What is Salesforce Managed Services?

You’ve just spent loads of money customising Salesforce to meet your specific business needs, and now your Account Executive is presenting you with the idea of “Managed Services”.

What is Salesforce Managed Services, and why do you need it if your project was built and delivered properly?  ‍

What is Salesforce Managed Services?

Salesforce Managed Services is a retainer for a specified number of hours.

EMPAUA’s Managed Services is structured to deliver value through the following:

• Case Management 

• Proactive Maintenance

Cases are raised by your team for your Managed Services team to attend to.

These could be for any questions or training, updates or tweaks to your current functionality, or additional features or enhancements that you’d like us to take care of for you.

This is the main value add that we can offer: to hand-hold and collaborate with your Salesforce Admin or Champion and to resolve any issues you have within the contracted hours.

Proactive Maintenance is the more technical side of things that your Managed Services team looks out for, to keep your system running well, and to minimise the possible downtime.  This includes: 

• Release Updates
• Technical Debt 
• Leverage new features to improve your User Experience. 
• Checking the security of your org (using Health Checks)
• Collaborating with your team to discuss the Roadmap from Optimiser reports

‍Why should you have this?

An earlier blog post covers the basics of Release Updates, but even with an explanation, these can be somewhat overwhelming to a solo Salesforce Admin or Champion, or it may require more time than you have available to investigate these updates and their implications for your org.

The truth is that they are often ignored.  

Much of the time, ignoring release updates won’t be a major issue.  But when they DO impact your org, this can cause significant downtime while you try to investigate and troubleshoot urgently.  

‍“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”

This is similar to thinking that your car can drive just fine on 3 pumped tyres (you can’t!)

Like your business processes, technology advances constantly.

Salesforce Flows, for example, have become so much more powerful now, and it is likely that a complex automation built 2 years ago can be significantly improved, resulting in a better user experience, more intelligent automations and faster processing speed.

Also, adding checks like Validation Rules, picklist updates or Mandatory fields can impact negatively on your Code Coverage.

Every time you add a Validation Rule, you should check your Code Coverage in case test classes fail. 

This fix would be relatively quick if done every time these blocks were changed, but they may only be picked up when it comes time to deploy new features or functionality from Sandbox. 

‍Time is money

Our Managed Services team saves you both.

For your Salesforce Admin, it would take more than a couple of hours to look into the Release Updates, and for each one, they would need to assess what these are even before they get to testing the possible impact on the org.

It’s often not something that they have the capacity for.  

Our team is used to the process of learning about the Release Updates and testing their impact.

We know what to look for, and we implement this for a number of other clients, which means it would cost you far less time from a MS Agent than it would take for your Admin to do this every couple of months.  

For your Users, we save time by looking at your org proactively, and suggesting ways to improve processes through housekeeping (clearing unused reports / dashboards, reducing unnecessary fields on pages) or possibly automating repetitive tasks. 

This increases productivity and performance.  

Also, the cost of a broken automation in production is not just about the time spent fixing the issue itself, it is also the cost of checking and fixing the data retroactively. 

This is neither fun nor easy.

If we are able to receive an error and address it quickly, this may result in a couple of days of missed work rather than weeks or even months.

The cost of broken trust in your system processes is far greater than the cost to ensure these issues are raised quickly. 

‍Do you need this, though?

I’d encourage you to check for yourself. 

If you want to know whether your org is being maintained effectively, you can check by going to Setup, and doing the following:

1. Type “Release Update” in the quick find bar, and look at the Archived tab. If they’re mostly grey, no-one has been addressing these.  You can look at the Upcoming release updates - Salesforce gives you a roadmap for the next year.  

2. Type “Health Check”. This will give you Salesforce’s score and judgment on the security of your org, as well as suggestions to improve.  We can usually take your org health from poor to excellent in as little as 30minutes as we explain what each suggestion means for your org and your users. 

3. Type “Optimizer”. Is this report enabled?  If not, click to enable, and give it an hour or so.  It will run a report on the basic housekeeping of your org, and advise you on what needs to be addressed in varying levels of importance (e.g. “Immediate Action Required” to “Not Applicable”).  

4. Check your Apex Error logs and Paused and Failed Flow interviews for jobs that are perhaps not running correctly.  

These things will give you an overview of how your org is currently being managed. If you would like to improve on this, our team is happy to assist. 

While we prioritise your requirements and cases logged, if we have any hours left at the end of the month, we will spend this time looking at your housekeeping, and raising issues for your approval before we proceed. 

If you would like to meet with our Team to walk you through the above assessment, please do let us know!