Introduction to the Dashboard
- Reina Underwood
The DS/ARI Content Writing Dashboard in Salesforce is your new home for SEO content writing requests! Here you will find your own work assignments, both Dealer Spike and legacy ARI Network Services, Inc. client request pools, request statistics, and the over all health of the content writing team. Be sure to bookmark this link so you can check back each day you work!
When you start your workday, you’ll want to click the Refresh button at the top right of your dashboard. This process ensures that all the fields are updated on your browser. The Salesforce information database is updated about every 5 minutes. If you have updated and saved a field, but the information hasn’t shown up, try waiting, then refreshing the report or dashboard.
Due to permissions issues, you may be unable to view your own assignments in the My Assignments widget at the dashboard level until this issue is fixed. We’ll explore a workaround at the report level.
What is a Salesforce Dashboard?
A dashboard is a container for multiple reports. Each report appears as a widget. Each widget can show some text, a picture, a number, a graph, or a table. With the correct permissions, a manager can look at a dashboard as their direct report.
A proper dashboard should contain just enough information for the team. For example, a content writing dashboard should not contain digital marketing ad spend information because it is not relevant to the content writers' work.
A dashboard is customizable for each team, but should be centralized so that the manager does not have to edit each board for all of their direct reports each time a change takes places.
What is a Report?
To put it simply, any report in Salesforce is a spreadsheet. How you want to visualize the report is a different matter. A report can be a single number to answer questions such as “How many customers have the product DS SEO Platinum?” A report can be a pie chart to show the distribution of customers who have DS SEO Platinum vs. DS SEO Gold vs. DS SEO Silver. A report can be a graph to show how many clients you and your peers have. A report can show how much work is waiting to be done, what’s in progress, and what’s already complete.
You can click the link at the bottom of any widget to go to the actual report for an expanded view!
How is this different from Trello?
Salesforce’s CRM (customer relationship management) tool is built on a relational database. Since we now have a more rigid and structured way of storing data, we can create, edit, and update data surrounding our clients without having to do it multiple touch points.
How it affects content writers: We can see what the entire company sees about a dealer.
Eliminates the frustrations about incorrect SEO packages because the data is pulled right from the contract.
No more carelessly generated Trello cards for cancelled clients because active contracts keep Ongoing Fulfillment objects active, and those objects are what create Fulfillment Tasks.
In conclusion, Trello allowed room for a lot of human error. Salesforce closed that gap, and any issue identified will be a blatant systems issue that our Salesforce admin team will need to fix.