Let’s be honest: you are an admin working in a fast-paced environment where your org is rapidly changing. You have a limited amount of time and resources but you want to ensure your org is performing efficiently. Monitoring end-user adoption and eliminating technical debt are keys to a healthy org but you’re not sure where to start.
Well, good news—here comes Salesforce Optimizer, a new tool from our Adoption Apps team. Salesforce Optimizer is the maintenance, productivity, and adoption app for Salesforce admins. Armed with this tool, admins can:
Through Salesforce Optimizer admins are able to receive actionable insights on areas of improvement with personalized recommendations on how to complete them. To learn the basics about the “what” and “how” of Optimizer, check out the Analyzing Your Org with Salesforce Optimizer Webinar. In this post, I will dive into common use cases that make Optimizer an Admin’s new best friend!
Technical debt will ALWAYS be paid, it’s just a matter of when and how big of a payment you will need to make. A good admin always pays his or her debts. Most enlightened companies try to anticipate the types of debt that will accumulate and build tools and processes to help minimize its accrual (more on that here). Salesforce Optimizer is one of those tools that can help you minimize technical debt accrual in your org by flagging unused fields, users, profiles, roles and identifying limits you may be nearing.
Now it’s just a matter of incorporating Optimizer results into your regular processes. One of the best ways to do this is to reserve a little bit of your time in every release that can be put towards the reduction of technical debt, leveraging the Optimizer to guide your work. Keep in mind each section of the report contains additional information on what you should do or where you can go to learn more about a particular topic. In some cases, there are even links to upcoming webinars and available Accelerators that focus on the issues reported.
When you combine the Optimizer Report with the Lightning Readiness Check you get an in-depth understanding of what it will take to move to Lightning. Use them together to perform gap analysis and plan your rollout project. Many customers use their Lightning rollout project as an opportunity to reduce their technical debt. Technical debt includes all of those customizations that have built up in your Org over time that are no longer used. Combining the power of these two reports is a great way to start building a plan to remove technical debt and prepare your org for Lightning!
While the elimination of technical debt can make your org easier to manage it can also make it more user-friendly— helping to drive adoption. Usability of your org is important to driving adoption. Removing unused fields from a custom object, for example, means your users have fewer fields to look through to find the data they need. But Optimizer goes deeper by showing you Salesforce features you may not be using that can help make your user’s lives much easier.
Salesforce Optimizer will highlight if your org isn’t leveraging native Duplicate Management—a key tool that can help increase the quality of the data in your org. Optimizer can also highlight if your users aren’t leveraging Salesforce1, our free mobile app that lets your users take Salesforce on the go. In Salesforce1 users can update records, post to Chatter, or view data, all from a mobile device. Those are just two examples—Optimizer will look into other areas like Chatter and Sales Cloud to help identify adoption opportunities. Leveraging many of these out-of-the-box features of Salesforce can help drive user adoption in your org to new heights!
How often should I run the Optimizer?
The choice is completely up to you. We recommend admins run the report at least quarterly. However, as you are able to take action on issues reported in Optimizer you may want to run it on an ad-hoc basis to confirm that your actions have resulted in issues being removed from the report. This will allow you to see how your org is changing over time and will allow you to take advantage of improvements we have added to Optimizer. Our team is constantly improving the report based on customer feedback that will result in better insights for you and your organization!
Future of Optimizer
Optimizer truly is an admin’s new best friend—just take a look at all the metrics that are currently in the report right now:
Yup, Astro has a list and Astro’s checking it… well as many times as you want whenever you want! It’s optimization on demand and the Optimizer is only getting better. Coming soon our team will be updating the Optimizer report to allow for faster and easier report consumption. It will include admin productivity and prioritization information, improved summary views for faster consumption, and more data visualizations— Woohoo! Have additional Optimizer questions or want to give us feedback? Post in the Success Community using #OptimizerReportFeedback.
So what are you waiting for? Kick off your Optimizer Report today and start your journey to a better org!
Get more out of Optimizer with the Org Health Assessment Accelerator
As a Premier+ Success Customer, you can get even more out of Optimizer with our Org Health Assessment Accelerator. I’ll let you in on a little secret: the Org Health Assessment is like the great-grandmother of the Optimizer report. It’s been our most popular Accelerator since the launch of the Accelerator program with over 2,000 deliveries to date all across the globe. Our Apps team saw a way to automate many of the insights our Success Specialists were delivering to customers and POOF! Optimizer was born. Running Optimizer alone gives you actionable recommendations and the Org Health Accelerator provides the 1:1 personalized experience that adds even more value. Now Optimizer and the Org Health Assessment go hand-in-hand with our crackerjack Platform Success Specialist team leveraging Optimizer and drilling even deeper into your Org to provide valuable insights.
Additional Resources
This post was written by Fike Corporation, a Salesforce customer. As Salesforce Admins, we’re on the forefront of innovation and digital transformation as we change our businesses. Here at Fike, we’ve seen a lot of change over the 75 years we’ve been in the industrial manufacturing business, but the biggest recent shift has been reinventing […]
Quick Actions in Salesforce are a fast way to predefine field values and streamline inputs for speedy, seamless entry of data—thus their name, Quick Actions. However, do you find that your upper-right-hand bar in Lightning is overloaded or that Case Actions are a bit confusing to end-users? That’s where Quick Actions Everywhere, the open-source (free!), […]
As a Salesforce Admin, one of your core responsibilities revolves around Adoption, ensuring end users are able to take advantage of Salesforce to increase their productivity. Adoption can also be one of the hardest things to drive, because it involves other people. Unlike developing an app or customizing a Lightning page, which are activities fully […]
