Every job has responsibilities that are more rewarding than others. No role is perfect. Everybody has to take the bad with the good, but the hope is the good outweighs the bad (hopefully by a lot).
It’s no different for the typical Salesforce Admin. They play an important role that works across many business functions—customer relationship management and revenue generation, strategy formulation and decision making, and processes for internal operations and business management. A talented Admin is truly a partner to many parts of a successful enterprise.
Besides the opportunities to work at a high level across the business, the Admin’s primary responsibility is to maintain the health of the Salesforce platform and assist its users. Admins are vital to improve and increase Salesforce usability, to train users to be efficient and effective, and to facilitate innovative and transformative projects. Ultimately, they extend Salesforce and justify the continued investment in the platform.
However, all of these activities, and the productivity of a business’s platform users, require high quality data. Without it, the impact of the platform and its users is ineffective at best and potentially damaging at worst. Long term, a business’s future could be imperiled. Short term, the Admin’s current career prospects could be shaky at that company.
No doubt, elevating data quality may be the last thing Admins want to spend their time on. While absolutely important for the reasons cited above, the time spent cleaning and fixing data problems can detract from time spent on the Admins’ other impactful duties that could help with advancing their businesses. In addition, there’s little glory in what seems to be a thankless task. And to be honest, the lack of glory also may not be helpful personally from a career advancement perspective (but the alternative is even worse).
In order to solve any problem, the root causes must be identified. Once the sources of poor data creation are known, an action plan can be enacted to improve overall data quality over time. Of course, the success of the plan is dependent on getting buy-in from the people affected.
Admins would be wise not to take on this issue alone. Data quality improvement is a team effort. Delegating some tasks to the Salesforce users makes sense. They're the ones closest to the data—they create and use records as part of their day-to-day responsibilities, and they would most easily recognize what constitutes good data.
Admins should focus on three areas as part of the plan:
If a problem can be solved through automation, that is often the best case scenario. The Salesforce-native app, Data Quality Helper by Passage Technology, can help Admins to achieve their data quality goals for new and existing records—and in a way that makes a tough job easier. The app offers these solutions:
To help execute a data improvement plan, Admins can set up a Lightning Web Component that provides all users an org-wide view of all identified data problems to address. The app is available on the Salesforce AppExchange.
When it comes down to it, the typical Admin has more than enough challenges in managing an organization’s Salesforce capabilities. Poor data quality only compounds those challenges and might reflect poorly on the Admin. The Admin didn’t create the data problem, but has the power to fix it. How much longer can you let the problem of poor data quality go unaddressed? Don’t wait until it’s too late.
There is a convenient solution. Learn more about Data Quality Helper or schedule a demo/consult today.
Upgrade to Data Quality Helper Premium Edition for unlimited enhanced data validation rules, unlimited duplicate resolution rules, unlimited data deletion of records, and priority support, plus all of the features in the Free Edition.
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