Situation:

The Senior Salesforce Administrator of nearly 10 years was involved in bringing Salesforce into the organization and helping to implement the platform across different departments. 

The company uses Salesforce to manage everything from customer service to credit management across their business units in London, and has grown to nearly 225 Salesforce users since implementing the platform in 2014. 

As Salesforce became the main source of truth for customer service data, the Senior Salesforce Admin uncovered that they were quickly running out of storage space. They use Service Cloud to communicate with both their internal and external customers and record all activities linked to a case through the email to case functionality. This creates a significant amount of data stored in Salesforce. 

Additionally, Salesforce is used extensively by the sales team to submit their sales orders, which is essential to see what their territory rules are and if they can request a discount. 

While they aren’t storing the full journey of customer data in Salesforce, which gets processed in their order maintenance platform, they do collect all the information leading up to the claims and orders such as who approved it, who requested it, and when it was processed. 

‍Challenge:‍

Because she was initially involved with counting and manually adding Outlook emails to Salesforce, the Senior Salesforce Administrator became part of the task force responsible for searching for a tool that could help them archive data, reduce storage limits, and prevent having to pay costly storage upgrades. 

When they first implemented Salesforce, they didn't have a backup solution. After three years of using Salesforce, they realized they needed a way to back up their data as well. The first tool they selected to solve for both challenges–backing up data and archiving it– worked fine in the beginning, until they needed to migrate from Classic to Lightning.  

“This is where we started seeing problems with the solution we had at that time” explained the Senior Salesforce Admin. “It didn’t seem to us that this solution was evolving with the changing technology in Salesforce, especially with Lightning. I felt like they didn't develop any new features that could accommodate the Lightning functionality. We started getting more queries, more failures, and then, upon looking into the reasons, discovered that this was no longer going to fit our needs.”

Additionally, the previous solution was only able to archive emails, not the cases associated with the emails, which was the bulk of what they needed the product to do. 

When the pandemic started, the team  was  getting more and more inquiries via email. As the inquiry volume increased, the solution they originally selected to archive data was no longer fulfilling their needs. 

‍Solution:‍

The Senior Salesforce Admin was introduced to Own at the 2019 Salesforce London World Tour. She had heard glowing accolades about the company, and decided to start with a trial to test how the product would work to fit her team’s needs–specifically to see if it could archive attachments and restore data in case of corruption or deletion. The initial test went very well. The biggest difference they noticed was they could back up, restore, and archive metadata with Own. With their previous solution, they were only able to archive email messages, leaving out  metadata that rolled into cases, making it a big win for the team. 

“We are using Salesforce across all these different objects, across all these different users, so we definitely needed a solution that we could customize based on different objects and capture all the metadata that rolled up to them.”

‍Results:‍

The Senior Salesforce Admin finds Own very easy to use. She logs in daily to check her backup policies, assess if anything has changed and, if it has, can quickly target what changed and how to fix it. 

With Own Archive, she started with archiving old data– anything that dates back seven years or older. Running policies to achieve this has been very simple. From checking on the status of a policy to ensuring  she is staying within API limits, The Senior Senior Admin can easily configure, test, and manage custom policies that define what data to store and how often. 

Recently, the team set a policy to archive closed cases with specific case reasons for a fixed date and archive nothing else related to that case. This flexibility to archive down to the individual details has been extremely helpful for the team’s productivity and confidence. 

“I don't have to be in a panicked state and run about everywhere, trying to figure out what isn’t working, what’s not archiving, why tests are failing. I can quickly find the root cause with Own and then re-focus on projects that are business impacting.”

‍Support when you need it

Just before a major holiday, the Senior Salesforce Admin discovered their data was quickly approaching maximum storage capacity. Needing to bring their storage down quickly, she reached out to Own Support to help efficiently archive the excess data. 

“The support team was so approachable and so easy to communicate with” reflected the Senior Salesforce Admin “I had colleagues working across different time zones, and with it being a long weekend, I didn’t have the resources I normally would. I contacted Support around 6pm on a Friday to see if I could get help and I was able to arrange calls over the weekend, on Saturday and Sunday. We configured the policies together and let it run for a day and then scheduled a follow-up call. I was blown away by the quick response and friendliness. This was a huge help to me and really showed how invested Own is in their customers.”