Charts in dashboards are used to help tell stories on your data. They help us to quickly identify the progress towards Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), identify trends and patterns within your data. If you chose the wrong chart type, you risk users not being able to identify the information they need quickly, or worse, confusing them.
Continue reading “Building powerful dashboards by using the right chart type”
As any remote team will know, digital collaboration is essential. Not only does it help you get to know your fellow team members better, but it can also help you be more productive.
However, most businesses will have multiple tools that overlap in functionality. This can make it challenging to know what tools you should use and when. More often than not, people then tend to fall back into email as this is where they feel most comfortable. However, generally, this is not the right tool for the job and can reduce collaboration and productivity.
Salesforce has collaboration features that you may not be using, however, can really help improve collaboration when working with customer data.
Chatter has been around since 2009. As an enterprise social network, Chatter is a way of helping everybody stay connected in a similar way to how you would use Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. It can be used by Employees (even if they don’t use Salesforce), Partners and Customers.
Chatter contains many features that would be familiar to anybody using social media. This includes posting updates, mentioning other users and sending images & attachments. Along with this, you can also post set questions, create polls and build custom actions.
Many businesses are not sure how they can get started with Chatter, and as such, it is often overlooked as a collaboration tool. To get started, you need to get an understanding of what the tool can do, who is going to use it and the purpose.
Within Chatter, you can follow people and records, making a personal daily feed of activity. This allows you to get an update on what is important to you without having to build reports or look at records.
There are many features of chatter that can aid collaboration if used regularly. These include:
Each record within Salesforce has its own feed (including dashboards). The feed can be populated with automatic updates such as field changes (e.g. Person A has updated field Stage from Proposal to Committed) or posting updates manually to the record.
An excellent way for teams to improve collaboration on customer accounts is to use the feed to share updates specific to the record. These updates can include mentioning users (start by typing @) who will then be notified.
Keeping all internal account communication to a single feed will help you find specific notes, reduce the number of emails sent and start conversations on topics that are visible to other users.
Groups are rooms of certain individuals that can be public or private depending on their need. Each group will have members that can publish and view posts.
Private groups are great for teams to share knowledge, information & documents. They keep discussions in a single place rather than using emails that can potentially get lost or left unread. You can even invite customers to private chatter groups, so they have space where they see updates and shared documents.
Public groups can be used for sharing company updates as well as collecting information on specific topics that are relevant to a broad audience. For example, you can create a group for each major competitor. These groups can be used to share information related to that competitor and ways you have beaten them on deals. This can then be used as a resource hub by other members of the team when they are going up against that competitor to give them the ammunition they need to help them win their deals.
The best place to see groups in action is through the Trailblazer Community.
Streams are custom feeds that you can build from the people & records you follow as well as groups that you are members of. They are a great way to focus on the feed information that is most important to you. You can get alerted about ongoing activities that you may not have been mentioned in explicitly.
The best place to find out more on Chatter is through Trailhead. After that, if you are still not sure where to start, or you are looking at ways to improve collaboration on Salesforce, get in touch and one of our experts will be happy to help.
Einstein Prediction Builder is a point and click AI tool and is available to purchase as one of the tools within the Einstein suite. In the Spring ’20 release, customer can now get one free prediction. So what is Einstein Prediction Builder, and what can you do with it?
Einstein Analytics is a product that is evolving rapidly and becoming more popular, mainly due to licences being included with other Salesforce projects such as Pardot.
Continue reading “Stepping into the world of Einstein Analytics”
It’s that time of year again. We may still be in Autumn, running Salesforce Winter. However, Spring’20 is just around the corner.
The festive season is a time to wind down and prepare for the new year for many businesses. A lot have code or development freezes because of the vital end of year figures coming out. Others have a skeleton crew because people are using up their annual leave. And this can often leave you wondering, what can I do to be productive over the festive period?
Continue reading “Running Salesforce over the Festive Season”
If you have been working with Salesforce for a while, you will have heard about Trailhead. Trailhead is Salesforce’s free to use learning platform. It helps Admins, Developers and users get a better understanding of the ever-growing Salesforce platform.
The Institute of Customer Services describes Customer Experience (CX) as what an organisation does to meet customer expectations and achieve customer satisfaction. Most businesses are working to improve their customer’s satisfaction. Have you considered how the same principles could improve internal customer satisfaction?
One of the biggest things that you notice when you move across to Lightning are the differences to Lightning Pages. When Lightning came out, it arrived with the Lightning App Builder. This powerful tool took page layouts to the next level. Giving you the flexibility to update anything on the page, display it in different formats and remove things you don’t use.
With Salesforce classic, each page had the same format, and without using other tools or writing code, you had no way of changing this.
Lightning pages are designed to work with components. These little reusable blocks can be moved around the page, giving you a lot more flexibility. This gives you the ability to put the most used and essential things front and centre while keeping things that are rarely used to other areas, so that they are still available, but don’t get in the way.
Lightning pages can be made up of standard components, components you have downloaded from the AppExchange and components you have built yourself. These are dragged onto the page layout and customised.
The range of components available includes basic requirements such as the record details, activity timeline and related lists. You also have components such as tabs and accordion that give you different options for displaying data, so you can hide data to make the page cleaner and easier to use.
Out of the box, most pages come with a header and right sidebar. However, there are nine templates you can choose from, and if you are feeling adventurous, you can even build your own templates.
Templates give you power over how data is displayed; for example, you can have 3 columns to try and keep most of the content of the page on the screen without scrolling.
Although not new (you could add 2 charts to a classic page). You can add multiple report charts to a page layout. This means that you can have various ways of looking at the records data without going to a report or dashboard.
Flows are powerful processes that can perform multiple actions or multiple records at once all without writing any code. The flow screen component lets you add your creations to a records page. My favourite use of these is quick creation screens such as creating a contact or opportunity from an account page.
Lightning pages are powerful and can significantly increase user productivity. Not sure where to start? Take a look at the Lightning App Builder and Quick Start: Lightning App Builder modules on Trailhead. Otherwise, get in touch with us here and we’ll be happy to help!
You’ve seen the signs for some time. The mornings are getting lighter, the weather is getting a little less gloomy, and daffodils are popping up all over the place. That can only mean that Spring is officially here and, just like with your own home, it is time to get your hands dirty and have a spring clean.
Continue reading “Does Your Salesforce Org Need a Spring Clean?”
When did you last check your Salesforce security settings? Data security is a top priority for many organisations, and this has only been exacerbated since the announcement of GDPR. Just like ourselves, without regular checkups, your Org might not be as healthy as you thought.
One of the many aspects that many don’t consider when managing Salesforce is protecting your data from loss or corruption. A CRM system is only as powerful as the data you hold in it. Continue reading “The cost of not having a data backup”