The Company
Not-for-profit organizations have long been a sizable and important part of the Salesforce ecosystem. But unlike their private sector counterparts, nonprofits typically use Salesforce for mission-driven rather than sales-driven functions. That can make for some creative use cases -- which can also lead to unusual challenges. And because their lean budgets are mostly dedicated to their core purpose, nonprofits often lack the staff, expertise and resources to manage their Salesforce environment internally.
That's where CommonTeri Services comes in. The Dallas-based firm, founded by Teri Walker, has extensive Salesforce and nonprofit experience, and it's dedicated to providing the crucial technical assistance needed to keep their mission-driven clients up-and-running and serving the community.
"We understand what it means to answer to a board of directors, teams of volunteers, keep in check with an annual budget and keep donors and grants coming in," says the company.
For more than a decade, CommonTeri has lent its expertise to nonprofits through a sophisticated set of managed services. Most use Salesforce primarily for program management, volunteer management and donation management, all critical functions for an NPO.
Salesforce is the heart of their operations, enabling them to more efficiently raise funds and serve the community-- and serve they do, in a multitude of ways. CommonTeri clients run everything from food banks, literacy projects, workforce readiness programs, to college prep and equine services. Most use a NPSP product on top of standard Salesforce and have multiple integrations like donation platforms, and marketing and communication tools.
The Problem
The CommonTeri team knows even the most well-maintained systems can generate errors, so there has always been a culture of using best practices with their customers. Monitoring and error management is a core part of that. But early on (prior to using Pharos), they were only able to do error management for a select few customers because the process was manual -- and very time intensive.
Before Pharos, Salesforce-generated exception emails went into a shared email inbox. Someone on the team had to sift through hundreds of emails, find corresponding errors, and triage them. CommonTeri staff was spending hours, even days, searching for issues. The sheer task of wading through hundreds of emails was overwhelming. while the process of diagnosing errors was tedious, time-intensive, and not scalable. Something so fundamental - managing errors - was inhibiting the firm's ability to grow.
CommonTeri needed a solution that would automate the process and provide insights into the high volume of coming from their customer orgs. They also wanted to consolidate errors and activities across all of their clients into a single dashboard, so they could manage each client individually, but also see across clients to identify common issues and focus on emerging hot spots.
The Solution
Teri Walker, the firm's founder, came across Pharos at a Salesforce community conference and realized it would be a game-changer. As a consultant, the “Connected Orgs” functionality of Pharos would prove to be a radical improvement over the previous approach. With Pharos, her team could look across all client orgs at once, and monitor problems both collectively and individually at a glance--a massive time saver.
Pharos also dramatically reduced the time it took for CommonTeri to find and resolve client issues. Repetitive errors could now be rolled up into issues and managed collectively at the root cause. As a result, older issues that were lingering in customer orgs became instantly visible and actionable.
“Pharos has allowed us to provide a higher level of service to our customers - nothing slips through the cracks anymore. Pharos lets us add more value to more customers without adding more resources to make that value happen, which is always a win.” - Teri Walker, Founder
Pharos was also the key to discovering hard to find Declarative Lookup Rollup Summary (DLRS) errors for CommonTeri’s many non-profit customers. DLRS is a part of Salesforce Labs and is a tool that is used extensively by many non-profit organizations. When DLRS is running in a complex Salesforce environment with process builders, flows and legacy debt, it often generates timeout errors which are very difficult to track and troubleshoot as they often happen deep in the weeds.
CommonTeri had many customers who were getting DLRS errors; for some, the errors had been occurring for months and years. But once they installed Pharos in their customer orgs, the CommonTeri team was able to quickly find the specific spots where these errors were happening and resolve the underlying issues causing the problems.
“If we tried to find each one of these DLRS errors, it would take hours upon hours. With Pharos everything came together quickly, we could pinpoint the error and its root cause. We could explain exactly what the error was and where it was happening without having to think twice about it.” - Teri Walker, Founder
More Value Delivered by Pharos
Using the "Frequency and Occurrence" dashboard in Pharos, the CommonTeri team is able to look at issues differently and determine if something is isolated or systemic.
This was especially significant during what the team calls "the Witching Hour” -- the time period shortly after a Salesforce release when things often go haywire as a result of the update. With Pharos, they could easily see any unusual spikes in errors, how often they happened, how many customers were affected, and whether the errors were isolated incidents or not.
“Not every error needs to be treated as a fire drill, so with the help of Pharos we can prioritize and triage issues quickly and efficiently.”
The Results
With Pharos, CommonTeri broadened and deepened the way it could serve all of its clients
Initially, CommonTeri provided error management only for their highest-tier customers because it is time consuming and resource-intensive. Using Pharos, the firm was able to cut down time spent on error management from hours and days to minutes and seconds, effectively opening doors for this service to all of their customers. And they no longer have people sifting through a huge inbox of emails. That process is now obsolete.
“Pharos ties everything together and gives us a comprehensive view of all issues. It shows us how many times something has happened, helps us determine if it's a new or recurring issue, if it’s something we thought was previously resolved but wasn’t, and makes things actionable. There really isn’t any other way for us to see this and Salesforce doesn’t show this out of the box.”
CommonTeri now offers Pharos’ capabilities to all of its clients as part of a bundled services package called "Security Blanket." It's one of their core offerings -- a scalable error-management solution they can provide to more customers without draining their own resources.
The CommonTeri staff