Connected Force

“Brandy loves capturing incredible marketing moments.”

Salesforce

As a marketer, it is not that the higher amount of subscribers the better, it is the number of engaged customers that matters. A few benefits of keeping the contacts data clean and high quality are: 1) Salesforce license cost is highly related to the contact counts in the system. As the marketer, regularly check the contacts amount in “All Contacts” tab to stay within the license limit as well as to remove contacts to avoid paying unnecessarily. 2) Keeping a high quality contact database is critical in building up and maintaining a high sending domain reputation to avoid emails landing in the customer’s spam box. 3) regularly deleting unnecessary contact data keeps the company compliant with the privacy laws, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), to “not collect or keep more personal data than strictly necessary”.

Contacts can enter Marketing Cloud from many sources. The primary way is via import, which means from the synchronous data extension that is connected to sync contacts from Service Cloud. Other sources include MobilePush, MobileConnect, etc.. What is considered unnecessary contact? The bottom line is CRM (most of the time salesforce service cloud) should be the system of record. When the Salesforce connector is set up, make sure the synchronised data extension only syncs the engaged subscribers. Therefore, any contact which is not part of the synchronised data extension is a candidate for deletion. However, there are some use cases in which contacts should bypass the deletion process. For example, contacts have the status as held and bounce, if they are deleted, their bounce histories will also be erased. Maybe it’s better to remain in the marketing cloud and rely on the marketing cloud’s bounce management capability. Once the contact’s status is changed to inactive, they can be included in the deletion. The selection for deletion should be tailored based on the business needs. The end goal of preparation is to store the to-be-deleted contact list (SubscriberKey field only) in a CSV file.

Contact deletion steps are as follows:

(1) Create a package in the parent account and give API access to read and write data extensions, so that the SSJS script can run at the child business level and delete the contacts from the parent unit level. “List and Subscribers Read and Write” permissions are sufficient for this contact deletion process.

(2) Create a shared Data Extension. Only SubscriberKey is needed for the contact deletion. Make sure to create the data extension as “sendable”. Import the prepared CSV file to this shared data extension.

(3) Create a SSJS activity and use the below script for contact deletion. Provide information of the sub-domain, client credentials from the previous two steps.

<script runat="server">
Platform.Load("Core", "1");
try {
//AUTHENTICATE
var url = "https://xxx.auth.marketingcloudapis.com/v2/token";
var contentType = "application/json";
var payload = '{"grant_type": "client_credentials","client_id": "xxx","client_secret": "xxx","account_id":"xxx"}';
var accessTokenResult = HTTP.Post(url, contentType, payload);
var accessToken = Platform.Function.ParseJSON(accessTokenResult["Response"][0]).access_token;
if (accessToken != "") {
//EXECUTE
var deleteUrl = "https://xxx.rest.marketingcloudapis.com/contacts/v1/contacts/actions/delete?type=listReference";
var payload1 = '{"deleteOperationType": "ContactAndAttributes","targetList": {"listType": {"listTypeID": x},"listKey": “xxx”},”deleteListWhenCompleted": false,"deleteListContentsWhenCompleted": false}';
var headerNames = ["Authorization"];
var s1 = "Bearer ";
var headerValues = [s1.concat(accessToken)];
var result = HTTP.Post(deleteUrl, contentType, payload1, headerNames, headerValues);
}
} catch (ex) {
Write("Exception Error: " + Stringify(ex));
}
</script>

(4) Create the delete process in the child business unit and call the contact deletion SSJS script from child business unit. The below contact deletion automation is an example, and it has additional features such as: before deletion – verify if the shared data extension has contacts for deletion; after deletion – record contact deletion log; and after deletion – refresh SFMC contact count.

Some practical tips:

• Contact deletion feature needs to be enabled in the parent business unit level.
• The default suppression period is 2 days, it can be changed to 0-30 days.
• Delete up to one million records is the system limit. However, smaller amount over a period of time is considered a safer approach.

In summary, contact deletion is a continuous process. The next step is to keep monitoring the subscribers engagement level. Keep only the engaged subscribers and delete regularly the un-engaged subscribers. This normally need data support (such as 6 months engagement history). A following blog will cover this topic. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!

For Articles Import, Salesforce documentation is sufficient enough to follow. Best way to start with is to follow the instructions from Setup->Import Articles, download the sample files and adjust to your content. Import External Content into Salesforce Knowledge provides more information.

However, for the scenario that a translation would like to be added to the master language article separately, there is not much information online so far, thereby I have written down the below instructions as a reference. For individual translation import, it always start with requesting for a translation, thereby Salesforce will prepare the translation version an Article ID. Afterwards, either editor can edit either online or offline (then import).

Request for Translation

1. Find the article you would like to have a translation.
2. Click the “Submit For Translation”.

3. Select the language you would like for the translation, suggest also select “Send notification email”.

4. Assigned user will receive an email notification with the link for editing the translation. 

Note that this means that internal salesforce user can edit the translation directly by clicking the email link. For the import article translation, continue follow Import Article Translation section below.

Import Article Translation

Similar with import articles, we need to prepare the import zip file structure.

1. There is limited information from Salesforce to start with: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=knowledge_translation_import.htm&type=5
2. Below is the overview of the folder structure:

3. This is the properties file content, see blue notes for special attention.

CSVEncoding=UTF-8.              

DefaultHTMLEncoding=UTF-8

RTAEncoding=UTF-8

CSVSeparator=;

DateFormat=yyyy-MM-dd

DateTimeFormat=yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss

ArticleTypes=Knowledge__kav     

– note: “Knowledge_kav” is the name of your folder and csv file.

SourceLanguage=en_US.                            

 – note: this is the language of the master article.

TargetLanguage=fr                                      

 – note: this is the language of your translation version.

4. In the CSV file, the field KnowledgeArticleId is very important. It comes from the email links, see highlighted below, which enables system to know where to import the content and also links to the master article. 

5. After import, the translation will be appear in the “Article Management” as expected.

Hope this article can help you!

Salesforce Knowledge base is like a swimming pool of (max. 10,000) knowledge articles.

Data Category is the most key concept that helps with organising these many articles. It is a hierarchical classification of articles in the knowledge base according to multiple categories.

Besides structuring the knowledge base, data categories also commonly used for 2 other purposes:

1. Providing a way to secure the access to the knowledge-base content
For instance, restricting a profile (R&D users) to only view “Research” data category articles.

2. Feeding the agent users/community users the relevant articles. This is achieved by Automatic Case Mapping and Automatic Community Navigation Topics Mapping.

This diagram above explains that data category is centrally set up in the Settings. Each knowledge article (right box) can be tagged with different categories.

Suppose an agent (normally agents work with the case object) selects a value from case related category field (can be a standard or custom with pick-list field, the values are defined exactly the same as data category), then all knowledge articles tagged with the same category will be suggested for this agent when the case is created.

The same way works for the community user, if a community user selects a navigation topic, all the knowledge articles that are under this category and are mapped to this navigation topic will appear in the community.

Hope this blog helps with understanding the data category concept within Salesforce!

This month I would like to write a blog about Salesforce, also because I just became a certified salesforce administrator.

Salesforce is a very easy-going enterprise application for mainly CRM system. 80% of the system is configurable, and with AppExchange, lots of templates and solutions are ready for download and use.

I highly recommend the salesforce training, which is free and very well structured. You can follow trailmix and learn step by step for a specialization. During the trailmix, you will complete badges, super badges, and projects. Each unit is not too big and learner can build up the confidence to go along the journey. I enjoyed earning super badges very much, due to it is assignment based challenge typically takes 6-8 hours to complete. It can be stressful if you are stuck in the middle of somewhere, but heyy do not forget we have google, there are many of others has been through this and shared their experience! With the completion of a super badge, you will receive 5000-6000 points, that will be a real happy moment!

For example, below is my overview after 3 weeks 🙂

Salesforce user is called Trailblazer, there are many cartoon characteristics makes the company feel easy-going and young, if you are interested in the cartoon’s meaning, here you go: Astro, Codey, and Friends. Never forget that Salesforce engages in organising many community events for users or certain group users, like admin users, it’s also amazing to observe such an enterprise company can engage with its users in such an easy and relaxed way.

Based on my observation this month, there are two areas in Salesforce where I found not perfect yet.

Firstly, the structure of the functionalities in the application is not very easy to follow anymore. Due to the fast growth over the past 20 years, Salesforce started with CRM system and grew to a platform basically can do everything. During this journey, 2 versions of salesforce are running in parallel – Classic and Lightning. I think Salesforce planned to transit from classic to lightning, but due to any reason it is not yet fully managed, some functionalities still require to switch to Classic to use. On a micro level, a functionality, for instance -workflow- Salesforce has 3 tools to do the same, each new tool has a bit more functionality compared with the earlier tool, not sure why Salesforce did not choose to release a new version of the same tool instead.

Secondly, Salesforce Einstein claims to have AI capability, however, the reality seems that it is restricted in the area of analytics. It is powerful in connecting data sources internally and externally, as well as reporting and building dashboards. However, there is no sign indicating the system is learning from users’ feedback (so-called feedback loop), which is the key element in machine learning, thus I do not count it is intelligent. Looking forward to the future Einstein!