Covid-19 changed life completely. Alongside the fear and uncertainty the pandemic brought on and continues to bring, Covid-19 also fast tracked changes to our working environment. Instead of working together in the office, many of us moved to working from home. No more in-person meetings, no more bumping into colleagues at the train station, coffee shop, or elevator, lessening the chance of small talk and easily knowing what your colleagues have on their plate.

Moments like these were great opportunities to catch up on normal life or work related activities such as projects, sales, or challenges. As helpful as instant messenger platforms can be, impromptu conversations are hard to replicate and the beginning of video/phone call meetings (waiting for attendees to login) are not long enough to share these exchanges.
Working remotely may not be a permanent change, but it may become more common going forward. So how can Salesforce facilitate easier collaboration? How can the platform make it easier to share information when we are not working in the same physical space?

Log all stakeholder communication as an activity.
Logging all outbound activities in Salesforce helps avoid reaching out to a prospect who has recently received communication. Before reaching out to a prospect, a glance to the Account or Contact in Salesforce can avoid embarrassing mix-ups and accidental overcommunication. It can be a vital way of keeping up with your organisation’s latest correspondence and tactical communications.

Emails
Achieving Inbox Zero may be a distant dream, but emails are still a necessary utility for organisations. Message and attachments shared by emails can be easily synced to a Salesforce record via Outlook Integration or Gmail Integration. The entire email thread can be synced to Salesforce and be read by the appropriate users.

Chatter
Salesforce’s in-built messaging system allows users to have conversations directly on records. No need to copy and paste the URL, in order to speak about the latest Opportunity.
Questions or comments can be easily added to a record and enhanced with @ mentions and topics (Twitter style hashtags). Users can also follow each other and records to keep abreast of updates made by Users or Key Accounts or Contacts. The behaviour is very similar to social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. Chatter posts and comments will always stay on the record and not be lost to future users. Updates to key fields can be incorporated as automatic Chatter posts, so you can see who and when the change was made. Chatter groups can also be created to allow conversations in public and private groups.

Visibility is key
Setting up the above is great, but it is severely hampered if Users cannot view the pertinent data. Setting up sharing rules correctly can allow Users to view the right data at the right time.

A holistic Salesforce which encourages collaboration but may prod a change to internal operations to avoid punishing Users who share their activities (e.g. stopping internal poaching of customers). Note: keep an eye out for data storage limits and store stale data offline.

Duplicate Rules
Updating Salesforce with Activities, Emails, Chatter, but what if there are several Salesforce records for the same company or contact aka duplicate records? Users will not see the latest information on Account X, if Account Y has the latest updates. Duplicate Rules will help everyone be aligned and reduce the chance of multiple Salesforce records existing for the same Account or Contact. Duplicates rules also need to allow flexibility for scenarios where only a human can determine that it is a duplicate. Having a process to report duplicates is important for manually reviewing duplicate records.

Can I suggest for you to continue suggesting your suggestions?
We learn to live with minor inconveniences to avoid reporting cumbersome changes. Users may have previously reported these changes after walking by the Salesforce Admin’s desk.
Now the User may be required to report small changes through an offline form, which takes 4 clicks to get to, download, fill in and email to a potential blackhole? Make it easy for Users to report small improvements and ask simple questions. Help your Salesforce platform evolve.

As a team of former admins, analysts and architects, CloudFig has valuable insight into enabling native features for your gain. We can help enhance your team’s Salesforce experience and enable collaboration.