The Admin’s Guide to Salesforce Visibility: Using Event Monitoring to Boost ROI, Productivity

Salesforce has quickly become a mission-critical application for organizations of all types. The great news for admins is that Salesforce visibility can show you not only how users are adopting and using Salesforce, but also security insights. In fact, a single Salesforce instance can store massive quantities of sensitive data to which hundreds or thousands of users may have access – of particular concern in highly regulated industries like financial services, banking, and healthcare. These users can represent a huge vulnerability. After all, many data breaches originate with insider and privilege misuse – 15 percent, according to a Verizon study. User activity monitoring and other data security measures are, therefore, essential for safeguarding confidential data stored in Salesforce.

Salesforce visibility: What is it and why does it matter?

Visibility into your Salesforce environment can show you which users are logging in, when, and from where. You can tell who is accessing what data, how often, and even which reports they’re running and dashboards they’re accessing. Salesforce visibility is essentially your window into how users are adopting the program.

So why does visibility matter? User activity monitoring is critical for any company, regardless of size, that wants to protect and secure data while getting the most use and value out of their Salesforce licenses.

Visibility into usage and adoption

Visibility can give admins insights into usage, adoption, and performance. Because Salesforce Shield Event Monitoring records over 45 data-rich log files on user activity, you can leverage the data to better understand how users are engaging with your Salesforce environment, as well as how it’s performing.

Salesforce admins are doing a great job when their company’s users are actively engaged in the platform in a way that positively impacts the business, such as improving productivity, boosting sales, or saving time. With increased visibility, you can see exactly which users are logging in regularly and interacting with the platform. You can also monitor exports, reports, objects, login activity, top users, and more. In turn, you can use this information to inform your Salesforce implementation and usage programs while demonstrating to management that your investment in the application is worthwhile.

For example, say you have one salesperson who logs in every day and regularly loads valuable information like promising new leads into their Salesforce environment. This power user is likely taking full advantage of Salesforce, unlike underperformers, who may not log in as frequently (if at all).

Salesforce admins are using enhanced Salesforce visibility to:

• Learn whether employees are using Salesforce the way you intended
• Track Salesforce usage and the flow of data among users
• Demonstrate what top performers are doing that leads to success
• Prioritize your time, resources, and budget
• Evaluate which users need additional training (and which users are proficient enough to lead the training)

Amit Ramakrishnan, Manager of Sales Excellence at Tri-K Industries, put it this way: “We’re able to say, ‘Look at what this high performer is doing. If you do the same, your numbers should improve.’ And, we’ve actually seen that happen!”

Visibility can also reveal if users are not logging in to Salesforce at all, revealing potentially unused licenses that are taking up precious budget dollars. Instead of letting unused licenses go to waste, you can provide the necessary training to bring users up to speed. Or, if you find that certain users truly don’t need a license at all, you can remove their accounts, reducing your expenses and saving resources.

Visibility into performance

Performance insights can also be useful for keeping adoption high. Instead of waiting for customers or end users to report a broken or slow-running page, you can use your increased visibility to proactively learn which pages are encountering problems and when – and to address the issue as quickly as possible.

Visibility into security and compliance

Greater Salesforce visibility doesn’t just deliver usage, adoption, and performance insights – it also helps you enhance security around the valuable information in Salesforce. The cost of a data breach for an enterprise company averages around $1.23 million, and that number increases every year. In addition to the financial costs, a data breach costs an organization untold amounts in lost trust from both customers and employees. And in highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare, it provides the user activity monitoring and audit controls required to comply with security and privacy regulations like FINRA, HIPAA, PCI, FFIEC, ISO 27001, GDPR, and FCA.

“Now, we’re able to know if there’s something off about a transaction, off about an access, off about a login, and we’re able to take care of that a lot quicker than we were able to do before,” said Joe Stolz, Salesforce admin at Midland IRA.

How can I achieve Salesforce visibility as an admin?

So how can you access those 45+ user activity logs from Salesforce to deliver usage, adoption, performance, security, and compliance insights and show your organization what a rock star admin you are? Salesforce Shield is made up of three components, each of which can be purchased separately depending on your organization’s needs – Platform Encryption, Field Audit Trail, and Event Monitoring.

The last of these, Event Monitoring, provides access to your audit logs, which – when layered with technology that translates the complex data into proactive, actionable insights – can be used to increase adoption, optimize performance, and monitor data loss. The equation is simple: Salesforce Visibility = Admin Success.

If your goal as a Salesforce admin is to drive high-performance usage and demonstrate the ongoing value of Salesforce to your management team, then you need visibility into user activity in your Salesforce environment. With it, you can easily visualize the activities and events occurring within your Salesforce instance, giving you the knowledge and concrete data to inform your policies and procedures. All you need to do is get the right visibility tool and use it to its full potential.