The Company
A new approach improved performance and reduced user angst
Aroma360 is a manufacturer and distributor of essential oil-based scenting solutions for businesses and homes. As the leader in Scent Marketing and Scent Branding, Aroma360 has a worldwide presence with global luxury brands.
The company uses the Salesforce platform for everything–from sales and marketing to e-commerce, accounting, customer service and shipping. Nearly all employees use Salesforce in some way, and their business relies on the system functioning optimally.
The Challenge
Grappling with a flood of uncertainty
Aroma360 was getting thousands of Salesforce errors a day–from user-generated errors to system errors. The Salesforce error notifications were too generic and lacked context. Frustrated users inundated their admin help desk daily and resolution took days to weeks, depending on severity.
These errors also impacted overall system performance and slowed processing of thousands of transactions and data going through the system. They enlisted the help of Salesforce Premium Support and, while helpful, the process took time and caused delays in resolution. Additionally the “fix it and not explain it” mindset created more confusion and frustration.
"We were losing employee productivity daily because of Salesforce errors and the notifications we got weren’t specific. We wanted mastery over the system – knowing exactly what went wrong and why it stopped working was really important to us."
The Solution
Steve Soto, then VP technology at Aroma360, came from a long history of software development. When he joined the company, he knew they needed a solution. But he was disappointed at what Salesforce provided in their core product offering to debug and track issues, which prompted him to look for an observability solution like Pharos on the AppExchange.
Upon installing Pharos, his team immediately started to get valuable and actionable insights into their Salesforce environment. They gained a centralized repository of all errors and details and context behind every error. This cut down their time to identify a problem from hours to just seconds, and they were able to get to the root cause more quickly. Even managed package errors that were once difficult to ascertain became easy to track and debug.
The error fingerprinting and categorization metrics in Pharos allowed them to pinpoint deficiencies in their business process. They gained a better understanding of what their users needed and put automation in place to optimize their system and dramatically cut down the amount of data being added to the system for thousands of transactions every month.
Steve used the Pharos dashboard extensively and daily to get a comprehensive, single pane view of the health of his Salesforce org. Metrics like user impact, occurrence and severity helped his developers prioritize and triage issues, while visualization of errors helped them drill down to provide a fast fix.
The Results
With Pharos, Aroma360 was able to:
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Recover multiple hours a week of lost time for support employees
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Reduce the amount of user-generated errors from tens of thousands a week to a few that could then be efficiently managed
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Improve system performance
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Dramatically reduce MTTI to seconds and MTTR from days/weeks to hours
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Enable automation for a better Salesforce process and improved user experience
“On our own, we couldn't get the answers we needed to resolve things in a timely manner. But with Pharos, they were obvious, not obscure. We didn’t have to go off platform to another tool. Pharos did it natively inside Salesforce.” - Steve Soto