For 12 weeks, I focused on how small-to-mid business Salesforce Administrators engage, perceive, and interact with Salesforce product service email communications.

Prior research on the Administrator customer base showed that many were from small-to-midsized organizations and on the lowest level of Salesforce support. This study dived into the compounding effects on this user base when it comes to receiving Salesforce Product & Service email communications.

Multiple times a year, Salesforce sends out Product & Service email notifications to update Salesforce Administrators on planned technology changes.

The Technology Communications & Readiness (TCR) team, made up of Technical Writers and Project Managers, is responsible for crafting and sending out communications to ensure that customers are prepared for planned technology changes. These communications can be categorized as Product & Service Notifications — and common examples of this include feature retirement emails, incident emails, infrastructure change emails, and more.

These emails are critical for Admins to avoid disruption and successfully do their jobs!

Salesforce Administrators manage and customize the Salesforce platform for their company or organization. As Admins are the point-of-contact for all Salesforce platform needs at their company, they need to be updated whenever there’s a change, update, or release so they can stay up to date and successfully manage the platform for their end-users.

But the problem is...these emails are super complex!

This results in compounding challenges for the majority of the Admin user base — those who tend to be from SMB organizations and on the lowest level of Salesforce support.

In reality, these were lengthy and technical emails, ranging in complexity. This is problematic when looking at data on the Salesforce Administrator user base — 68% of Admins are on the most basic level of Salesforce support and from small-to-midsize companies. This means that most of these Admins are on the lower end of the proper Salesforce training and education needed digest the complexity of Salesforce, and lack the proper access to Salesforce customer service when wanting to have their questions answered.

Thus, the burning question is...

*SMB Administrator: defined by if their organization has less than <100k AOV
*Lowest level of Salesforce support: defined by Basic support tier

Here are some specific research questions.

To kick off this study, I needed to fill in existing knowledge gaps.

After spending a week talking to various stakeholders to gather context on what I needed to know, I started off by conducting a Literature Review on existing insights at Salesforce to learn more about the following relevant spaces.

This lead to a series of initial learnings that supported the rest of my study, such as...

While I had found existing principles around content effectiveness when assessing Salesforce-branded content, I had to ask —“Are these the same principles we should use to define what makes Product & Service email content effective?”.

How do we define what makes an effective email? In this case, it depends on what the Salesforce Administrator, the our target user, defines an “effective” and “successful” email by. To start understanding this, I conducted a workshop with the TCR team utilizing a Jobs-to-be-Done framework to understand the goals and motivations Salesforce Administrators have when encountering these product service email communications. From the set of jobs created from this workshop, I revised the content effectiveness principles to better fit the context of Product & Service emails.

In a part-survey part screener, I kicked off this study with a qualitative survey conducted with 100+ Salesforce Administrators.

Acting as a part-survey and part-screener, I built a survey gathering details on participant criteria (What size is their company/organization? Are they an Admin? What support level are they on?) as well as asking initial insights about their behavior and past experience when interacting with Salesforce Product & Service emails.

This was followed up with 1:1 interviews with 10 Salesforce Administrators over the course of a week, leveraging a Heuristic Evaluation activity.

After screening through 100+ screener participants, I selected 10 Salesforce Administrators to talk to through 60-minute 1:1 remote interviews. Towards the latter half of each session, I conducted a Heuristic Evaluation activity to further understand and observe their perceptions and understandability of these emails over a series of metrics.

Over the last two weeks, I delivered various read-outs to different teams at Salesforce. Here's a sample insight from one of those read-out decks.

The last two weeks of the internship involved reading out a research deck to various stakeholders in differing forums. As I needed to deliver insights to differing teams (ex: the Technical Writing team vs. the UX team) I built different research decks depending on the audience. Here’s a sample from that deck I shared with my main stakeholders —

SAMPLE INSIGHT

Salesforce Administrators on Basic-level support find other ways to compensate for the 1:1 guidance they lack through Salesforce support.

Basic-level support misses the mark when it comes to delivering on quick and easy 1:1 support with Salesforce customer service reps. However, Admins have other means to gather that 1-1 support when they’re really stuck and need help — they have learned to leverage existing connections with support at Salesforce, hire outside Salesforce consultants and contractors, or even utilize social media to tweet or reach out to those related to the topic.

One impact of this research work includes a revision of the email approval process within the team to include additional checks before email send-out to Admins.

Following my internship, one impact of this research work includes a revision of the email approval process within the team to include additional checks in order to ensure understandability and actionability for these target Salesforce Administrators. I also returned back to the Research & Insights team the following summer as a full-time researcher!

I actually kept a doc of learnings I had throughout the internship — every time something stood out, I jotted it down. Here's a few things I had written down at the time.

Conducting research can be ambiguous; it's important to learn how to embrace ambiguity.
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Embracing ambiguity is important when conducting research. This project was nuanced and vague from the start, and having an open mind (instead of stubbornly going down one path) was critical, as the more we uncovered about the problem, the more we could figure out where to go next.
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Narrow your research scope by cutting down on what you don't need to know.
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And along with that — knowing which rabbit hole you shouldn't dive into is a skill to learn! Salesforce is complex. I was absorbing tons of new information every day, but with a limited amount of time, I had to learn to figure out quickly what was noise in order to effectively answer this problem statement within the 12-week time frame.