Codey, Astro, Appy, Muley, and Cloudy sitting near a cliff on their laptops below text that says, "Configure Salesforce to Support Responsible, Inclusive Innovation."

How Admins Can Configure Salesforce to Support Responsible, Inclusive Innovation

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As an admin, you play a major role in how customers and colleagues experience Salesforce. Choices you make can connect your organization’s mission/purpose to the power of cutting-edge technology. When it comes to your org’s values, this is especially important, because customers care about what businesses believe in, and it’s often admins who translate those values into real-world support.

When you log in to Salesforce, you have access to tons of tools to help you live out your values in interactions with customers, communities, and markets. And using these tools can really pay off! In fact, taking advantage of built-in features like ethical personalization can help avoid hidden costs, like having to reconfigure Salesforce to address a problem after you start using it.

So, where should you look for these tools, and what can they do to help your organization succeed responsibly? Let’s look at some of what’s available in Salesforce products.

An accessible option

Different people need different things—and technology should accommodate! Too often, though, choices made during design or implementation exclude people who may work, live, and think in ways the designers didn’t plan for.

But the best technology in the market should be available to everyone. The Salesforce built-in accessibility features help admins configure an experience that everyone can enjoy. We use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Revised 508 Standards, and EN 301 549  standards to improve how our products work for everyone.

You don’t have to know all those standards yourself to know you’re delivering an accessible result, either. In-app guidance helps you identify the best steps to take when dealing with particular accessibility concerns.

Admins drive authentic innovation

People feel their best when they feel they can bring their authentic selves to shopping, working, or receiving a service—whatever they do. As an admin, you’ll be a big part of how your organization connects with both customers and employees. Every situation is different, but all admins have to deal with questions like:

  • What information they should collect and store.
  • How to deliver meaningful insights to product and service teams while respecting privacy.
  • How to combat bias and still deliver valuable information about customers, businesses, and more.

Fortunately, those aren’t questions to answer by yourself. Salesforce products are built to empower peoples’ diverse identities, with out-of-the box features like inclusive pronoun and gender identity fields, and, with the Summer 2023 release, the “Mx.” salutation.

As an admin, you can support inclusion with ethical personalization and data management, which allows your organization to identify, collect, and leverage information while still respecting the people at the heart of the process.

Empower with intent

It’s not always easy to fully research complex issues while supporting a busy business in real time. That’s why it’s important for the tools you use to default to support your values. In our work to improve Salesforce products, one of the biggest lessons we learned was the importance of empowering people whose perspectives weren’t addressed in the original design. By working together with diverse communities from different places, beliefs, and backgrounds, we hope to share a seamless experience—no matter who the user is.

You can see that effort at work in practical guides for admins, like our Guide to Privacy and Ethical Use of Gender-Related Data, which leverages insights from a wide range of perspectives—including customers, subject matter experts, and employee resource groups.

And features like intentional defaults inside our products help you create better experiences by design. The options selected out of the box when you first configure Salesforce aren’t random, or designed with the minimum in mind. Instead, the defaults reflect research and feedback about the most ethical and inclusive options for most customers.

In other words, from the moment you boot up Salesforce, you can be confident that the default selections prioritize safety, trust, inclusion, and accessibility. These values aren’t just compatible with Salesforce technology—they’re built in by design.

Doing the right thing should be simple. As a Salesforce Admin, you have the tools in hand to take on future business challenges while upholding the values that make your organization stand out. Learn more about the connection between things like data, AI, admins, and trust here.

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