Salesforce: Tracking User Requests
By: Jimmy Jay
Tags: Salesforce Productivity, Salesforce, Project Management

Dealing with day-to-day requests for changes to your Salesforce instance can become overwhelming. If not handled correctly, these requests can become distracting, hard to prioritize and difficult to track. Streamlining these requests into a process focused Salesforce object can help you avoid these problems.

Creating the request object

Start by creating a new Custom Object. Choose an object name that makes it clear to users what the purpose is. Suggested names are “Salesforce Request” or a name specific to your team’s name. Use Auto-Number for the name to serve as a ticket number. Enable Chatter for this object is that is something your organization uses.

Requester Fields

Requester — Lookup (User): In addition to the Created By field, this allows users to create requests on behalf of others.

Subject — Text: Allows the user to provide a short description to help you or your team quickly identify the ticket topic.

Description — Rich Text: Additional detail on the request. Rich text will allow formatting as well as images to be included.

Impact* — Drop Down: What is the perceived value of the result of this request?

Urgency* — Drop Down: How soon is this request needed?

[Optional] Reason for Impact/Urgency — Text Area: If you find your users are abusing impact and urgency by selecting High/Urgent too often, use this field and a validation rule to make the user provide a reason. Often this extra work is enough to stop the abuse and make the user question their selection.

*Its recommended that you do not provide a default value for Impact/Urgency. This forces the user to think about the values they are selecting.

Admin Fields

Assigned To — Lookup (User): Used for assigning an admin to the request.

Status — Drop Down: Track the progress of the request. Below are suggested values but its best if you align these to your process.

New — Set by workflow on creation.

Assigned — Set by workflow when Assigned To is populated.

Working

On Hold

Awaiting Feedback

Complete

Rejected

Admin Notes — Rich Text: Allows admins to provide additional status information.

Date Completed — Date: Used for potential reporting. Can be set by workflow based on the Status

Completion Notes — Text Area: Resolution approach used to complete the request.

Priority Level — Formula(Text): A formula to assign a numeric value to the Impact/Urgency selected by the user. Suggested values below.

Request notifications

New Request:

Audience: Creator, Requester and the Salesforce Admin team.

Purpose: Lets the users know that an admin has seen their request. This heads off the user reaching out to you to let you know they submitted a ticket.

Assigned Request:

Audience: Creator, Requester and Assigned To.

Purpose: Lets the users know an admin has been assigned to their request, giving them a specific individual to interact with.

Completed Request:

Audience: Creator, Requester and Assigned To.

Purpose: Let the users know their request has been completed. Include the Completion Notes so the user knows how it was completed.

Rolling out the object

Add your new object as a default tab. Making it the first tab for every user will ensure it does not spill over into the additional tabs. Communicate the changes to your company covering the following points:

How to submit their request.

What type of requests are appropriate for this object.

That requests will be prioritized and completed accordingly.

This is the only way system requests will be fielded and why it’s important.

Allows requests to be prioritized in the context of other requests.

The correct/available team member can respond faster.

Enables tracking of changes that have been made.

3. Enforce your new process. If someone submits a request via a different channel, redirect them to the new process. Keeping a canned response that references the points covered in #2 can be useful for this.

Originally published at https://cloud-daemon.com on July 1, 2019.