The Janitor, keeping an eye on the problematic local bird population

Janitor Dashboards

‘You have to know the rules to break them.’

I love this saying.

I’m also quoting another article I wrote that prompted me to write this article;

‘You have to know the rules to break them. If you can’t or don’t want to make a field mandatory for whatever reason then monitor that field instead. Add it to a janitor dashboard and keep an eye on it.’

My definition of a Janitor Dashboard is:

A dashboard based on a series of reports that highlight common errors, missing data or incompatible combinations of data. Typically these are issues that are hard to fix systematically i.e. they require human intervention or complex logic to fix, so you know there is a problem but the solution is not immediately obvious.

This ties in with the minimum viable product philosophy that I talk about; when you’re building a new app or configuring a new system, you want to keep it as simple as possible rather than trying to solve the more difficult challenges straight away. You create a minimalistic solution first; the MVP does the job, and then you can monitor the results to identify the best and most efficient way to improve the app/system. You’ll know you’re on track because your customer journey and related documentation will guide you on the key data points to report on… ;)

Example 1 — Churn

We know that organisations are shifting towards a more customer retention based business model aka focussing on NDR or NRR (Net Dollar/Revenue Retention) as part of their key metrics.

If you’re not familiar, then the basic idea is that whilst older business models were heavily biased towards winning new business, we now know that it is more cost effective to retain and grow existing business as a priority.

A large part of this process is identifying and reducing churn risk. The key word is risk and that is something that can be very complex to manage systematically. There are many factors that feed into the risk of a customer taking their business elsewhere so having a janitor dashboard can be a highly effective way to monitor and mitigate this risk.

Here are some reports that you might include in your Churn Janitor Dashboard

1. Support Cases
   - Number of open support cases per customer, exceeds a threshold or set ratio i.e. more than 1 new case per user per week
   - Number of high priority/severity cases within a set time frame
   - Number of escalations/chases
   - Number of formal complaints (more than 0!)
   - Number of aged/unresolved support cases
2. Product Usage
   - Drop in average usage in a certain time frame
   - Less logins per day/week/month
   - Less time spent logged in on avg.
3. Marketing Engagement
   - Customer unsubscribes
   - Reduced website or webinar activity
4. Account Manager Engagement
   - Number of calls/emails logged
   - Number of Leads created (Account Based Marketing anyone?)
   - Number of renewal, upsell or cross-sell Opportunities created or won/lost
5. Competitor Activity (potentially quite advanced)
   - Wouldn’t it be great if you could spot trends in the number of times you are displaced by a competitor or lose a tender against a competitor so that you assess potential threats and work out which of your customers your competitors are targeting?

Initially there is no way that you can summarise and roll up all those key data points and potential risk identifiers into one single metric or notification. But having them all in one place, on a simple and easy to read dashboard can make it easy to spot risk at a glance and focus your customer retention efforts accordingly.

Over time, you’ll notice trends and have enough data to create your MVP churn indicator automation. Hopefully you’ll come up with a better name for it too.

Example 2 — Technical Support

What better way to prevent churn than have a 1st rate support team, powered by cutting edge statistics, alerts and knowledge base articles. Well I can’t provide any of that here but setting up a janitor dashboard to monitor support cases is a perfect illustration of the effectiveness of the humble janitor. It’s something that I have done in the past and to great effect.

So before you curate your support ticketing system, get the basics right first and use the janitor to spot trends and weaknesses in your support cases!

1. Cases not assigned to an agent
2. Cases without a response (or if you have automated responses, a personal response) after a X minutes
3. High priority cases without a response or resolution
4. Cases approaching SLAs targets
5. Cases assigned to the wrong team
6. Cases with the wrong category or priority

There are probably 100’s of reports you could include but hopefully these ideas are enough to set the scene. Again, the key thing to remember is to keep it simple so that, as a manager, you can see at a glance, where your focus needs to be.

Example 3 — Salesforce Admin Janitor

Just a few more ideas for a another dashboard that us admins can appreciate:

1. Unassigned records (I know this isn’t technically possible)
   - Records owned by the default owner that shouldn’t be i.e. Leads or Cases that were missed by the assignment rules and came to you instead
   - Records that have been sat in a queue for a certain amount time and have been touched (based on Last Modified Date, for example)
2. Inactive Users
   - Users that haven’t logged in for a certain amount of time (great for saving on licence costs!)
3. Flow Errors
   - Get your Flow errors (the error traps you create because you’re a good admin) to create a log in a custom object
   - This gives me an idea… watch this space
4. Unused Reports and Dashboards
   - There is a report type for this — Find old or inactive Reports and Dashboards to delete
5. Unused Fields
   - Use a tool like Zoominfo’s Field Trip to identify fields that aren’t used very often if at all, hide them from the page layout and then delete after a certain amount of time if no one complains*

*I don’t recommend waiting for users to complain as best practice

Surface and solve issues in your Org with the power of Janitor Dashboards!

I hope you enjoyed the article and found it useful. Please feel free to get in touch via the comments or hit me up on LinkedIn!