When we’re in the moment at work, it often seems like everything is permanent, but things are actually always changing. People on your team unfortunately come and go. They quit. They get laid off. They get fired.
From an IT perspective, this has an impact. The people in charge of your organization’s IT must keep track of all these comings and goings and make sure operations keep on humming technologically without missing a beat. This is especially true with data-rich, mission-critical CRM systems like Salesforce.
How do the best organizations handle these situations? Glad you asked.
The important thing to remember here is that when an employee leaves the organization, you do NOT want to delete his or her account. That account contains valuable data, such as contacts, leads, groups they own or manage, and much more. You need to preserve all of this critical historical data in the CRM system so that the employees who remain, and those who will be assigned certain accounts, can access it and build on it.
In fact, in Salesforce, you CAN’T delete user accounts for this very reason. Instead, you need to deactivate the account. By doing this, the data stays, but the departed user can no longer access it.
Deactivating an account in Salesforce is simple. If you’re an admin, go to Setup, then click Manage Users, and then click Users in the dropdown menu. Find the employee you want to deactivate, and click Edit next to his or her name. Then, simply uncheck the Active box on the next screen, and then, this is important, click Save. If the employee owns records by default, you’ll simply need to reassign them to someone else.
Here’s a great video from Salesforce that takes you through the process, and provides more information.
Of course, you might need to remove the user from other pieces of software as well. Those processes obviously will vary.
It’s very important to establish a process and policy for these situations for the software admin(s). The move should be made to deactivate the user the very moment that person is no longer an employee, if not earlier.
Have some questions about deactivating software users? Let us know! We’ve seen it all.