How I Solved It with Jennifer Lee

Prepare Your Data for Agentforce | How I Solved It

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Welcome to “How I Solved It.” In this series, we do a deep dive into a specific business problem and share how one Awesome Admin chose to solve it. This episode has a twist—the admin is me! I’ll guide you through how to solve challenges with Agentforce.


Key business problem

Hey Awesome Admins, I’d like to dive into a topic that's absolutely critical for getting the most out of Agentforce: data quality.

We know Agentforce is all about delivering those personalized, in-the-moment experiences that build loyalty and drive amazing results. But here’s a crucial truth: Agentforce is only as powerful as the data that fuels it. Trying to run Agentforce with messy data is like baking a gourmet cake with stale ingredients—it just won’t deliver the masterpiece you’re aiming for! In the world of Agentforce, clean, reliable data is your star ingredient. It's what empowers your agents to be superheroes, armed with the right information at their fingertips, right when they need it.

Want to get your data in prime condition? Check out my two new “How I Solved It: Prepare Your Data for Agentforce” episodes, packed with tips and tricks, to see these concepts in action.

How I solved it

The not-so-hidden cost of messy data

Admins, let's be real. Imagine a customer contacts you with an urgent problem. Your agent pulls up their record, and it's a hot mess—wrong address, missing purchase history, outdated preferences. The agent struggles, the customer gets understandably frustrated, and the entire interaction goes sideways. Does that scenario send a shiver down your spine? That's the real impact of bad data.

It leads to:

  • Wasted time: Agents spend valuable minutes trying to make sense of inaccuracies instead of doing what they do best: solve problems.
  • Customer frustration: No one enjoys repeating themselves or feeling as though a company doesn't know them.
  • Missed opportunities: Without the full, accurate picture, agents can't personalize interactions or offer the most relevant solutions.

Your winning framework: Assess, cleanse, and govern for Agentforce success

So, how do we flip the script? How do we transform that data chaos into Agentforce fuel? It all starts with a solid framework. Here’s my go-to approach: Assess, Cleanse, Govern.

1. Assess: Give your data a health check

Think of this as your data's annual physical exam. We need to check its vital signs.

  • Accuracy: Is the information correct?
  • Completeness: Are all the important fields filled out?
  • Consistency: Is all the data formatted uniformly? Phone numbers and dates are big offenders, between dashes, slashes, or parentheses (for area code).
  • Uniqueness: Are there duplicate records causing confusion? This is a big one!
  • Timeliness: Is the data current?
  • Relevance: Is the data genuinely useful for Agentforce?

Okay, let’s get real. How did your data do at its checkup? Did it get sent home with recommendations to get into better shape?

Salesforce tools to the rescue: Assess and cleanse

Salesforce equips us with some fantastic tools for both assessment and cleansing.

  • List Views: These are perfect for quickly spotting records that need immediate attention. For example, you can whip up a list view to find all Contacts missing an email address for quick, targeted cleanup.

List view containing contacts with missing email addresses.

  • Reports: These are your analytical powerhouses! Use them to identify trends, uncover inconsistencies, and get a big-picture view of your data quality.

Report with accounts missing data.

But when do you use them?

  • Use List Views for fast identification and immediate action on individual records.
  • Use Reports for analyzing trends, pinpointing widespread issues, and tracking data quality improvements over time.

2. Cleanse: Scrub that data clean!

Once you've identified the problem areas, it's time to roll up your sleeves and clean house.

  • Validation rules are your automated data guardians. They prevent bad data from entering your system in the first place. Important note: Always consider required fields and automation (like Flow) before relying solely on validation rules.

Let’s start with a fairly simple example: Ensure every contact has an email address. Here, we’re checking that if the email is blank, then it displays an error message.

Validation rule to ensure the contact has an email address.

Now that you’re warmed up, here’s an example of a more complex validation rule. We need to ensure that the “high priority” accounts have a primary contact and that the primary contact has an email. Critical consideration: Validation rules can impact integrations and automation, so rigorous testing is key!

Validation rule to ensure the high priority account has a primary contact and the primary contact has an email address.

Lastly, when working with validation rules, consider bypassing rules. Sometimes, you'll need to temporarily bypass rules (like during data loads) that ignore the validation rules you have in place so it doesn’t bring the data load process to a screeching halt. There are a few ways to handle this; using Custom Hierarchy Settings is one way.

Here’s the same validation rule but with the bypass validation rule mechanism in place.

Validation rule to ensure the high priority account has a primary contact and the primary contact has an email address or if the bypass validation rule is set to true.

Custom Settings is very similar to a custom object. Here, I created a checkbox field to indicate whether or not to bypass the validation rule.

BypassValidationRules custom settings.

In this example, I’ve configured a user, Addison Maisley, and a profile, Account Integration, to bypass the validation rule.

Examples of custom settings set at the user and profile level.

Duplicate records are a major roadblock to Agentforce efficiency. Duplicate Management tools are your best friend for identifying, merging, and preventing those pesky duplicates.

This custom account matching rule identifies accounts by requiring a fuzzy match on non-blank company names and exact matches on non-blank phone numbers, billing countries, and billing states.

Example of an Account matching rule.

Let's get into how Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) and Flow are your dynamic duo for data cleansing. Keeping your data in top shape isn't a one-off task; it's an ongoing commitment, and these tools are essential for making that process effective and manageable. Tune into the second video to learn more.

3. Govern: Keep your data sparkling with proactive strategies

Once you've assessed and cleansed, your next mission is to govern that data—to put smart, ongoing processes in place to maintain its quality. This is where you ensure Agentforce has consistently reliable fuel! Here’s the condensed guide to making proactive governance stick.

  • Data Governance: Establish clear ownership and standards. Know who's responsible for what data and set clear rules for how it's managed. This creates accountability and consistency.
  • Regular Audits: Schedule routine data quality checks. Regularly review, look for, and fix data issues using tools like Reports, List Views, or even SOQL. This helps catch problems early.
  • User Training: Empower your users to be data stewards. Train everyone on why good data matters and how to maintain it. When users understand the impact, they become data champions.
  • Flow Automation: Automate data quality tasks. Use Flow to handle repetitive data cleanup and consistency tasks automatically. This saves time and reduces errors.
  • User Feedback: Get input from your frontline data users. Your reps use the data daily and can spot issues you might miss. Create a way for them to easily report problems and share insights.

By making these proactive steps a regular part of your routine, you're building a rock-solid data foundation for Agentforce success!

Use SOQL for deep, continuous data insights and investigation

Think of SOQL as your ever-vigilant data detective for ongoing governance. It helps you find those subtle issues that could compromise data integrity over time.

Tackle real-world governance (like in my video!)

Imagine Agentforce uses an “Account_Status__c” picklist for customer support entitlements. Over time, legacy statuses like “Preferred” might linger, or customers might not get upgraded to “Platinum”, leading to wrong support tiers or missed offers. An SOQL query can swiftly identify accounts with these outdated or incorrect status values by filtering for any values not in your defined active set (‘Standard’, ‘Premium’, ‘Gold’, ‘Platinum’), helping you ensure accurate routing.

SELECT Id, Name, Phone, Type, Industry, BillingStreet, BillingCity, BillingState, BillingPostalCode, Priority__c, Status__c
FROM Account
WHERE Status__c NOT IN ('Standard', 'Premium', 'Gold', 'Platinum', '')
AND Status__c != NULL
LIMIT 20

Perform broader governance checks

Beyond specific picklist issues, SOQL is fantastic for regularly finding orphaned records, validating complex business rules that reports can't easily check, and spotting inconsistencies across related objects.

Your SOQL toolkit for governance

  • Workbench: Great for quick, exploratory queries to investigate potential data issues.
  • Data Loader: Useful for exporting larger datasets identified by SOQL for analysis or cleanup.
  • Code Builder: An integrated environment where you can directly execute SOQL queries to explore your data.

Flow automation: Your proactive governance workhorse

Flow is your key to automating those essential data quality tasks and processes, making your governance strategy efficient and consistent. Instead of relying on manual checks for everything, let Flow handle the routine work!

  • Enforce data standards. Go beyond basic validation rules. Use Flow to implement more complex data validation logic or to standardize data automatically upon creation or update (for example, ensuring all phone numbers follow a specific format or auto-populating related fields based on specific criteria to maintain consistency).
  • Maintain data relationships. Automatically update related records when a key piece of information changes, ensuring data integrity across your objects.
  • Flag issues proactively. Configure flows to identify records that fall out of compliance with your data governance standards and automatically create tasks for data stewards to review them.

Here’s the example flow I used in the video. For each case record created, it determines whether the contact has a preferred contact method and, if so, updates the preferred contact method field on the case.

Example flow used in How I Solved It video.

By strategically using SOQL for deep investigation and Flow for automating your data standards and quality checks, you're building a robust governance framework. This proactive approach ensures your data remains a powerful asset, empowering Agentforce to deliver those exceptional customer experiences every single day!

Level up with Data Cloud

We all know the dream—that perfect, complete, 360-degree view of our customers. But the reality is that customer data often lives in a LOT of different houses. Your transactional data might be in one system, website interactions in another, support tickets in yet another, and marketing engagement data somewhere else entirely. This creates data silos. Trying to piece it all together manually for your reps? That’s a recipe for frustration and missed opportunities.

If you’re wrestling with these data silos, Data Cloud is an incredibly powerful solution designed to tackle this exact challenge head-on. Think of it as your central hub for all things customer data. Data Cloud helps you:

  • Unify your data: First things first, Data Cloud connects to your various data sources, whether they're other Salesforce orgs, external databases, marketing platforms, or data lakes. It brings all that disparate data together into one place. No more system swiveling for your reps!
  • Harmonize your data: This is where the real magic happens! Simply bringing data together isn't enough if it's still a jumbled mess. Data Cloud helps you create a single, unified profile for each customer. It uses sophisticated identity resolution to understand that “Jen Lee” from your ecommerce system is the same “Jennifer L.” from your marketing list and the same “J. Lee” in your service portal. This harmonization creates that truly coherent, 360-degree customer view that is so vital for Agentforce.
  • Activate your data: Once you have this unified and harmonized view, Data Cloud allows you to activate it. That rich, consolidated customer profile is now readily available and actionable across your different platforms, especially Agentforce! Your reps and artificial intelligence (AI) agents get the full context of every customer interaction, preference, and history, empowering them to personalize conversations and resolve issues faster than ever before.

How Data Cloud works to connect any data, harmonize profiles, and activate anywhere.

Imagine your agent, human or AI, about to chat with a customer. With Data Cloud powering Agentforce, the agent can instantly see the customer's recent purchases, their last service interaction, their marketing engagement, and even their activity on your website—all in one view! That’s the power of a true 360-degree customer view, and it’s what makes personalized, efficient service a reality.

If you're looking to break down those data walls and truly empower Agentforce with a complete understanding of your customers, Data Cloud is definitely something to explore.

Your mission: Be a data hero

Awesome Admins, it's your time to shine as data quality champions! By putting these strategies into action, you’ll not only supercharge your Agentforce but also create smoother operations and, most importantly, happier customers. Let's make some data magic!

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