Enterprise Help Desk Built with Salesforce

Another of my early experiences came from supporting a fully custom-built Help Desk solution within Salesforce. While I wasn’t involved in the original development, my role as an administrator gave me deep insight into how a robust, tailored support system can be architected and maintained entirely on the Salesforce platform.

How the Help Desk Worked

The Help Desk was built around a custom object with thoughtfully designed custom fields that captured every critical piece of support interaction. The system empowered authorized Salesforce users to submit internal IT & HR tickets, which were then auto-assigned to queues representing functional areas of each department—streamlining workload distribution.

Key features included:

• Attachments Support: Users could attach relevant files directly to tickets for richer context.

• Detailed Tracking Fields: The Help Desk tracked the assignee, submitter, request details, communication notes, and resolution notes via custom fields—capturing the full lifecycle of each ticket.

• Validation Rules: Resolution notes were mandatory before a ticket could be marked as resolved, ensuring quality and completeness.

• Automated Closure Workflow: Once an assignee marked a ticket resolved, a workflow automatically closed the ticket after 24 hours, unless the assignee closed it sooner after confirming resolution satisfaction with the submitter.

• Survey Integration: On closure, an automatic survey was sent via a third-party tool, capturing satisfaction scores from 1 to 5 and optional comments. Survey responses were fed back into Salesforce for reporting.

• KPI Reporting: All ticket data and survey results were reportable, supporting continuous improvement efforts and leadership visibility.

Key Takeaways & Lessons Learned

Using and supporting this system gave me invaluable administrative experience:

🌸 Custom Object Design: Understanding how to design and manage custom fields that capture nuanced business process details.

🌸 Automation Best Practices: Managing workflow rules and validation rules to enforce process integrity without hindering user productivity.

🌸 Queue and Assignment Management: Using queues to organize tickets by functional areas helped me appreciate effective workload balancing.

🌸 Integrating Third-Party Tools: The survey tool integration showed me how Salesforce can communicate bidirectionally with external systems to capture meaningful feedback.

🌸 Driving Data Quality: Validation rules and process enforcement ensured that ticket data remained clean and reliable for KPIs.