Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re continuing our review of great episodes of the past year. This time, we’re revisiting some of our top episodes and guests focused around innovation. Innovation is a core Admin Superpower, both for our companies and our careers and communities. We’ll talk to Nana Gregg, VP Senior Salesforce Administrator at JLL Technology Solutions and Salesforce MVP, Molly Mahar, Product Designer of User Interface and User Experience at Salesforce, and Jimmy Hua, a Lead Member of Technical Staff in Software Engineering at Salesforce and founder of Asiapacforce.
Join us as we talk about how Nana, Molly, and Jimmy have leveraged Salesforce to help makes things easier for their coworkers and customers alike.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nana Gregg, Molly Mahar, and Jimmy Hua.
How Nana uses new releases to deliver innovation.
Nana Gregg doesn’t have a college degree, but her unique path to Salesforce has ended up with her being the VP Senior Salesforce Administrator at JLL Technology Solutions. Nana pegs her success to a hunger for learning more: “I never knew that when I became a Salesforce Admin I would need to learn finance, but I did,” she says. “I learned finance concepts and accounting concepts because I had to implement this AppExchange package, and that has made me a better administrator because I can talk to those teams and understand what they’re asking me to do.”
“If you ask my boss, he would tell you I’m a release geek,” Nana says. The first thing she does when she’s prepping a new release is to focus on the highlights: she looks at the major areas of focus that they use in their org. Within the first week, she sends an email to her boss breaking down the changes by how easy they are to implement. What are no-brainer wins, and what is simple but need a little bit of a process? “By Monday morning, I want to come in and send out an email with all the cool new functionality to get people excited and stay excited about the system and see that we’re continuing to innovate.”
Why data is key for Einstein bots.
Molly Mahar works on Einstein bots, and she shares a lot of tips about how you can use this new and exciting technology in your own org. So how do you get started with your own data? “There’s a number of sources: chat transcripts from Live Agent, case records that have ways that people are asking for these things,” Molly says. However, “people tend to talk differently when chatting with a human than with a bot,” she says, so you need to keep that in mind. “We’ve built the ability to have packages of data for intents that map to your use cases, which you can find on AppExchange,” she says, and there will be more on the way.
One key, however, is that you trust the data going into it in order to train your bot the way that you want. While other natural language bots use public domain data and other sources, it doesn’t necessarily translate into a bot that speaks the same language your customers are speaking. “We want Admins and companies to maintain control over exactly what the bot is learning from,” Molly says, “it’s important that you trust the data going into it.” That’s how you can really deliver that magical experience to your customers that make bots feel like a seamless part of your brand.
How innovation with Salesforce helps deliver equality.
Last but certainly not least, we revisit our talk with Jimmy Hua, who is innovating within the platform to deliver equality. He created a Salesforce app to help manage and promote the Ohana group that do so much amazing work. He got interested through his work as the founder of Asiapacforce. For Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month in May they threw 8 events in San Francisco, and over 20 internationally across the 14 hubs they have for Asiapacforce spread throughout the globe.
“It was actually really hard to manage all these events across different locations and people,” Jimmy says. Keeping track of everything was getting tricky, “I was sitting there and saying to myself, ‘I think there’s a software out there that could help us do this…’ and then I realized I work on the platform every day,” Jimmy says. He realized that he could make something to improve on the visibility of events— with thousands of emails he had no idea what was happening on any particular day.
“One of the biggest things I try to do is to not reinvent the wheel— we want to use other people’s work to build even more things,” he says. Once he looked at his needs, he realized that managing an event works a lot like campaigns. He built out the Salesforce Instance into something called Ohana Network. One of the other Ohana groups was complaining about the same challenges Asiapacforce faced, and even the Office of Equality was doing budgeting with spreadsheets, so Jimmy started adapting it to solve those problems as well.
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