Well, I am so happy that you're here
because on the show today,
we're gonna talk about a super important Admin skill:
problem solving.
We've got a great demo in store
and lots of awesome tips and tricks to share.
But, before we go any further,
I need to quickly share our Forward-Looking Statement.
This is a reminder to make all of your purchasing decisions
based on currently available technology.
All right, with that out of the way, let's get going.
Now, Karmel, you've been an Admin for seven years.
Why is problem solving such an important skill for Admins?
- Problem solving, to me,
is the foundation of being an Administrator.
Every day, we're tasked with collecting information
from users and stakeholders
regarding the issues that they're experiencing
so that we may assist them with a better user experience.
Ultimately, Salesforce Admins
have to solve problems every day,
but since not all problems are created equal,
some days we'll be trying to solve
why a user can't access a specific record,
other days it'll be how to design a new automation
for the business.
Each of these require different approaches.
By boosting your creativity and decision making skills,
it's possible to become better
at solving all types of problems.
- So Karmel, being a good problem-solver
is also all about being proactive
in order to identify potential issues
and ultimately avoid problems, right?
- Oh, absolutely.
You wanna be proactive in doing things,
like monitoring different processes,
checking on security controls,
and keeping track of the data in the system.
And if you do happen to find any potential issues,
you also wanna be proactive
in communicating that with your stakeholders.
- Yes, I mean, communication is a huge part
of being a Salesforce Admin,
especially when you're working with a lot of stakeholders,
multi-step business processes, and large amounts of data.
It can be quite a challenge.
- Oh, absolutely, Gillian.
Data management is definitely a large part
of any Salesforce Admin's role.
I mean, I can't count the number of times
a user has come to me with a problem
and needed help creating an automated process
to manage data better.
- I'd love to hear more about one of these in particular.
Can you show me the steps you took
to solve one specific user request?
- Sure, Gillian.
Let me show you how I solved it.
(bright upbeat music)
Now, our company sends out a lot of different communications
to customers from different departments,
which we capture all on the contact record.
Here, in this list view,
you'll see all of the different customers
that are subscribed to our different newsletters,
as well as which ones they are not subscribed to.
Now, let's say for example, we take John here.
John decides
that they no longer want to receive Insider's Corner.
As soon as that checkbox is marked untrue,
immediately a new task is created
and assigned to one of the members on the marketing team
to tell them that, "Hey,
you need to go and schedule this call three days from now."
And by three days, I mean three business days.
- So, Karmel, hold on.
I love that you put in three business days
because especially someone like me
who likes to go and unsubscribe
from everything at the same time,
sometimes I uncheck those boxes
and then I realize I'm missing out
on something I actually need.
But if you call me on the weekend,
I'm definitely gonna double opt out.
- Oh, absolutely.
And we don't want you to receive that call on the weekend.
In addition, we have a field here
that is specifically to relate a new case that we've created
so that that way,
we can keep track of how many of these unsubscribes
have taken place
and how long is it taking us to actually resolve them.
So you have all the information here,
as well as a really well-written description
telling you exactly which unsubscribes took place.
Here, you can see with Insider's Corner,
that was the one unsubscribed to,
while our other newsletter, Quarterly Financials,
had no change in the subscription.
- Okay, so now that we've got that unsubscribe taking place,
what happens next, Karmel?
- [Karmel] Well, the next thing I'm gonna do
is if I'm making this phone call,
I'm actually gonna talk to you,
and then, of course, I'm gonna update my task records
with the information about what we talked about.
And this example with John,
John said, "Great, resubscribe me."
So we'll put all of that detail on the task record.
Then, we'll go ahead and update the subscription,
update the needed checkbox to be marked true,
as well as change the status to Completed.
- Okay, so you just did a lot right there.
You captured all of this information
about the resubscription,
the conversation you had right there in Salesforce.
Then, what happens?
- After you check those two fields and hit Save,
you'll get a new task created
reminding you to actually go and update that contact record
so that we can get John resubscribed.
I'll go ahead and update John's contact record right now.
We'll change Insider's Corner to be marked as true again,
so that they can continue to receive that newsletter.
And in addition,
I wanna go and close out this open task record.
So I'm gonna go ahead and change the status
to Issue Resolved.
As soon as the task is marked as Issue Resolved,
the case is automatically gonna be updated to Closed.
Here, you see that that status is marked as Closed
and it was just at the click of a button.
- All right, so that was a lot of automation
that happened right there.
Just by marking that task as Issue Resolved,
this happened automatically with the case?
What else happens, Karmel?
- Well, we also wanna make sure
that everyone on the marketing team knows
that we were able to resubscribe John.
So we have another automation
that just sends a quick message to the marketing channel
saying, "Hey, we were able to resubscribe John.
And if you wanted to take a look,
here's a link to the case record."
- Well, that was really slick, Karmel,
but I think there was a lot that kind of happened there.
So there was a lot of automation between updating the task,
updating the case, updating the marketing channel.
Can you show us a little bit more about how you did that?
- Absolutely.
Let me show you my flow.
- Flows, I love flows.
Show me the flow!
- Now, just as it's important
to keep good, clear communication,
it's also important to have really well-written names
in your flows.
As you can see here,
mine identifies that it's record triggered
and it only runs on update only.
Now, because we have multiple automations
running in this flow,
I actually start out with a decision criteria to say,
"Which action should we be looking for?"
And for this one, we have two.
Our first decision outcome is considering what happens
when a task records status is changed to Completed
and that Subscription Updated Needed checkbox
is marked true.
Our second decision is:
What happens when a task record
has the status also updated to Issue Resolved?
- Okay, so you've got your two decisions.
What is the next level here in the flow?
- Well, let's take a look at what happens
if you do get that Subscription Updated checkbox
marked as true.
Here, I have an assignment variable taking place
that's going to assign all of the values
for the task record that gets created
to remind you to go and update that contact record
after you've had your phone call.
- I like it, you're pulling the data that already exists,
so you don't have to duplicate that manual entry.
I love that.
- Absolutely.
And then, we're using a Create Records action
to take that record variable that had all of our assignments
and go and create that record.
Now, that's just the first part of the automation.
Remember, we still have what happens
when there's Issue Resolved.
So the first thing that we have to do
because we want to update a case,
but we're actually triggering this off of task record,
first thing is we have to go and find that case.
So we use a Get Records action to actually take the ID
that is in our task records Related To field
and say, "Use this to go and search for our case record."
And of course, we only need one record
and we want all of the field values.
Next, we'll take this time
to actually go and update the marketing team
so that they can say, "Yes, success!
We got a resubscription."
So we have a formula field that is used
to actually create our text template that's in the message,
as well as a constant variable
that stores our marketing channel's record ID.
Lastly, we have our final action,
which is the Update Record action.
In this case,
I chose to do it slightly differently than the assignment.
Since I'm only updating the Status field on the case record,
I felt like this was fine
instead of going through a whole assignment variable.
So I'm just saying here, "Go ahead,
update the case record using the ID
from our Get Record action,
and then change that status to Closed."
- Thank you, Karmel, for showing us that great demo
and showing us how you solved it.
(bright upbeat music)
Now, Karmel, another thing we saw in your amazing demo
was data management
and how it's all about creating processes
to ensure that data in Salesforce is managed correctly.
Because often, this data, as you showed,
is being used by different parts of the businesses
to make important decisions.
What are some best practices that you can share
about ensuring data in Salesforce is managed correctly?
- Keeping Salesforce as the main source of truth
for all customer and sales data keeps that super easy
'cause it's all in one place.
And then, after that,
setting up different validation rules and processes
to proactively prevent data duplication.
And, of course, periodically checking
and rechecking different integrations, packages,
and other tools are correctly configured
to send information to Salesforce.
- Okay, well, on top of data management,
as Admins, we're also often tasked
with translating business requirements
into technical solutions.
That's kind of like the Admin magic.
Now, we saw that in your demo,
but to do to this
requires really great communication skills.
Do you have any advice to share on how Admins
can communicate effectively with their stakeholders?
- Well, starting out
with building really strong relationships
with your internal stakeholders is gonna be key.
They're gonna feel comfortable coming to you
and talking to you about their issues.
And, of course, then regularly scheduling
a Salesforce stakeholder meeting
to review the different business needs and processes
and technical requirements all in one place.
And then lastly,
continue to deliver regular training sessions
to new Salesforce users.
- Well, this has been so fun, Karmel.
Thank you so much for being a guest today
on "How I Solved It."
Now, 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.
(bright upbeat music)