Salesforce Support and Having Underwhelming Experiences

How about a real quote,

You are either part of the problem or part of the solution.

J5

So I wanted to follow up with this post trying to think of why it got to such a state with SF Support and make sure I don’t make the same mistakes and let history repeat itself, and also try to be aware of the fact my un enthusiasm is not the case of the whole community, just me.

An Introspective look at the holistic problem with the SF Support Offerings:

Before reading further, this is a rant of a 20 year tech support career against the Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 + divides, not to a specific SF agent or anything toxic like directly insulting them or anyone. I feel this will resonate with anyone who has ever dealt with any support for a gigantic company.

Disclaimer complete, I will continue on by making the problem statement this service solves as: addressing the “dance” of scheduling time, allowing access, explaining your issue with quick response time on demand critically thought out answers, via mediums like Slack and Text for the chat support convenience.

SF Support and Premier Support Problems

It was this all too familiar tech support game of finding time to talk to each other, them never getting close enough to the issue to even know what the fix would be, and the equivalent of links that made me feel like LMGTFY vibe big time.

Now…. I did tech support as I’ve outlined in some of my career posts, and I know these moves from people who don’t know answers or are really just not interested in the details I am offering up, despite them answering their questions. They were just doing their job and reviewing, but there is a level of familiarity you get with your org where it almost is second nature why things happen and their clean slate perspective isn’t as close to a solution as you in your head experiencing it.

Philosophy aside I want to give a better option, and address that problem and address it with this service.

What is the Actual Issue Rather than SF Support “Bad”

There are a few reasons I have seen and it’s ultimately come down to the fact that Tier 1 is not technical or rewarded in that Tier for critically thinking at a helpful level, as a very general statement.

The unicorns will get Tier 2 + jobs and it is luck of the draw and chances are you’ll get someone at a Tier 1 level, and with this you start to see that they are doing the equivalent of case deflection with their canned responses, and also trying to find meeting slots between two probably very busy calendars.

On top of that it has become an escalate-as-needed for severe issues, after ruling out that you basically have “rebooted the router”, so to speak, and then you’ll get some confirmation a fix was made on the backend or that there is some reason that the problem happened.

You can’t really blame the situation on individual reps, and you might even have data that shows that this lower cost tier of support for a business handling 80% of issues with scripted answers in the end saves time of wasting high cost tier support and saves money. I don’t know. All I know is it’s very frustrating when you know if you could just confirm one or 2 details in your head you’d have connections firing that meant potentially solutions to your problem.

I think that is what my goal for this support could be distilled down to, is knowing that being able to log into slack, open a channel or chat and engaging by presenting a problem or question, and getting a well thought out answer with the ability for immediate feedback on follow up questions is worth what the costs end up being dealing with any level of SF support.

Summary:

• Frustrating that submitting a ticket in SF really feels like giving up
• Unfair on my end to think that Tier 1 reps could understand a complex integration or Admin configuration issue.
• The front line support making sure the basics have been checked off and solving your average non-profit non-technical employees questions about things probably saves money at scale
• A solution to the problem is an on demand slack chat support and reference guide where the person has enough experience with Salesforce to give a well thought out response and tailor the response appropriately based on the situation and technical challenges presented.
  • A unique trailhead referral Slack Application created by me allows us to leverage the 2000 hands on training modules and information, as well as Community Post responses to supplement responses with tools that will empower whoever owns the problem to have what they need to be able to fix it.