Table of Content
Creating the Perfect User Experience
Innovation should be at the heart of every Salesforce project. Whether you are implementing Salesforce for the first time or iterating on a well-established, complex Salesforce org, marrying the needs of your end users to clean, scalable Salesforce solutions will transform your organization’s ability to operate.
What You’ll Learn
- How to create a perfect user experience in Salesforce by understanding your users and balancing their needs with clean, scalable solutions.
- The importance of using Salesforce’s point-and-click architectural toolset to achieve rapid innovation and agility.
- Practical tips for delivering innovation in Salesforce, including reducing manual processes, automating tasks, and integrating systems.
Creating an innovative Salesforce instance is critical to transforming your organization and reimagining your internal processes for a better user and client experience. Using Salesforce’s quick modular architecture allows businesses to scale their digital operations to their specific needs very quickly, so that end users and management can get quantifiable insight into their business while making it easier for your teammates to do their jobs.
The secret to nimble Salesforce agility comes from leveraging Salesforce’s point-and-click architectural toolset, before introducing custom code into your environment. The nature of Salesforce’s core architecture allows for quick deployments and easy change, empowering Salesforce Administrators and Developers to release their projects rapidly and make updates to their build easily as business processes transform over time. Innovation becomes easier when it can be stood up and changed quickly.
Don’t think that low-code architecture creates a stiff product or that standard architecture limits your ability to innovate. It’s quite the opposite–a declarative-first toolset allows for easier modularization of your work, allowing you to rapidly design and implement quick changes.
Start with Understanding Your Users
Innovation is one of Salesforce’s core values. Salesforce’s vision of innovation is not limited to the projects you deliver, but the how and why behind these efforts. Even though the Salesforce toolset makes it quick to deploy changes, it is still important to understand who you’re building for and the intent of their change request before you dive into any design work.
To deliver a truly innovative solution, you need to understand what you’re doing before you make any changes. Only then should you solve the underlying technological problem, in a way that’s easy for your end users to adopt. Failing to understand the intent of your users and the overall goal of the build itself leads to abandonment and project failure. Be warned that, at times, end users won’t really know what they’re actually asking for, so it’s on you to understand the issue they’re really facing and present them with the most appropriate solutions to their challenges. Since you are the expert, you will need to ask your end users the right questions to come up with the best solution. Take time to prepare these questions in advance, it will not only help you get all the information you need, but will also position you as a true professional.
Find the Right Balance
There is a fine balance between inbound requests and proactive innovation, but the key to getting the best performance from your Salesforce org will always be balancing your design between the needs of your end-users and clean architectural implementation.
You should always work closely with your end-users. You need to step into their shoes, really understand their challenges and goals, and read between the lines of their requirements. You may be the technical expert on this platform and your business users may have pressing needs, but simplifying Salesforce should not be forgotten as a goal.
Salesforce agility helps businesses solve issues and wow clients, but always be sure to use declarative options in your architecture before looking at code-based solutions within Salesforce. Making Salesforce work better also involves respecting its intended design, while matching its OOTB capabilities to the needs of the business you serve.
Tips for Delivering Innovation in Salesforce
When beginning your innovation journey, there are a few quick actions that will help you provide users with agile solutions without compromising on a great experience:
- Look to reduce manual business processes to drive efficiencies – especially look for opportunities where you can reduce end user errors.
- Automate where possible, making it easy for teams to manage their day-to-day in Salesforce, so you can help teams within your organization succeed in their jobs.
- Look at ways to create a command center for your various employee personas (and even client personas, if you’re using Salesforce Sites/Communities), so that they can go to one place to manage their day and see their performance, efficiencies, and bottlenecks.
- Consider how you can integrate systems via APIs or other Salesforce products to reduce your users flipping back and forth between applications and interfaces.
There are a wide variety of excellent methods and tools to assist you with your Salesforce project, some of which do not even require a scratch org and can be enabled in mere seconds, directly in production. You can build practically everything, so use your imagination and do not lose sight of the people who will ultimately inherit your work: your end users as well as the people who have to maintain your Salesforce functionality.
Key Takeaways
- Leverage Salesforce’s modular architecture and point-and-click tools to quickly scale digital operations, making it easier for users to gain insights into their business.
- Innovation requires understanding the needs of your users before implementing changes. Properly understanding user requirements helps in building solutions that are easily adopted and prevent project failures.
- Balance the design between meeting end-user needs and maintaining clean architectural implementation. Use declarative options before turning to custom code solutions to respect Salesforce’s intended design and optimize functionality.
- Focus on reducing manual processes, automating tasks, creating command centers for users, and integrating systems to improve efficiency and user experience. Always keep end users and maintenance teams in mind while designing solutions to ensure sustainability and ease of use.
Want to leverage the power Salesforce’s innovative toolset for providing exceptional user experience and rapid ROI? Download our Quick Guide: 5 Easy Ways to Introduce Salesforce Innovation