Introducing
Slack Support Salesforce Caddy
A comprehensive way to get expert Salesforce advice on service on demand and avoid the pitfalls of gigantic invoices from Consultancies and wasted hours with SF Support mishaps.
Highlights:
Live Example and Details
I have always loved to solve problems and troubleshoot more than anything.
It was the most intoxicating thing to solve a major issue or be able to support and be relied on to come through with fixes.
I was able to quickly escalate in support positions and tried to absorb all of the information I could and found helping to be quite fulfilling.
I also found a fascination in being part of the technology as it evolves and seeing what is able to be done these days.
I’ve wrapped these passions and experience and curiosity into a Salesforce Support subscription service and I will begin to describe the benefits of the service below:
Features and Benefits of the Slack Salesforce Chat Support Service
Feature Table of Contents
- Supporting In-House Teams to Minimize Expensive Agency and Wasted Support Time
- Your own dedicated support #channel in Slack in your Workspace
- SF SME on Demand
- What type of Support is Offered?
Supporting In-House Teams to Minimize Expensive Agency and Wasted Support Time
With our service we understand that there are good intentioned Admin and Dev SF pros who are 95% of the way to getting a bug solved, and have almost made sense of an issue.
They have stakeholders to answer to, and despite their best efforts are in a situation they haven’t had to deal with before with a Salesforce problem and are at a fork in the road.
The Admin may be in deep Dev waters or a Dev may be better suited for not spending days fixing an Admin issue, and C-Suite has an optimistic view that the in house SF Team and SF support combined are fast tracking a fix.
You need help whether it be a nudge in the right direction, or a documentation backed root cause analysis, we can help.
Your own dedicated support #channel in Slack in your Workspace
or Ours (for non-slack companies).
- Response time guaranteed for Requesting Assistance
- An answer that gives documentation based reasoning with references and supporting links
- For more complex items, log level analysis of your situation and guidance to help provide needed information about the problem to enable your in house team to solve an issue where realistic
- Benefits of Slack like threading, pinning, Slack apps, mean scrolling through emails and case text walls is not an issue
- US Based, 10x Certified 10year+ experience for assistance and consultation
- Dedicated to Solving your Problem and attempting to minimize need for billable hours to agencies in exchange for self sufficiency with SME expert real time assistance.
- Also minimize unneeded SF Support Ticket Crapshoots, and maximize your teams internal capabilities where companies have an internal SF Team.
SF SME on Demand
Using Slack and more than a decade of daily attention to learning and solving complex technical problems, we are introducing a Service for a medium of “Submit a ticket” transforming to be a reliable source of resolution and savings.
Also a guarantee that if there is a blocker to completion of a work item in your business and an expert answer would move the needle, you can rely on us to get that to you.
Get More Details
Sound like something that could help you? Let me know if you have any questions on the service at all or even if you have any questions about Slack or the Support Service and what we can offer.
Or even a SF question! I will answer ASAP.
What type of Support is Offered?
We have packages that we offer and on top of the packages we add an option to get answers in quicker levels of a Service Level Agreement. The services have 2 considerations
- SLA for response times
- Deliverables to you based on your needs.
The tone from our perspective is a conversational friendly chat for any of the interactions, but we do have specific ways of allowing for an inquiry to have a defined deliverable to set expectations on both sides.
First, we will choose which level engagement suits your team, which varies based on in-house resources available, business impact of a SF bug, solutioning needs, etc.
Package Options
Support on Demand Package (299$/mo/user)
- General Q&A on SF Topics
- General Support Retainer
- Admin/Dev need to Move the Needle
- SF Ticket Submission Guidance to Minimize wasted time
Consultant on Demand Package (499$/mo/user)
- Training Requests
- Urgent Bug Fixes with an SLA
- Huddles for working sessions to solve problems in real time
- SF Ticket Contact Association for Ownership
Developer on Demand Package (799$/mo/user)
- Paired Programming on issues
- Git / Devops Consultation and support
- SFDX guidance / training / q & a
- Deployment and Data Migration assistance
- Assumes a solution is known but will confirm best practices
Solutioning and Architect Augmentation Package (1499$/mo/user)
- Includes Developer on Demand Package items for post solutioning assistance
- Integrated into your workflow to Attach SF.com solutions to Tickets Groomed with Biz Req’s.
- Collaboration on filling out gaps where Solutioning needs more information
- Can setup integration outbound from existing systems where possible to post data to us to automate sprint design and grooming between us and the handoff
- White boarding Sessions where ideas need socialized
- Problem / Solution service for non sprint items that need a SF.com specific Statement of Work based on a business problem that needs solved
- Meant to Supplement in-house resources, but execution of implementation of the solution would be separate, but available from us
- For small to medium businesses where you have Project Management resources and capable Admin/Dev resources and need ad-hoc solutions that the team can then implement
Service Level Agreement Options
| Service Name | Service Response Time | Service Details |
| L1 | 15-30 mins between 8a – 8p PST | Submitted requests from SF global action will trigger timer for response. Meant to address Production Bugs as quickly as a P1 ticket internally for a company would. |
| L2 | 1h-2h between 8a – 8p PST | Submitted requests from SF global action will trigger timer for response. Meant to address Production Bugs as quickly as a P > 1 ticket internally for a company would. |
| Default | 1h-6h between 8a – 8p PST | This is the default SLA without adding any type of adder for quicker response. This shouldn’t be relied on for Production Bugs that stop business unless you really deem that OK. |
| N/A | ASAP | For some Solution heavy package items it would be something planned days in advance at least and isn’t relevant to an hour by hour SLA. |
Use cases
Curious how your use case fits into the Service? Here are some scenarios where we expect to be able to make an impact:
Use case 1:
- Joe from XYZ Corp is the Owner and has 5 SF Licenses that he has for his team and they are using Opportunities for their Sales process. Joe and his assistant are the defacto Admins and SF issues are their problem.
Use case 2:
- Go Getter Joe from Fortune 100 XYZ corp is Director of CRM at his company and has a team of Admins and Devs underneath him. They operate in sprints, and have non-junior devs who haven’t fully embraced SFDX. IDE Wars and lack of need for CLI tools in SF dev previously leaves a stew of unsure-ty about how to setup SFDX for your orgs code base and get developers active in it. Some of the deep Technical Software Engineer knowledge is around but they are not SF developers and their nuances wouldn’t be SF nuances and it doesn’t always translate well. GGJ has capable senior dev(s) that have gotten deep into SFDX but feel there are mysteries and more they could be doing and would benefit from a resource who is available to them as a service (posting on stack overflow and reddit can only get you so much goodwill). In this case the cost benefit of the increased productivity with sfdx efficiencies to the devops activities going on is a no brainer.
Use case 3:
- Lisa is a go getter Product Manager at a Startup using SF. They are a product heavy team with managers who are deeply intwined in the system they use to track and do mockups and leave their creative genius in the hands of the devs, who have reasons why abc won’t do 123. There is no established grey beard org veteran on the SF side and some mid level devs and an admin can get a lot of stuff done, but the solutions are appearing short sighted. Product Management can not shame their devs but if they could get in the velocity of change request > req/mockups > solid SF solution with line item tasks as a designed story from the dev team (they still would give their thoughts and estimates), they feel it would go a long way. Insert the Design Review Assist.
Use Case 4
- A company is using Salesforce and they have customizations to their org that make it unique. The stuff works most of the time but if they have issues it is complicated by the fact that SF support can blame it on several integrations but you know in your head that it you’ve ruled it out. You do the dance for days and realize that the problem is resolved and in the end it was a deployment of a SF release and the issue was ultimately resolved as a SF issue. This will probably be a Case in SF Support history somewhere but is as good as forgotten, and we are at the mercy of the next issue and SF Support experience. Insert the Support Assist
FAQ
Are you replacing SF Support?
No, just minimizing the need for them where possible.If it becomes a technical issue that we diagnose down to being on SF Servers where a ticket is necessary, you can be sure that is the absolute last step, but sometimes a crucial step. It does happen where an issue is something they can fix on their end and at that point it becomes a strategy of bringing supporting documentation to the table to start the process so a resolution can be had quickly, which we help provide.
We become the gatekeeper to Tier 1 at this point, throwing 10 years and 10 certifications worth of experience in consulting for over 100 companies, to address your issue, provide reference documentation and follow up answers to questions, critically think about what is the best course of action, and provide a final problem statement response with all the support materials you could want.
I can’t guarantee that you won’t ever have to deal with SF Support, but I can guarantee that I will make sure it is 100% necessary and if so that you have in hand anything that would allow for a delay or a stalemate in the exchange. We are so dedicated to honoring that, that if you aren’t getting resolution with them after one of these hypothetical SF server errors goes unresolved by your in-house team dealing with support we will take ownership on your orgs behalf if you’d like as point of contact to getting a resolution.
How Does the Service Compare to Hiring a SF Consulting Agency?
In short, labor costs and convenience.
The micro fashion of the problem/solution arrangement means in a lot of cases the hoops that you jump through to vet a Consultancy, or the boxes they force you to check as part of their due diligence that amounts to 100 billable hours @ 300$/hr, don’t always need to be part of fixing a small problem, and Cosulting Companies just are not in the business of minimizing billable hours.
I’m hoping to turn experience, curiosity, fast typing, tech skills and hundreds of orgs managed and customized in consulting and full time jobs into a subscription service spread out over multiple companies where companies save money and I keep busy and get to help people.
Consulting Agencies will nickel and dime you for .5 hour engagements on every email and the budget doesn’t allow for engaging the agency via chat for implied support without some prior arrangements. Also people like to be self-sufficient.
If you can get direction and know what to focus on to solve a problem, it can be sped up immensely by hearing details from a previous occurrence of the same issue, and these issues getting catalogued over time, and the process of ruling out things based on facts and details to ultimately get to a solution.
Why does SF Support have a Bad Rap?
As a Salesforce Decision Maker and Person accountable for Orgs, I’ve faced the infuriating scourge of Tier 1 support from Salesforce which I am no joke, 0/5 in the last couple years in getting even one bit of help.
You face a few different extremes
- Salesforce Support and ticketing to try and get an answer without spending money, which most decision makers are going to probably want to suggest you do as an Admin/Dev.
- Shop SF Partner Consultants and get Sticker Shock or Invoice Shock, or information overload about freelancers, outsources, choices to get SF Skilled Expertise
- To complicate it you probably also have SF in house help where you feel like if you could just get the right keyword to google or answer to why something happened, you’d be able to move forward.
Well instead of paying 250$/hr to an Agency or 5$/hr to an Upwork outsourced shop you’ve never worked with, you can have peace of mind that for 99$/mo (less than 1 billable hour to most Consultancies) you have access to a treasure trove of experience and daily increasing community answers to problems and solutions.
Socrates
Further Reading
If you are interested in my thoughts on what I think actually happened to the Salesforce Support reputation and lack of helpfulness being so prevalent, I wrote more about it in a follow up post here.