💃 Every Salesforce Admin NEEDS This🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! It’s Thursday morning, you open your email, and the subject lines read like a dystopian haiku-

HELP ASAP PLEASE

Re: Re: Re: Fwd: Problem

Hey quick question…..

😩

There’s no context. No categorization. No prioritization, or, rather, everything is priority.

You spend the next 3 coffees ☕️ playing detective, piecing together scattered clues across Slack, email, and hallway conversations.

Meanwhile, your email unreads have doubled…

😩😩😩

☝️ BEFORE…AFTER 👇

Ticket, Please!

That nightmare scenario was before you implemented a shiny ticket system ✨.

After you’ve rolled out your Service Cloud/Zendesk/ServiceNow or whatever your ticket application of choice is, then you can enjoy-

🎉 Every request drops into the ticket queue, with a Category - Type - Item.

🎉 A priority level gives you an indicator of what order to attack each ticket.

🎉 A resolution code at the end both validates and infuriates you when the “User error” continues to lead all resolutions codes 😩.

🎉 ^And you’re able to quickly show your leadership where your time is being allocated, and why. In fact, they can self-serve this by checking out the reports and dashboards you built.

A polished ticket system is more than just a dumping ground for “stuff to do.” It’s an insight engine, capable of converting-

👉 Chaos into clarity

👉👉 Clarity into process improvements (and automation!)

👉👉👉 Process improvements into measurable revenue impact

And when you run it well, you’re not just an admin, you’re a strategic operator with receipts 🧾.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD TICKET SYSTEM?

3 Key Components of a Ticket System

CTI aka Category → Type → Item

Think of CTI’s like Netflix categories. Here’s what we mean-

😣 Without CTI’s, you’d scroll forever through an ocean of random titles.

😃 With them, you can dial in your search, for example Comedy → RomCom → Matthew McConaughey

For tickets, it’s the same:

😣 Without CTI: “Issue with account.” Could be billing, could be a user can’t login, could be witchcraft 🤷🏻.

😃 With CTI: “Finance → Billing → Payment Processing.” Now you can assign it (automatically via routing rules 💪) to the right person.

Ticket Priority

Plenty of ways to serve this up, but we like Severity levels. Here’s a breakdown

🙂 Tier5 - This is a low-priority, minimal impact severity to a single user or small group of people. That’s why you use “Tier” instead of “Severity,” because you don’t want anyone freaking out 😅. A Tier5 example is a user requesting their Salesforce password be reset 🙄.

😬 Tier3 - This is a step up in severity from Tier5 because it impacts a team, department, or executive-level user. While the issue may not be deep, it’s impact is wide because of the proportion of users, or seniority of the user, it impacts. For example, the Marketing Team’s profile was modified and they no longer have access to the UTM fields on the Lead.

☹️ Sev2 - This needs immediate attention because revenue is impacted until it is resolved! Money is literally being lost because of this issue! An example is the docusign integration is broken and salespeople can’t send out contracts 😳.

🥵 Sev1 - This is bad. You hope to never experience this. If you’ve seen 2 of these in your career, you probably have some gray hairs. It can be an act of God - a hurricane takes the Southeast region offline. It can be a preventable catastrophe, like the database admin accidentally drops a table from Master Data. ( Both of these examples are why redundancy exists.)

Every ticket is assigned a priority. And the admin has the ability to change the status.

Resolution Codes

The pot of gold 💛 at the end of rainbow 🌈. Here is why resolution codes are so valuable-

When it’s budget season, and the ticket KPIs show-

📊 65% of the tickets were resolved by the sole Salesforce admin, with a majority of root causes being user error.

📊 35% of the tickets were resolved by other departments where multiple people from multiple teams are supporting, with most root causes being system error.

You don’t need a strategy wizard 🧙 to understand that the C-Suite needs to invest in their Salesforce support, through some combination of augmenting the Salesforce team and compensating the Salesforce professional for the effectiveness of your application design and build, and your excellent support record 💪.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

The takeaway is to have a ticket system…and enforce users using it!

A ticket system may not sound glamorous…until you realize it’s the map of where your company’s problems live, and where its opportunities are hiding (…and how un-glamorous it is to not have a ticket system 😬).

Run it well, and you don’t just solve tickets…

You reduce waste ♻️. You speed up revenue 🤑. You save money 💰.

And in the process, you build a career that leadership can’t ignore.

Because in the end, the person who controls the queue controls the story…and that person should be you 🙂.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes