This week on the podcast we are speaking to Senior User Researcher Mabel Chan and Principal User Researcher Alyssa Vincent-Hill—both on the UX Salesforce team. We’re diving deep into the world of personas and discussing how our research team uses personas to help us better understand our customers.

Join us as Mabel and Alyssa define personas and examine how admins can apply personas to better understand our users and supplement the transition to Lightning.

You should subscribe to the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Mabel and Alyssa.

What’s The Big Deal with Personas?

Personas help us to formalize our understanding of our Salesforce users across the various clouds. The research team at Salesforce has been surveying hundreds of thousands of Salesforce users (including admins) and taking that information by using behaviors that people have reported to them in order to craft categories of users. These categories help them to better understand what traits, needs, and attitudes tend to float together so that they may make a generalization to help them tailor their development as well as research and communication to better serve various types of users.

How Admins Can Understand The Personas Of Their Users

Admins don’t necessarily have to use surveys to develop personas for their users. Interviews can be extremely effective, too. You can take thirty to sixty minutes to sit down with various types of users one-on-one. During these interviews, you can ask users questions about their everyday goals and what activities and tools that they use to achieve those goals. You can also ask them how tech and Salesforce savvy they are. Some additional questions to ask include:

• What motivates you?
• What capabilities do you have?
• What does success mean to you?
• What is the best part of your job?

As Mabel says, “You can really scale down a huge survey into more easy to bite interviews and conversations with your users.”

Personas vs. Job Roles

A persona deals with a group of users and what they do outside the Salesforce platform. There is, however, definitely some overlap and at first, it may seem a bit confusing at first, Mabel admits. “Personas and profiles do overlap a little bit, but profiles may include more than one persona and personas are a tool that anyone can use.” She also explains that “profiles are a way to give the right settings and permissions for what different types of users can see and do in Salesforce.”

Job behavior is essential in crafting personas. You can understand personas better by looking at core job behaviors and talking to users about what they spend most of their time doing during the day. “Most of us have core tasks that we stick to and that are consistent with our role over time, so identifying those tasks are essential in identifying personas. Personas are a great user-centered design tool and are extremely beneficial in helping to optimize Salesforce. As Mabel describes it, “understanding personas will help admins better design Salesforce to make their company run better.”

Personas Assist in The Transition to Lightning

Understanding personas are critical when transitioning to Lightning. It’s about crafting the ideal profile and permission sets for each persona, which will help you understand the various pain points your users are facing. “It helps you sort of break it into chunks. We’re going to focus on this group first—we’re going to implement it for them and then get feedback from them on how the implementation is going.” Alyssa recommends that you make tweaks to your implementation process. “Use it as a pilot group, but a really focused pilot group that as an admin you’ve done some research with, have talked to current users, and have a good understanding which hopefully would help to set that up for success,” suggests Alyssa.

For more insights, make sure to follow Alyssa Vincent-Hill on Twitter @a_vincenthill.

Links:

• “Build better with UX” - User Research and Persona Trails on Trailhead
• Salesforce User Research Program

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We want to get your suggestions for guests on the podcast, and we need your help! So tweet your guest suggestions, support, etc. using the hashtag #ButtonClickGuest to help us get more AwesomeAdmins on the podcast.

We want to remind you that if you love what you hear, or even if you don’t, head on over to iTunes and give us a review. It’s super easy to do, and it really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it.

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This week on the podcast we’re speaking to Kathy Baxter, a Principal User Researcher and Kristen Muramoto, a Senior Product Designer. You may remember Kathy and Kristen from their amazing presentation on Social Customer Service at Dreamforce. They’re here to offer lots of relevant insights, best practices, and tips for marketers and admins alike.

More about Kathy and Kristen’s session: Join us as Kathy and Kristen share their insights and delve deep into the strategies they’ve designed for Social Customer Service. We’ll learn why customers are demanding SCS, why companies shy away from it, and what companies can do to bridge that gap.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kathy Baxter and Kristen Muramoto.

Have a conversation.

“Social Customer service is about reaching out to your customers wherever they are, whether that’s Twitter, Facebook or another global network. It’s about making it easier for everyday communication that’s conversational rather than transactional via phone or email,” says Kristen.

Yet, many companies are slow to adopt SCS. “There’s a fear of change and lack of knowledge. This is why we’re trying to get our experience out there and let people know that it’s not as scary as it might seem,” says Kristen.

81 percent of millennials prefer social support.

Customers now demand and expect SCS. “Not only is social really popular amongst millennials, but also we’ve found that 26% of customers will turn to social when they can’t reach a representative otherwise,” says Kathy.

During the design process, Kristen says it’s important to ask, “how do I make it clear in the user experience so that agents can help their customers as fast as possible as I would expect as a millennial?”

Prepare your support network.

Kathy and Kristen have come up with 10 strategies for social customer service. The first step is to identify ownership on social media. “In many companies, the marketing department is already out there on social media, but customer support is coming later to the game,” says Kathy. Marketing and customer reps need to come together so they can decide who gets to respond to what issues and what the dividing line is.

“This area is moving so quickly,” says Kathy. To be successful at SCS, companies need to develop deep expertise, be where their customers are, develop a playbook and train their agents properly.

84% of social messages at companies are ignored.

If an admin wants their company to get on social, what can s/he do about it right now? Kathy suggests, “do a search social media and see who is @ mentioning your brand and products. Ask: is it meeting silence?”

“If it looks like you don’t have a social presence out there, go speak with the head of customer support and make a case as to why you need to be engaging in that conversation,” says Kathy. If they don’t have a plan to implement social, ask why.

Adapt strategies as needed.

Looking forward, “we want to work with our customers to make sure our strategies are working for them. We then apply them to their success metrics and monitor their changes so we can adjust our strategies as applicable,” says Kristen.

Lastly, share your insights. “We do our best to share out the research and the best practices that we’ve learned with our customers so that they can benefit from it. We don’t just keep it internally. We share it out to empower our customers to be the best they can be for their customers,” says Kathy.

Links:

• Understanding User Research with Mabel & Kathy
• Kathy Baxter & Kristen Muramoto’s Session at Dreamforce
• Designing Social Customer Support: How to Help Businesses Reach Their Customers

#ButtonClickGuest

We want to get your suggestions for guests on the podcast, and we need your help! So tweet your guest suggestions, support, etc. using the hashtag #ButtonClickGuest to help us get more AwesomeAdmins on the podcast.

We want to remind you that if you love what you hear, or even if you don’t head on over to iTunes and give us a review. It’s super easy to do, and it really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it.

Love our podcasts?

Subscribe today or review us on iTunes!