Extending Salesforce through Browser Extensions
How to develop a custom reporting accelerator to save 25,000 minutes per year
By TC Sutton and Jack Palmer
Juliet, a true-to-life data analyst at a marketing firm, was drowning. Each week, she spent countless hours sifting through customers that should be targeted for one of five active campaigns. It was a tedious chore, leaving her with little time to spend on the core data analysis she was hired to do. Instead, she spent most of her time opening contact records and dispositioning them to different campaigns. Then her leadership team announced a new plug-in currently in development that would greatly simplify the process of assigning customers to campaigns.
Intrigued by the simplicity and promise, Juliet downloaded and installed it. The browser extension turned out to be a game changer. Instead of waiting for each record to load in new tabs, she could update records in a single click. The records were also highlighted to show where she last acted. Contact reports that used to take her 15 hours a week to complete were now took under two hours.
Over the next few weeks Juliet gained a new appreciation for the power of browser extensions. She saved countless hours, her love of work improved, and she finally got time back to do the data analysis work that she enjoys.
As part of a recent research and development initiative, we at Slalom wanted to explore the possibilities of creating features that extend Salesforce capabilities and could easily be ported, adapted, and customized by any organization. We had noticed that certain Salesforce features such as standard reports aren’t easily extended beyond basic in-line field editing. We wanted to see if we could help the everyday users of Salesforce, like Juliet.
Now you might be thinking, How could one extend functionality as a standard user — don’t I need to be a developer to build new functionality and features on the Salesforce platform? Let’s dive in and showcase the possibilities.
As we began to research how to build features without access to Apex, Lightning Web Components, Flows, and other standard Salesforce developer tools, we wondered, Where is functionality so locked down that standard Salesforce development cannot currently extend? We interviewed our senior Salesforce leaders to help identify the most common tasks that Salesforce users do and collate the wish list of new functionality to explore.
One idea identified by our experts was also a common ask from our customers over the past 10 years: the ability to have action buttons on standard Salesforce reports to perform common workflows and updates. Craig Poirier, a senior director for our Salesforce team, shared, “Leveraging browser extensions is a powerful strategy to enhance Salesforce productivity. These extensions can enable immediate actions on standard Salesforce reports, streamlining workflows.” Armed with this knowledge, we set out to further explore the productivity that can be gained through extensions, especially for packaged applications that do not allow customizations to certain features.
The challenge: Adding contacts to campaigns with Salesforce standard reports
For practical purposes we looked at some of the most common standard reports used by our internal sales team including Contact, Account, Opportunity, and Campaigns.
Let’s look at a standard use case: an event is coming up and the sales team needs to select contacts that they would like to add to a campaign for that event.
Using out-of-the-box functionality, you can create a Contact report and filter it to My Contacts. Once a user opened the report they would then need to:
1) Open up each of the contacts in a new tab, and wait for the contact record to load.
2) Switch to the related records tab.
3) Scroll to find the Campaign History, and Add to Campaign.
4) Search to find the campaign, and add the contact to the campaign.
Now, in many cases, power users may extract these into a CSV file, flag or delete records that they don’t want added to the campaign, and then upsert the remaining records to the campaign via Salesforce Data Loader. The majority of users, however, will follow and repeat the four steps above until they have completed reviewing all the contacts on their report. There are many inefficiencies with this particular approach, as each of these steps takes time, and the process of scrolling and clicking on specific spots within the page to accomplish the task over and over again is extremely tedious.
The power of browser extensions
Browser-based extensions, such as Salesforce Inspector or Salesforce Mass Editor, have been around for a while and are highly popular. We know that these browser extensions have access to the Salesforce access token and work across many Salesforce instances. Our team was able to locate the access token and test it to make sure we would be able to make authenticated requests to the Salesforce APIs. Once we had an access token and confirmed that we could make Salesforce Rest API calls, we needed to work on the front end and see what experiences and functionality we could enable.
We were quickly able to interact with the HTML Document Object Model, otherwise known as the DOM, to interact with the data in the report. Exploring hovers, pop-ups, context menus, and injecting our own HTML elements into the report all became possible. Incorporating browser extensions to standard Salesforce reports empowers users to take swift action and removes obstacles preventing data-driven decisions. This can improve user efficiency and effectiveness and minimize the time spent navigating multiple windows — something most Salesforce power users have had to learn to live with over the years. Salesforce reports are a great use case, but are really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to use cases for browser extensions. The extension allows us to seamlessly add functionality into standard Salesforce reports and even highlight records that have been actioned.
There are alternative ways to accomplish similar outcomes without a browser plug-in such as creating custom Lightning components and developing a custom report that would allow similar functionality, but that level of customization is likely beyond the ability of a typical Salesforce user and would not leverage the out-of-the-box Salesforce report capability.
A time-saving solution
Applying this browser extension accelerator to our internal processes has saved, on average, 30 seconds per record. It has prevented our internal teams from having to follow the four-step process for adding contacts to campaigns, streamlining our work.
As the team reviews approximately 1,000 records per week, we estimate that this solution will save about 25,000 minutes — roughly 50 days — per person per year. This is a staggering boost in productivity and took less than a week for us to solve.
There’s a lot more that can be done with browser extensions, and we’ll continue to prototype more features that can accelerate productivity and bring new experiences.
Slalom is a next-generation professional services company creating value at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity. Contact us to learn more about how browser extensions could be used within your Salesforce environment.
