Salesforce’s popularity comes thanks to its secure and scalable features and the way it always strives to make the platform as safe as possible. However, there are some instances where you might feel like your Salesforce platform is not working to its full potential, or you may not see the growth you were expecting after implementing Salesforce in your business. That’s where a Salesforce Health Check comes into action.
But, ‘what is Salesforce Health Check? You might be asking. In this article, we will answer this question and let you know why you should get one, the advantages of a Health Check, and how you can get an org Health Check in Salesforce. Keep reading to learn more.
What is a Salesforce Health Check?
A Health Check is a service that provides a detailed view of the general security health of your Org, your processes, and your workflows. It can help you identify vulnerabilities in your security system, unused features hindering your productivity, missed critical updates that affect your org’s performance, or any obstacles in everyday processes.
Why is it Important to Perform a Salesforce Health Check?
Similarly to us humans, who need a yearly doctor’s appointment to check that everything is going smoothly with our health, your Salesforce org needs to undergo Health Checkups on a regular basis. If you want to ensure the consistency of your processes and take advantage of Salesforce’s full potential, then this procedure is a must.
Additionally, there are some instances where it is very important to run a Health Check, for example, after a new Salesforce Release.
As we know, Salesforce schedules 3 major releases every year, bringing new features, updates, and enhancements. And it can take a lot of work to keep up with every new feature or update and how it affects your current Salesforce instance. So, running regular checks on your Org can help you stay up to date with the new features, take control of your system, boost data security, and keep your platform scalable.
Another instance for why you’d need a Salesforce Health Check would be if you are a consultant inheriting an existing Salesforce system and you need to find out if the org is covering your business needs, if it has a lot of technical debts, or if it’s missing some critical updates. With a Health Check, you can clearly see how your platform is doing and what to do for better optimization.
Finally, you might have just implemented Salesforce in your business, but it is not giving you the expected growth. Then you’ll need a Health Check to review if the implementation is evolving in alignment with your business processes, if every user has the correct security setting, or if your data is clean and usable.
All of these can be determined and avoided by running regular Salesforce Health Checks. So, instead of waiting for issues to upset your operating systems, get a reality check of how your Salesforce instance is currently performing by proactively running a Salesforce Health Check.
What Problems does the Health Check Solve?
As mentioned before, with regular Health Checks, you can help your business evolve in alignment with Salesforce capabilities and solve some problems that affect the health of your existing Salesforce instance, like the following:
Decrease User Adoption: When your Salesforce platform is not aligned with your business needs, you can have a decrease in user adoption. You can have users utilizing some features more than others, or not using Salesforce and creating data silos. An assessment of your org can help you understand the usage of your Salesforce licenses in each department and provide a guide to implementing an adoption program to increase user adoption.
Data issues: Other issues that might come out over time are duplicated contacts, accounts that need data cleanup, or maybe requiring additional automation to avoid data corruption and keep your data integrity. A regular health assessment provides a deep understanding of your platform’s data security and how to maintain the correct data governance structure in your org.
Security setup: Processes time out can bring about errors in your system, and not having the correct security setup for users can bring security issues. Additionally, your org can have inactive security mechanisms that exist in your security settings. A Health Check can assess your Org’s security settings and uncover any security risks affecting your platform’s health.
Unused features: It’s hard to keep up with all of the new features Salesforce brings every year, so it’s not uncommon to have some businesses not taking advantage of the new Salesforce features or having missed out on some critical updates that are holding the company back from seeing the expected growth. By regularly evaluating the health of your org, your Salesforce administrator can keep up with every new enhancement, feature, and change affecting your platform and gain control of the system.
Technical debts: Over the years, your business could have created technical debts that are accumulating interest and are increasing the difficulty in implementing upcoming changes. With an org audit, you can gain an understanding of the scope of the debt and where they are coming from, and create a plan to address these issues by priority.
Business processes review: As your business grows, your Salesforce org might not be supporting your current processes, you might be missing opportunities to optimize your processes, or your process requires frequent troubleshooting. With a Health Check, you can ensure that your industry’s best practices align with Salesforce’s, review which apps have been integrated into the org, and ensure the new configurations are not adding risks to deployments.
Advantages of Performing a Health Check
Now that you have seen what problems a Salesforce Health Check can solve, let’s mention some advantages that performing a Health Check brings to your business.
- Enhance your business ROI.
- Get a complete and clear view of how to continue with your org’s optimization.
- Improve your platform’s user adoption.
- Increase your productivity by identifying unused features.
- Find hidden potential in all departments of your company.
- Track your changing security needs and get a deep understanding of your org’s data security.
- Streamline new deployments.
- Improve overall system performance by fixing system errors.
When Should You Run a Health Check?
In order to keep a comprehensive view of your org’s health, it is recommended to run a quarterly check of your Salesforce org’s health.
Some businesses are very busy and only manage to do an annual Health Check or one every six months. However, that is not enough. Businesses move too quickly, and Salesforce has three major releases every year. By having only annual Health Checks, your team will have a considerable overhaul to complete and will miss out on the true potential of your platform.
With quarterly checks, you ensure that you can keep up with all the updates and new features, and gain control of your system. Additionally, you will be able to keep your org scalable and check the development environment. It will facilitate admins to keep up on best practices, review code and configuration, and improve their platform performance.
How do I Run an Org Health Check in Salesforce?
There are different ways you can run a Health Check in your Salesforce org, and it will depend on what you want to review.
1- Salesforce offers a Health Check tool that you can access through setup. This tool analyzes vulnerabilities in your Salesforce Org from a single page. Health Check’s dashboard allows you to see if your security settings align with Salesforce Baseline Standard and gives you the option to fix the risks with the click of a button. If you want to know more about this tool, check the Salesforce trailhead on Health Check.
2- A Health Check tool that is powered by Salesforce is Checkmark Apex Code Scanner. This tool is a little expensive, but it can run a security scan on your platform to discover any loophole present in your apex code, and it ensures everything is aligned with Salesforce’s best practices.
3- Another way to check the health of your org is with Salesforce Accelerator. This on-demand tool allows users to scan for technical issues in their platform and provides recommendations on how to fix them. It brings out the reasons behind the technical debts and the low performance of the org. This accelerator is available for organizations that are part of a Salesforce Premier Success Plan.
4- Finally, the most common way to run a Health Check is by doing a manual org assessment, where you can conduct a technical audit of the system concerning user adoption. You can evaluate the Salesforce products that are being used and check if you are making the most out of each product feature and conduct an audit on the quality of the data and plan how to cleanse the data as needed.
In order to make the most out of your org’s health assessment, it is recommended to get help from an experienced Salesforce partner who can make a more personalized Salesforce Health Check assessment according to your business needs.
In Short
As we mentioned, a Salesforce Health Check is an important maintenance step that should be part of your org’s quarterly routine. If you are looking to uncover the technical issues that are holding your org’s back from providing you with the growth your business needs, find the hidden potential in all departments of your company, or just optimize your current platform, then you need a Salesforce Health Check.
You can get it done by your salesforce admin, following Salesforce guidelines, or you can have a more personalized optimization of your platform with the assistance of an experienced Salesforce Consulting team.
Luckily for you, Cloudsquare, a Salesforce consulting and implementation partner, offers a complementary Salesforce Health Check in their services.