Insight: Top Features That Drive Adoption

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking to Zayne Turner, Lead Developer Evangelist at Salesforce, to talk about features that can help you drive adoption at your organization.

More about this Insights session: Zayne has a lot of experience with features as a Developer Evangelist, so listen as we get into a deep discussion about how specific features can help get your team onboard.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Zayne Turner and Gillian Bruce.

Features and coffee.

“Features are like adding things to your coffee,” Zayne says. Not everyone takes their coffee the same way, and similarly, some features are going to be perfect for your team but not so perfect for the other folks down the hall. “People need things there for them to help them use the tool.”

“Executive buy-in is how you make a rollout sustainable,” Zayne says, and features can really make that persuasive case you need to make. For executive level, you want to find a to help them quickly and easily connect with what’s happening throughout the organization (dashboards are great for that).

Driving adoption comes down to relevance.

For Zayne, “relevance is the key” to get people to see the value and make a move to Lightning. Visualizing data is a quick way to get there, whether it’s a dashboard with key data points or report charts on record pages so your team can see what’s going on at a glance. The best part is that you don’t have to build a whole dashboard because you can just use the utility bar to put that anywhere on the app.

Ultimately, the key to adoption is to find ways to remove friction from the Salesforce experience and create a natural, seamless experience. “Make context wrap around your users: wherever they are in Salesforce they can get at what they need, and what they need isn’t hard to find.”

Diving into the Utility Bar.

Zayne has taught at a zillion Lightning Now tours, so she’s something of an expert in the utility bar. Gillian is a fan of Chatter, and specifically the “Chatter Brag.” Another smooth move is to make a custom logo for a utility bar component to add a little more flavor to your app.

“The little touches that make it seem more personalized are great, but you also want to make sure you’re not overloading the utility bar either.” Instead, think about why your users would want to do a particular thing and go from there.

You want to make sure that you’re putting components in a useful place for how they’re going to be used. If it’s something that people are always doing throughout their day, you’re going to want to set it as a global action. Quick actions, on the other hand, “are a really great secret place for executive buys.” You can “action all the things” to hack productivity for your team.

Other Lightning features that can hack adoption.

In Lightning, any app can be a console app, which means you don’t have to have a zillion browser tabs open. The thing to realize is that “console is a navigation style and an increase in efficiency” because it gives you a lot of great options for getting info fast.

It was a “hallelujah moment” when Zayne saw that dynamic pages were coming in the Winter release. They let you get things out of the way when your users don’t need to see them or put stuff right in front of their face when they do need that information.

Favorites are also a fantastic way to help your users get where they want to go more quickly. “As someone who prides themselves on their Salesforce navigation skills, I was stubborn about using favorites for a while,” Zayne says. But when they were getting ready for the Dreamforce Developer Keynote she needed to do the same thing over and over, and when she finally favorited a couple of list views, it completely changed her view.

Trailhead:

• Lightning Experience Features module
• Lightning Experience Customization module
• Improve Your Classic App by Moving it to Lightning Experience project

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