How Strata Homes Uses Salesforce
In September 2021, Jen joined Strata as Salesforce Delivery Manager.
In her new role, Jen inherited a multitude of projects: from onboarding Salesforce Lightning CRM users to launching an online portal where customers can see all their documents and check off important tasks. Strata saw, post-COVID, the need to offer digital options to customers. Across these projects, Strata’s main priority was to leverage existing systems to create a better experience for customers.
Sales, customer care and marketing teams are the predominant users of Salesforce at Strata. These are the people in the organization aiming to capture a 360 view of their customers within Salesforce. To ensure smooth processes without gaps, Strata needed pristine data hygiene.
Subcontractor precautions
Strata has around 90 Salesforce licenses—mostly for internal teams. But a handful of the licenses are allocated to external subcontractors.
“Let's say, after the house is bought, there’s an issue, like a broken window or chipped paint,” Jen says. “That customer will submit a case which is assigned to a subcontractor, who can log into the portal and select when they're going to complete the assignment. It works great to have them manage that part of the process.”
But outside users bring risk. As such, Jen ensures strict permission sets for specific users. “We have to be very careful what they can and can't see—but also what they can update,” she says.
Strata also captures notes about assignments in the notes field. Subcontractors manually add information regarding the assignment into this field, so if it gets deleted, everything associated with that job also gets deleted.
While subcontractors are an important part of Strata’s business, the organization needs to ensure it can restore important data if or when things go wrong.
Strata Homes Needed An Efficient, Complaint Solution
Before Strata chose Own, Jen was running monthly exports, Salesforce’s native backup provision. These manual backups took at least an hour.
After downloading the exports, she added them to a storage space-eating folder that wasn’t compliant with their data storage policies. Jen knew that even if she could restore some data after an incident, she couldn’t restore lost metadata associated with records. “If we had had data loss or corruption, it would have taken days to correct,” Jen highlights.
Jen knew that her organization needed a more efficient, comprehensive solution. She raised the issue with her line manager, Strata’s Head of Business Improvement, explaining that the company needed a better process—especially to align with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.
One of Strata’s processes relates to subject access requests (SARs): when a Strata customer requests their personal information data. Prior to Own, SARs were a manual affair, painstakingly processed record by record.
And that wasn’t all. Before Own, had Strata been hit with data loss or corruption, the company wouldn't have known when or how it happened. Any issues “may have been raised by users who have noticed a difference in data,” Jen says. “It wasn’t reliable at all.”
Turning to Own
Jen didn’t join Strata and implement Own blindly: “I had previous experience using Own in another company and had a really positive experience,” she says.
At Strata, she warned key stakeholders of the issues associated with the native Salesforce backup option, namely:
- Strata wasn’t backing up its metadata, creating unnecessary business risk
- The backup process was manual and thus time-consuming and unreliable
Jen’s real introduction to Own came via a Salesforce World Tour. She reviewed other solutions, and felt confident in Own’s offering.
Ultimately, running with Own came down to word-of-mouth and two questions: What does it say on the Salesforce AppExchange, and what is she hearing within the Salesforce Admin community? “Own is number one for a reason and there weren’t really any other comparisons that we needed to do,” Jen explains.
This made Own a done deal for Strata.
Evolving to Accelerate
Jen “had Own implemented as soon as I started in the role at Strata” and has been seeing its comprehensive protection payoff ever since. With Own, Strata now backs up its metadata and thus reduces unnecessary business risk. The organization has also made its backup process much more efficient and reliable, saving time and headaches.
There’s more: Own provides Strata with extensive and widely varying use cases—stemming beyond Strata’s original reasons for purchasing Own.
Sandbox seeding
Before Strata, Jen regularly tested in sandboxes, and wondered, “How hard is it to put data into a sandbox?” It didn’t take long for her to discover that it’s actually very difficult and time-consuming to create the right data and relationships within a sandbox.
Enter Own Accelerate: a massive time-and-money-saver for Strata. Jen now uses several sandboxes for different projects and seeds to test real data and workflows. “The ability to have so much control over how much data I need to put into our sandbox is amazing,” she says.
When one team was integrating with Salesforce, Jen consulted on the team’s sandbox testing, with all the sites already in it. She showed how to use seeding to add the relationships and anonymize the data—saving the team plenty of hassle in manual data entry.
Jen now spends more time testing and refreshing sandboxes, with automatic data anonymity at the click of a button– saving her hours a day. Additionally, rather than starting from scratch and exporting required data or guessing that she’s captured data relationships, she uses templates.
Data loads gone wrong
Jen often logs into Own when she notices data discrepancies. She checks back to see what the previous value of a field was—especially if tracking isn’t set up. But sometimes, working with data goes majorly awry.
Strata conducted one data load that went wrong, resulting in the need to restore data as soon as possible. Thanks to Own, this was no issue. Without Own Recover, “I couldn't even begin to imagine how long it would take to get our data back to normal,” she says.
Custom objects
One of Strata’s most used Salesforce objects is a custom job: master-detail relationships. In one instance, a number of changed records needed reverting to the previous day's values. When Jen ran a history report that didn’t give her what she needed to revert, she logged into Own for a quick, painless data restore.
“Own is a lifesaver,” Jen highlights. “It’s easy to think Own just sits in the background, but if you do ever need to use it for data restoration, you've got it.”
Data loss and corruption events
“There have been a few incidents where I have needed to do a recover and restore,” Jen says. She once had to deploy status information changes to thousands of records within an existing process. “Due to the complex nature of the data, there had been an error which had gone unnoticed,” she explains.
The statuses were incorrect for thousands of plots, which could have resulted in customers receiving the wrong updates for their houses, and leaving staff unable to track the correct statuses of builds. “With Own, I was able to quickly identify the data and restore it back to the correct data.”
GDPR requests
SARs from customers mean Strata has to pay particular attention to GDPR compliance by responding to them in a timely manner. “Part of this process previously required users to go through all related cases and records for that customer, and manually download the relevant documents,” Jen explains. “With Own, I can search for attachments with a certain term and it will retrieve the documents in a list which I can download directly.”
Specific record keywords are highlighted everywhere they’re mentioned in Salesforce, eliminating the time it takes to search records individually. “It’s super easy and has very much streamlined that process,” Jen says.
Feeling at home with Own
Investing in Own comes down to answering a simple question: Just how valuable is your data?
Previously, it took Jen around three hours to export and save data to Strata’s external hard drives. Own will do this while running in the background, and she doesn’t even have to think about it.
“With our previous process, I just thought, what is the point in doing this?” she says. “Because I knew that if anything had gone wrong and I needed to add the data back into Salesforce, it could take weeks—if [it were] even [possible] at all.”
No more post data-loss hunting
Data loss isn’t just about the loss itself. More time is spent identifying the cause, and then restoration to its original state—“more expensive than your annual contract with Own,” Jen explains.
“It’d be stupid to say there's not enough budget, because if something goes wrong it will cost you way way more in time, effort, money and people's patience,” she says.
Automation, now
“Knowing that everything is automated is a huge weight lifted,” Jen says. Own has taken away most of the burden of responsibility for completing these tasks manually.
Even if she doesn’t use Own every day or even every week, having it in place—such as during deployments—is invaluable. “It means I can concentrate on the job at hand, and if I do need to restore, I know it’s a simple and easy process,” she says.
Growing with Own
More than anything, Own is peace of mind and protection against accidents.
At Strata, Salesforce usage has grown since Jen started and there's a lot more focus on ensuring more company data is on the Salesforce platform, which is the company’s main record of truth for clients.
“Own adds value across the business to people who probably don’t even realize it,” she says. While only Jen deals with Salesforce on a technical level, “anything that saves me time is a godsend.”
“It makes my life easier in so many ways, as it’s such an easy but priceless tool to have,” she adds. “Luckily, we’ve not experienced major data loss. However, knowing that if we did, we have Own on our side, is a great feeling.”
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