Wednesday, April 18, 2018

The Data is Restored: Thanks to Salesforce Customer Support and Our Internal Team

If you've been following the events surrounding the unexpected loss of my Salesforce data detailed in this post, How Passage Technology's Storage Helper Torched My Relationship with Salesforce, or if you've been following my updates on Twitter, you may be interested in the latest update -- as of yesterday, we believe we've restored all of our accidentally deleted data.

In that regard, I wanted to express my thanks to the Salesforce customer support team for assisting with the re-upload of several years of data from our Sandbox instance. As I mentioned in the update to my previous post, after being re-referred to the Salesforce customer support team by their Twitter support, the customer support agent that contacted me was extremely helpful. Not only did he listen and talk with me about all of the issues associated with the data loss, he then took the initiative to re-upload the data. That was no small task as the associated Excel files amounted to almost 250MB worth of data. First, he had to add a custom field for the Sandbox ID of the Invoice header, then upload the Sandbox data, then use a VLookup function to remap the Invoice Line "child records" before uploading them. It actually took him several days to complete all of this. I'm extremely grateful for the support.

With his help, we only needed to re-run our integration script for data going back to last September, (something that took us a couple of days to complete, just to give you a sense of the scope of the data).

Finally, it's worth noting that last week I sent an email to Marc Benioff to express my thanks for the customer support agent that had made such an extraordinary effort. Much to my surprise, I received an email back from Benioff, expressing concern over my experience and the issues that I raised, and forwarding those concerns on to their customer support team. After that, I received a follow-up call by one of their senior VPs. I suspect that, if we had been deeper in the weeds than we were, they would have done what they could to help us get back on our feet.

All that being said, Leo, the front-line customer support guy who wound up catching my issue following the Twitter referral, really exceeded my expectations for customer support, and it's an important reminder about just how important that front line customer support channel is. While it's reassuring to know that my concerns matter enough to Marc Benioff to generate a reply, if it hadn't been for Leo's efforts, I doubt that the whole matter would have taken a path to an executive response.

That's not to say that Salesforce's front line customer service succeeded right out of the gate. Clearly, getting a responsive experience required some persistence on my part.

In that, I think, I can find a take-away from all of this. If you're wrestling with a significant issue like this and you're dealing with Salesforce customer service, don't give up. Like many companies, Salesforce has default practices that are designed to address 80% of the issues that come up. And, like many companies, they probably have a percentage of their staff that wants to stay within the confines of their defined processes. But I think you can take one thing away that response that I got from Marc Benioff -- they really want to be the company that they promise to be. 

Having been to (and through) a number of Dreamforce events, there's a feel-good aspect of the Salesforce brand. There's the philanthropy, the 1-1-1 business model, their principled corporate voice -- there's a lot to respect about when and how Salesforce stands up. Perhaps that's why, when you're faced with certain technical challenges, operational restrictions, or dealing with aspects of the company's business processes that seem too revenue-centric, the company that you face can seem very different than the company you imagine.

But at it's core, I think Salesforce wants to be a better company; that it is a better company than most. I can't say that I won't get pissed off about something that they do tomorrow, but in the face of adversity, they did alright by me -- even if it took a bit to get there.

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