Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we talk to Katherine Clark, Vetforce Product Manager at Salesforce. This is the third episode in our Behind the Customer Stories series for the Admin Keynote at Dreamforce. We’ll find out about her story and how she connects experiences for her users.
Join us as we talk about how she connects Vetforce members with the skills and careers that they need as a solo Admin, with the help of automation.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Katherine Clark.
Coming home to Vetforce.
The last time we had Katherine on the pod she told us about how she found Vetforce and how that opened up the Salesforce ecosystem for her. Now we’ve found her in an entirely different position— working at Salesforce managing the Vetforce instance.
When Katherine first saw the job posting, she figured she would share it to find someone else in her network that would be a great fit. “As I was reading through it, I realized that role would be me coming home,” she says, “I would be helping others in the military community do the same thing I did and find their dream role as a Salesforce Admin.”
The Vetforce redesign process.
“I came into Vetforce at a really interesting time,” Katherine says, “they were right in the middle of this massive redesign project of Vetforce.” Vetforce is run on Salesforce built on Community Cloud, “but it had been designed many years ago and was just ready for a facelift.” When she came onboard they were in the design phase, “it was great for me, as an Admin, that I got to see everything from conceptualization and research to an end project. It gave me so much appreciation as a project manager to see what such a large redesign encompasses.”
The redesign process was based on feedback from the Vetforce community. For one thing, they had received the feedback that members preferred time-bound tangible goals, like “I want to become a Salesforce Administrator,” or “I want to become a Salesforce Developer.” From there they can jump into becoming an Advanced Administrator or a Pardot Consultant on their own and advance at their own pace. If this sounds a little like Trailhead to you, you’re right, and Vetforce has several integrations with the platform.
How automation helps Katherine as a solo Admin.
One of the defining features of Vetforce is the strong community they’ve built. “Something that really helps our community thrive is harnessing the automation that Salesforce provides,” Katherine says, “we use Community Cloud to set up the groups and set up a real place for our members to connect, but then also because of our integrations we’re able to pull in information from other systems and other places.” That lets them automate the delivery of their benefits so, for example, if they see that someone has earned 100 Trailhead badges they can automatically place them in a new group in Vetforce.
This kind of automation is really important to Katherine because she’s a solo Admin. “There’s nobody at the desk next to me that I can turn to and ask questions,” she says, so using things like cases and knowledge are big timesavers to help her members get connected to Salesforce skills and careers as quickly as possible.
The future of Vetforce.
“Number one on my innovation horizon is Einstein Bot,” Katherine says, “I’m really excited about the power of it and what it can do for our community.” We did a three-part series on Einstein Bots for Admins, so we definitely share in the excitement. The personalization is really exciting, especially for a unique community like Vetforce.
Personalization and customization is the name of the game for communities, and there’s a lot that Katherine can do as an Admin without having to get a developer involved. “I really enjoy being able to, on a Monday morning, pull in a component and give our community members exactly what they need at exactly the right time.” Just like with Lightning App Builder, custom components are the backbone of what makes a community like Vetforce tick.
Coming to the Dreamforce stage…
“Last year, after Dreamforce was over, I posted a photo of the Marc Benioff keynote with the message, ‘I don’t know how Dreamforce next year is going to live up to this Dreamforce,’” Katherine says. This year, Gillian featured Katherine’s story in the Admin Keynote, bringing to life all the ideas we’ve talked about it. If you didn’t catch it in person, be sure to tune in online to catch Parker Harris, Mike Gerholdt, Gillian, Katherine, and more. “We’re really excited for everyone to see inside our front door,” Katherine says.
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