💃 Undefeated Salesforce Ticket Systems 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! There’s a 95% chance you’ve worked on, or in, a ticket system.

As an admin or consultant building out a Service Cloud org. Or as an admin, using a ticket system as your conveyer belt of misery opportunity 😃.

Maybe even a non-Salesforce app like Zendesk, ServiceNow or Jira.

But did you know how there are 3 key components of a ticket system that can make a ticket system hum 🎶 ?

DREAMWORLD

The Perfect Salesforce Ticket System

A Severity-1 ticket drops. You know because you, and every manager and executive, receives an doomsday email notification.

You read the ticket - Urgent! Docusign is down, users cannot write sales contracts!

Included in the email is a Zoom link, the escalation bridge for all sev1 tickets. You quickly join and the VP of Sales and a few sales managers are already on.

The VP asks - can you login to docusign directly? And send contracts from there? The answer is yes, and the executives agree this is not a Severity-1 because there is a workaround and business can be conducted, albeit with added friction.

The ticket is downgraded to Severity-2 and assigned to you to resolve. You’re advised to drop what you’re doing, focus on this, and provide hourly updates until it’s resolved.

You discover the admin user that the Docusign account was linked to was deactivated and then reconfigure a new admin owner. Once you’ve confirmed the issue is resolved, you close the ticket and send out the root cause analysis (a Sev2 requirement!).

However, you’re concerned that an administrative user was deactivated without the proper offboarding steps being taken, so you create a tier-3 ticket for yourself to validate the offboarded user is not impacting anything else.

😮‍💨

Just another day as a Salesforce professional 😅.

BEAR ESSENTIALS

Salesforce Ticket System Must-Haves

Every good ticket system has 3 essential components. The ticket trifecta!

1) CTI - Category, Type, Item

A good CTI configuration is a well-plumbed factory. Requests are cleanly routed to queues and specialists 🧑‍🔬. Backend ticket reporting gives managers insights into common requests, exceptional requests, areas that don’t get many requests and areas that get too many requests 🧐. Powerful stuff 💯!

Here’s a breakdown of the CTI components -

👉 Category is the highest level. If this was a trucking transportation business, categories might include Maintenance, Pickup/Delivery, IT, and Invoicing.

👉 Type is one level down. If the Category is maintenance, then the Types may be Engine, Tires, Fuel, and Drivecam.

👉 Item is the most specific level. Rolling with the same example, Category: Maintenance, Type: Engine, then Items could include Oil Change, Spark Plugs, Overheating, and Rebuild/Replace.

Full example-

• Category: Maintenance

• Type: Engine

• Item: Oil Change

2) Ticket Severity

Ticket severity is a simple, no-nonsense way to prioritize requests. It’s also the salt to CTI’s pepper, perfect mates 🤝!

Here is an example of severity values you could have in your ticket system-

🖐️ Tier 5 is an enhancement request. Perhaps a minor inconvenience. Like updating the label on a field.

🙅 …there is no Tier 4! The value of not having a Tier 4 is it creates a clear segmentation between a nice to have and a need to have.

🤟 Tier 3 means an internal team or department is impacted. Sales Ops needs a list loaded or Marketing needs new UTM fields created for enriched lead source metrics.

✌️ Severity 2 is a business critical issue. Revenue is significantly negatively impacted. Entire teams, departments, or regions are handcuffed. This could be the ERP integration with Salesforce breaks or someone forgot to pay the Salesforce bill and org is locked-out.

👆 Severity 1 is a freeway pile-up 🫣. Business revenue has come to a halt and every second the issue remains, the business sheds value. The ERP goes offline or an act-of-God like an earthquake ceases critical operations.

One thing about Sev1’s is you’ll remember them for the rest of your life 😓.

3) Escalation Management

Remember from the example where a Zoom link was included in the Sev1 notification email?

You need intentional, well-defined processes to manage escalations. Your ticket system, with its CTIs and severity levels, is the backbone to this.

Now layering in notifications, communication channels, and SOPs to guarantee the death of an escalation.

🗣️ Notifications - from our original example, the creation of a Sev1 ticket auto-generated an email to those who need-to-know.

📞 Communication channels - the example also included a Zoom link in the auto-generated email. Having a war room delivered to you to align and strategize with your team removes friction and saves valuable time.

🫡 SOPs - aka Standard Operating Procedures help to remove decision-making and get right to action-taking. And in the case from our example, a root cause analysis for high-severity tickets nurtures an anti-fragile culture 💪.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

When the ticket system is sloppy then you’re adding friction to resolving issues.

When the ticket system hums, then not only are issues resolved faster, but you’re generating insights that will improve operations and possibly eliminate some issues entirely 💪.

So which do you wanna be? Sloppy like a teenagers bedroom?

Or humming and tight like these guys?

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes