Understand User Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the role of User Management within the core responsibilities of a Salesforce admin.
- Demonstrate best practices for designing and customizing user experiences in Salesforce.
- Develop strategies for streamlining access and improving organizational efficiency.
- Implement communication techniques and tools to engage with stakeholders, measure user adoption, and maintain user guides.
What Is User Management?
User Management—one of the five core admin responsibilities—involves configuring access, measuring adoption, and observing and communicating with users. This unit focuses on key aspects of managing users.
Design and Customize User Experiences
As an admin, it’s your responsibility to ensure users have the access they need to Salesforce applications, features, and data. Even a short period without access can severely affect productivity. Whether you were involved in building out the application or are new to the team, user management best practices help prevent these disruptions.
The first best practice is regularly meeting with and observing your users in the environment they use: Salesforce. Regularly meet with various users to observe and collect feedback on how to make their user experience the best possible. Whether you do this in person or virtually, the goal is the same—to look for opportunities to improve the daily workflow of your users.
Some questions to answer include:
- How would you normally accomplish this task?
- Which reports do you still export to Excel?
- What other departments do you interact with?
- Is there a part of this process that is challenging for you?
User observation starts by identifying at least one individual in each profile or persona within your organization. Spend time with individual contributors, managers, and business leaders, and map any parts of your business process that you learn along the way. Rotate the groups and roles that you spend time with. That way, all of your users’ experiences are represented in your review.
Start by scheduling 15-minute meetings with virtual coffee and screenshare. Notice little things, like how service teams enter data differently than sales teams. And how each prefers a different order of fields. These small changes can have a huge impact on adoption, and might have been missed in the initial app rollout.
During your conversations, remember to stick to business processes and values. Avoid Salesforce-specific terminology, and don’t ask users how they’d solve any challenges on the platform. Instead, try to uncover areas for optimization or enhancement. Sometimes a meeting doesn’t reveal any new areas for optimization. That’s OK. Document your observation sessions so that you can provide summaries to business stakeholders and use them for future enhancements. You can even take this as an opportunity to create a “user feedback” app so all of your documentation is stored in Salesforce.
Manage Profiles, Permissions, Roles, and Groups
Depending on how mature your Salesforce implementation is, your organization might have a few profiles or a few hundred. Having a multitude of profiles can make it a challenge to meet with users and look at ways to improve the user experience improvements. Multiple profiles can also slow down deployments because the related features were configured for all profiles. It’s best to have an ongoing project to reduce the number of profiles in your organization. The first step is to get buy-in from your stakeholders. Tell them you can respond to requests quicker if you clear up profiles. Profile footprint reduction isn’t something that happens overnight, but it takes less time than you might think.
Whenever possible, start by assigning users the Minimum Access—Salesforce profile. Then use permission sets and permission set groups to grant only the specific permissions users need. A permission set is essentially a bundle of settings and permissions that enables user access to various tools and features, enhancing their functionality without altering their profiles. This approach is the recommended method for managing user permissions in Salesforce.
Instead of basing permissions on job titles, align permission sets with the tasks each user performs. By reusing smaller permission-set components, you can avoid the complexity of creating numerous profiles for different roles and functions. For more details, refer to the Permission Sets section in Salesforce Help.
Reporting and Adoption
Adoption is basically a way to measure if your features are being fully utilized. To measure adoption, you need to check out the features your users are expected to be working with in Salesforce. This can include standard features, like those in Sales Cloud, or custom ones you built using custom objects, fields, or automation. To get a clear picture of adoption, create a list of these features and decide how to report on each one. Regular review gives you a concrete understanding of whether the team is using your configuration. By staying on top of adoption trends, you can catch any shifts early, which helps inform your stakeholder updates or user guides.
If you notice a feature isn’t being adopted as expected, it’s a great opportunity to meet with stakeholders to uncover what might be holding them back. This kind of communication keeps users involved, makes them feel empowered, and gives you valuable insights to tweak your setup for better results.
It’s a best practice to do user audits when reviewing adoption. Before an audit, make sure your active user list is up to date. Only people who should have access to Salesforce should be listed, and it’s important to deactivate anyone who no longer needs access. Consider running Salesforce Optimizer as part of your monthly maintenance, before installing a new app, before each Salesforce release, or at least once a quarter. You can run the report as often as you want to keep on top of maintenance activities. You can set the app to run automatically on a monthly basis.
- In Setup Quick Find, search for and select Optimizer.
- Enable Optimizer by allowing access, if you haven’t done so already.
- Decide if the app should automatically run and update.
- Click Open Optimizer.
Depending on the size of your Salesforce org, analysis could take up to 24 hours. After you start a run, close the app and check back later. Or refresh the browser tab to see the latest run status. Don’t run the Optimizer again until the run has finished.
Salesforce sends an in-app notification when results are ready. Access Optimizer results by clicking the notification. Or return to the Optimizer in Setup to review your results.
In the app, Org Metric History is shown with graphs for file storage limits, data storage limits, and static resource limits. These graphs give a high-level visual overview of how these limits have impacted your org.
Next, check roles, profiles, permission sets, and permission set groups to see if anything’s unassigned or just not being used. The new User Access Summary is a great way to see User Permission, Object & Field permissions, Customer permissions, and Group & Queue Membership.
Lastly, make sure your users’ access levels match their job roles. When you talk to your users, verify they can do everything they need for their job. If not, adjust their access, either through profiles or permission sets. (You learn more about this later.)
Communicate with Stakeholders
Communication with stakeholders is your next best practice. In this case, stakeholders are people who lead a team that has their business process in Salesforce—like your Sales Manager, if you’re using Sales Cloud, or your Fundraising Manager, if you’re using Nonprofit Cloud. Determine the communication preferences for everyone involved, then create recurring monthly meetings with department leaders. Discuss their needs and the state of Salesforce in their teams, adoption and usage metrics, and feedback and improvements from your meetings with users. Afterward, send a recap to keep everyone aligned.
Create and Maintain a User Guide
Another admin best practice is creating and maintaining a user guide. The first step is to make sure you have documentation. If you don’t it’s your responsibility to create it for your organization.
Offer user guides for each job function, and also create an admin guide for other Salesforce Admins if needed. You can use a variety of tools, like Quip, Google Docs, or third-party AppExchange applications, and of course, within Salesforce itself. Explore and find the solution that’s right for you.
Where possible, use native features like Help Text, Descriptions, and In-app Guidance to direct your users on how to use the application.
And of course, you need to keep all these documents up to date to stay aligned with your latest business processes.
AI and Emerging Technologies
When you approach a new technology such as AI or Agentforce, consider how a feature or tool can save you time. As a best practice, think about creating a User Feedback app to manage all of your user interactions and feedback. And consider how Agentforce can help you summarize that feedback. Using AI in the flow of work helps you prepare for that next meeting or summarize user sentiment.
By consistently applying these best practices, you build trust with users and stakeholders, streamline business processes, and improve overall user adoption. In the next unit, you learn about the admin core responsibility of data management.