Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Maxey, Senior Product Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how My Trust Center can help admins communicate incidents, plan releases, and operate with transparency.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with John Maxey.

When I was early in my admin career in 2008, keeping track of status updates was as simple as loading up Salesforce Trust. These days, with so many different products and services, it’s gotten a lot more complicated.

That’s why I was so excited to sit down with John Maxey. He’s working on My Trust Center, a personalized, authenticated experience that only shows you information that’s relevant to your org.

With the new My Trust Center, you’ll be able to get more specific information about upcoming maintenance and how it affects your org. Everything is tailored to what products and services you’re actually using, instead of having to sift through unrelated incidents and interpret whether or not they apply to you.

As John explains, Salesforce can be much more granular about any specific maintenance or updates and how they will affect you. And that makes it easier to make decisions like when to promote new features, when you need to do testing, or when there might be downtime. You can coordinate better with your team and avoid surprises.

At its core, My Trust Center is about improving transparency both internally and externally. For admins, it will provide more visibility into what’s going on when something doesn’t work and when a particular service will be back online.

If there’s an incident, you won’t need to ask your CSM or contact customer support to figure out what happened. RCAs will be attached to each incident, so the entire process is self-serve. And you can configure notifications via SMS, Slack, or email to keep your entire team up to speed.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from John about what’s coming with My Trust Center. And make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Mike Gerholdt:

We’re going to dig into what My Trust Center means for how you communicate incidences, plan releases, and operate with clarity across increasingly complex environments. So if you’re the person everyone turns to when something breaks or when they just think something’s broke, this episode’s for you. Let’s get John on the podcast.

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

But before we talk about some of the cool stuff that you’re working on, let’s learn a little bit about John Maxey. So John, how did you get to Salesforce and what is the cool thing that you oversee?

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

But we’re going to talk about … So the blog post that went up today on admin.salesforce.com is the same topic as this podcast, which is My Trust Center, which I can’t tell you how excited I am for this. Because I remember back to my days early admin, like ’08, just going to having to pay. It never dawned on me until one of my users couldn’t log into Salesforce a long, long, long, long time ago. And I was like, oh, I wonder why that is. But I never thought about like, oh, cloud services can go offline. I need to pay attention to this.

And at the time, trust.salesforce.com was literally just like a handful of blinky lights. That’s all it was because there was a handful of pods that you paid attention to and you just checked to see if yours was up and that was it. And then over the years, I mean, there’s so much more to pay attention to. Everything that goes into trust.salesforce.com. So can you kind of take us on that journey of like Mike from 2008, just having to remember if NA1 is up to everything that the new My Trust Center is going to give us?

John Maxey:

So fast-forward 18 years and we’ve acquired companies, we’ve developed new technologies and new products. Some of them are on the platform and others are what we call off core or they’re not directly in our application. They’re separate different types of architecture. And then we’ve also moved into the public cloud. We’ve also been selling to enterprise customers and we think about an enterprise customer and their implementations are far more complicated, multi-cloud. So they may have marketing and commerce, as well as sales and service. And then we have all our industries.

So in talking to customers when I became the product manager of the trust site in 2018, just sort of realized that their experience, especially for our larger customers was harder to deal with. When you look at, I mean, I think we have 950 some odd instances in our sales service industry, we have over a thousand DBs in marketing cloud engagement. It’s just kind of daunting to try and figure out where you are. And so at the time we were figuring out tools to make it easier to find that.

But really the answer was to get personal and to create an authenticated site. So then we know our customers. I believe that’s like CRM 101, know your customer. And then when we know who they are, when you log in, we can present you with what you have with the things you already purchased, the products and services. So in this first release, we’re starting that path, that journey to true personalization. And so there’s still some gaps here and there, but one of them is the support for all our products. So we have requests out to all of our different products like MuleSoft and Tableau to do a little bit of work to get them ready for the My Trust Center. But yeah, so that’s, I mean, it’s just grown and this My Trust Center really just has come out of customer feedback and wanting a better experience.

And the other thing about the personal, I know a lot of folks are going to probably jostle a little bit at the move away from a purely public site to the authenticated site. But there’s an opportunity there to not only provide the personalization, but also be able to expand the types of services we can provide, product communications, things like that, that we may do via email today, but we can provide an experience to consolidate all that into one single spot, seeing as we will know who those customers are, being able to target the communications. As if we did it today and it was public, it would just be too much. It would be information overload. And so being able to segment that because we know who you are is really a powerful driver for that.

Mike Gerholdt:

And there was rarely a case, but this also speaks to why My Trust Center makes so much more sense. If I were to go there, “Oh, my instance is down, but these three instances aren’t.” Well, it’s not like I could do anything. It’s not like if my lights are out in the neighborhood, but my neighbor’s lights are on, I can grab my dog and I can put my slippers on and walk across the street and be like, “Hey, can we sit at your house until our lights come on?” It never dawned on me when I would go to trust.salesforce.com and see, “Oh, well, everyone else is online, just this one pod is off.” Okay, cool. Next. Right?

And that matters now because now if you think about it from what admins, developers, architects, they have so much to pay attention to. And all of a sudden, especially in a highly regulated industry, you talked about being in Finserv, why is this down? And you can feel that user looking over your shoulder and then you having to sift through a trust site, multi-layers, multi-things, and kind of give them an answer. This is, why can’t you just present me with the dashboard that makes sense? I mean, the dashboard in my car only tells me about my car. It doesn’t tell me about every other car on the road. So it kind of feels like a natural evolution.

John Maxey:

So yeah, definitely making sure that we’re giving you the information. And then also being able to expand on it more. Like I mentioned, the public nature of that, we’ve got press watching it, we’ve got competitors and things like that. And sometimes we just don’t want … We don’t have to be guarded with what we say because of how that could be used. When we know we’re talking to customers, we can be a lot more open, even drafty as they might say. We know that something’s going on. Maybe we don’t know exactly what it is.

And that’s not really necessarily appropriate when you’re speaking to a public audience. But when you’re talking to customers and they just want to know that you know that there’s a problem and that Salesforce is working on it. Like your analogy, when the power goes out, typically the customers don’t need to know when the application is having an issue. They know that the application’s that. They want to know that Salesforce knows that there’s an issue and what are we doing to fix it?

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

And in the past, it would have been as much of how much downtime would there be, but that’s almost a thing of the past. But really it’s more about when will my features? Maybe I’ve been working on those in Sandbox and I’m ready to promote them. When do I know to promote them? If we’re talking about an operations persona, they need to know when there need to be a little more diligent because there’s a release going on.

Some of our customers do testing after we do a release to make sure that there’s no conflicts or anything. Obviously as people customize their orgs, we do our best at Salesforce to make sure that there’s no conflicts in the code that we release, but there’s always, folks are very inventive in the way they do their solutions. And so there could be a conflict. A lot of customers like to test that, they want to know when. Especially if you have a large application, a lot of people in to test, you want to know the best use of their time because it’s usually on a weekend.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

But then because Trailblazer ID just takes an email address, you could use your group email to sign up for a Trailblazer ID. And then that ID, that email address, would have to be attached to a license in the orgs you want to see. So that’s the way to do that. Today, we understand it’s a challenge. Not everybody has a bunch of extra licenses to use for this type of purpose for folks who are monitoring. So we are working on a solution for a license that would have very limited or maybe no access to the org at all. But you could attach it to say a group email and then be able to get all the monitoring information you needed from that.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

In the future, we’re thinking about ways maybe we could provide some visualization to say that it’s in process and maybe how far in the process. I mean, the more we can self-serve, the better. And then we’ll look at other ways of being able to surface that type of information and similar type of communications directly in the portal and through notifications and all of that.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

I mean, in small things is accessibility, making sure that we’re accessible to finding out about the need for the license solution so that folks can see this. Whether we have big companies that outsource or have operations teams that manage all of that for the whole company. And Salesforce is just a piece of that. We also have a gap of getting an API that matches our UI, so it’ll be personalized. And if you use a monitoring application, you can just feed the signals right into that so you can have a single place to monitor all of your operations across your whole company.

So those are the types of things that we got in formatting. And actually the initial iteration of the 90 days upcoming maintenance and releases was originally 30 days and people were like, “But you only do a major release every 90 days. You can’t see enough.” And so we expanded that. And I think we need to add a little more navigation capabilities because some of that … Sometimes like for me, I have a bunch of instances that I have orgs on. So I get a bunch, a bunch of those and it’s just hard to deal with. So we’re still improving. We have a feedback farmer. We’re always looking at that feedback to see if there’s an opportunity to improve what we have.

Mike Gerholdt:

John, I’d be curious, in the past I’ve asked people, when we work in tech, often our hobbies or the things that we love to do are a little more tactile because like I told a friend of mine, I said, “Well, when the power goes out, you can’t ever see what I built.” And he was like, “Wow, that’s super powerful.” And I was like, “I know, right? It’s kind of crazy.” But I’d be curious, outside of security and building the My Trust Center, is there something fun that you like to do on the side?

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John, thanks for coming on to talk about this, I’m sure. Well, I know for certain, when you have stuff to talk about, you’re going to come back. Because this is so, so incredibly useful for admins and it really helps us kind of understand the whole state of everything that’s going on with our orgs so that we can communicate that internally to our stakeholders, which keeps the wheels running. So I appreciate you filling in all of the dots and keeping our status green for us.

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

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