In the vast world of Salesforce, list Views may not be the flashiest or most discussed feature, but their impact to your organisation could be massive. Could it be that this seemingly simple feature holds the potential to revolutionise how your teams manage their workloads?
A hallmark of a successful Salesforce Service Cloud implementation, marked by strong user adoption, is one where every user has a suite of List Views that give them visibility over exactly what they need to see, and the appropriate List Views actions to be able to complete all their tasks quickly and efficiently.
In this article, we’ll explore a Salesforce Service Cloud implementation from its inception to go-live and on to significant productivity gains, all through the lens of List Views.
A List View in Salesforce Service Cloud is essentially a filtered table that displays records from a specific object, such as Cases, Contacts, Projects or Accounts, according to the criteria you set.
Think of it as a personalised dashboard, offering a curated snapshot of the data that matters most to you and your team. Whether you’re looking to monitor high-priority cases, track customer issues by region, or simply manage your daily tasks, List Views allow you to access and organise the information that’s most relevant to your role, all at a glance.
Before the project, EcoSunHeat (a pioneering, Bristol-based, renewable energy company specialising in solar power and heat pumps) was in a real mess. Their entire business was tracked on spreadsheets, bits of paper, different calendars and just in people’s heads.
Luckily their management team had a plan. They decided to implement Salesforce Service Cloud with Field Service Lightning to standardise, organise and take control of their data, and empower their employees to work more efficiently and accurately.
To implement their new solution, they employed a Salesforce Implementation Partner, let’s call them Desynit, to configure and optimise the system to their needs, and make sure everything was set up correctly for now and going forward.
When Desynit came in, one of the first things they did was look at the Spreadsheets and data sources they had already. Why do companies have so many spreadsheets?
One of the reasons is that Users really like to be able to see multiple records at once, they like to be able to choose what data points are valuable to them, and they like to be able to search and filter – just like List Views.
BUT the huge problem with spreadsheets is that everyone has their own ideas of how the data should be structured! Suddenly you’ve got customers’ names, phone numbers, addresses and other sensitive and important data in multiple places and different formats.
This is a GDPR and compliance nightmare. You are trusting the integrity of your staff, which as you grow or recruit new staff, can set you up for a fall.
More than that, because these spreadsheets are not controlled in any way, it’s really easy to just delete things by accident or mess up a formula, and not realise until you’ve lost something important.
Putting the data in Salesforce and providing accurate List Views solves this problem and provides a host more advantages on top.
When Desynit starts the implementation, they use standard fields for most of the data, and create custom fields where there are specific data points relevant to EcoSunHeat’s industry and a few unique selling points they have too.
Not only the spreadsheets are analysed and their fields built into Salesforce, but also all the Calendars and ad-hoc notes too (where appropriate).
Once the fields are created, the team can collate, organise and migrate the whole data set into Salesforce Service Cloud. This means that all the fields can be pulled onto List Views and the team can view all the data in bulk.
The first great thing about this is that because Salesforce is a relational database the team at EcoSunHeat immediately started to see the links between their data.
They’ll realise things like “Look we both have a task with this Account on the same day!”
Or, “we’re talking to the same Contact about those 2 different Opportunities independently and we never even realised!”
Going back to list views, records of Accounts, Opportunities, Contacts, Leads, Tasks, Events (because Calendar data was all migrated and synced going forward using out the box integrations) can all be viewed in bulk.
Initially the views were set up a lot like the spreadsheets the teams were used to using, this was super important because it gave a lot of confidence to the team that “nothing was lost”.
Whenever a team goes into something new, you can never undermine that feeling that everyone has of being nervous and unsure where everything is and “did it all go in?”.
List Views really help with that, we can point to a list we’ve filtered to their records that were just migrated, select all the same fields and say “Looks, it’s exactly like your spreadsheet just 10,000 times better!”
This was a huge step forward for EcoSunHeat already but was only just the beginning.
Now that the data was migrated the team started to share the best List Views between teams so that they all had consistent views of the information they needed to see.
They noticed that the different Objects in Salesforce (Contacts, Accounts, Projects) were like the “tabs” they used to have on their spreadsheets, and the different list views on the Objects were similar to how they used to filter everything, except now they didn’t need to filter it differently every time, they could just select the correct list view!
And unlike their spreadsheet’s things didn’t just get deleted or changed by accident. All the data was tracked as related records with a history of changes.
The final step that really pushed them to huge increases in productivity was when they started making use of the bulk automation features of List Views.
The first straightforward one is in-line editing. Just like your spreadsheet you can look at a list and edit the data point (cells) by clicking on them – albeit with an “are you sure” button and proper controls and tracking on the data in Salesforce.
But we also have the magic of bulk actions. From a list view a user can select multiple records at once and press from a selection of specially designed and curated buttons. These buttons can then perform actions related to the records that were selected.
As I’m sure you can imagine there are a very many ways that these actions could be used.
Let’s say the team wants to do a bit of marketing, they filter and select the Contacts they need using list views, then select the ones they want to market to initially and add them all to a campaign. Then selecting sub-groups they press another button to assign all those Contacts to one person to manage, or assign all those contacts to an upcoming Event, or create a task on each Contact for someone to follow-up on.
Then perhaps later on once the Event is complete they’ll want to bulk update the Stages of all the relevant Opportunities.
From a Project point of view, perhaps the team wants to update stages of a Project installation in bulk, and send an email action to update the customer on their progress once all the stages are completed.
Ultimately these kinds of automations really make users love Salesforce Service Cloud.
In this article, we explored how List Views played a crucial role in transforming EcoSunHeat from a disorganised, spreadsheet-dependent company into a streamlined, data-driven enterprise.
It started with good data, consolidating scattered information and visualising it in list views, which provided confidence to users and drove adoption.
Next we shared the best List Views and ultimately built out some powerful bulk actions.
By embracing List Views, your organisation can achieve similar success, boosting user adoption and helping you to meet your goals.
Our independent tech team has been servicing enterprise clients for over 15 years from our HQ in Bristol, UK. Let’s see how we can work together and get the most out of your Salesforce implementation.
