Five Things Salesforce Admins Can Do to Improve Adoption

Welcome to “Five Things for Salesforce Admins”— a blog series where we dive into various Salesforce features and talk about five ways you may not have thought about using them before! 

One of the biggest challenges that Salesforce Administrators face is getting end-users to use the system regularly. Often there is a rush of excitement (and fear) when Salesforce is first rolled out to a company, team, or department. Then, that initial burst of enthusiasm passes and it can be hard to get people to change their ways of working. So, here are five things you can do to help!

Enable In-App Guidance

With the Summer ‘19 release, we have a great new feature available to help with adoption: In-App Guidance. This is a way for you to give assistance to users right within the app. You can link to outside documentation, videos, or other useful things. You can also see metrics on how many people are actually clicking on the resources you provide. For more info on this, check the help docs.

Enable Celebrations

Another fantastic new Summer ‘19 feature, Celebrations, allows you to add a sparkle of confetti when you reach a certain stage in a Path. The obvious use case is when an Opportunity becomes Closed/Won, but I bet you have other great examples at your organization too. How about when a Lead reaches a “Ready to Convert” status? Or when your custom Project object changes status to “Complete?” This is a really easy add, and one that I think you’ll find your users enjoy.

Add Help Text Everywhere

Add help text to standard and custom fields so that everyone knows exactly what should go in Salesforce. This is one of the easiest things you can do as an Admin, and is often overlooked. Help text can ensure everyone gets on the same page, and as a bonus will improve your data quality, too! Keep your help text short and sweet, like a tweet. Remember, no fancy formatting, just the bare minimum that gets the point across. View the help docs here.

Use Images in Formula Fields

This is an oldie but a goodie. It’s an effective way to visually identify things like data quality problems, or “high value” Accounts. Almost anywhere you can think of to have a visual of something, this is a super useful tool. And with images displaying in list views, you can make them super powerful and help your users quickly identify high priority items. View the help docs here. Grab the Graphics Pack from the AppExchange.

Add Emoji

I wrote an entire blog post about this, so you should definitely check that post out. However, the TL;DR version is: use emojis in key areas in your Salesforce instance to help make users aware of where they might need to add new information, pick the right choice, use in a formula field to indicate a specific result, or in Chatter as a regular emoji! ??

That’s just a few suggestions of features you can use to improve adoption. What ideas do you have to improve adoption? Let us know in the comments or on twitter with the hashtag #AwesomeAdmin!