Salesforce is running its latest Community Survey right now, and it closes July 19. If you haven’t taken it yet, it only takes about 10 minutes (given you don’t have that much sentiment to pour out), it’s anonymous, and, based on the questions in it, it might be the most direct opportunity you’ll get this year to tell Salesforce exactly what you think about its latest advancements.
I took it myself this week, and a few of the questions got me:
- How has your perception of Salesforce changed over the past 12 months, and if it’s worsened, why?
- Do you trust Salesforce to act in the best interest of its customers and community?
- Do you feel confident using Salesforce’s AI technology in your current role?
- Do you feel equipped to keep up with the pace of change in Salesforce products?
These questions don’t sound soft or PR-friendly at all. And based on the community sentiment we’ve been writing about at SFB these past few weeks, they’re the questions you’d actually ask if you already suspected the answers might not be great and wanted to know exactly how not-great they are before it’s too late to change course.
Why This Survey, and Why Now?
This isn’t Salesforce’s first survey ever. Back in March, Salesforce published results from an earlier community survey, which resulted in a Net Promoter Score of 40 and a Community NPS of 28, with 56% of respondents saying their perception of Salesforce had improved over the past year and 71% saying they trusted Salesforce to act in the best interest of customers and the community. That’s not too bad!
Salesforce also noted that some of the most critical and pointed feedback in that wave came from its most experienced and engaged community members, meaning the long-tenured Trailblazers and Community Group Leaders who actually know the ecosystem’s ins and outs.
Think about it for a second: the people most invested in this ecosystem are also the ones who’ve spent the most time in it, and therefore are also the most willing to say when something’s wrong.
If this latest wave of the survey is aiming to measure community sentiment around trust and AI confidence more directly than before, what does that tell us about Salesforce? If this isn’t a signal that they already suspect or even know that these are the numbers significantly moving right now, then I don’t know what is. Our latest SF Ben Admin Survey revealed some dangerous trends in Salesforce right now, and third on the list is none other than AI adoption moving faster than trust.
Salesforce’s community survey only shows how Salesforce wants “harder” data before deciding what to do about it.
The Community Is Already Talking
A Reddit thread encouraging people to take the survey caught my eye this week, thanks to the comments in it that feel like some sort of group therapy. Admins and consultants used the comments to air frustrations about quiet, undocumented product changes, certification retirements they’d paid time and money for, and the general sense that Salesforce’s AI push is outrunning most people’s ability to keep up. These sentiments aren’t new, and in fact we’ve been posting about them at Salesforce Ben for the past few weeks.
One commenter admitted they’d almost missed the survey entirely and thanked the original poster for surfacing it. It’s a small detail, but it shows how a lot of the community’s honest feedback is happening in threads like this one, which isn’t exactly the best format for Salesforce to actually act on.
We’ve heard versions of this before. Salesforce consultant Vuk Stajić recently described clients left “strung out” by the pace of product change, watching features they’d already invested in get deprecated or repackaged before they’d even fully adopted them. It’s actually the same undercurrent running through this survey, where people aren’t just tired of change in general, but they’re tired of not being able to trust what will still be there next quarter.
The exact same fatigue showed up when Salesforce paused its own MFA enforcement rollout this month, and resumed it days later on a new schedule. One reader’s reaction literally says it’s “shocking that Salesforce keeps messing this up”, which is also the same pattern that shaped community reaction to the recent Permissions on Profiles retirement reversal, which was announced in 2023, postponed indefinitely, and now announced as cancelled completely.
There was so much time to do the migration, but orgs were having a difficult time implementing a permission set led data model, given how Profiles are foundational and a lot of features in complex orgs rely on them. But all that aside, this habit of announcing things and going back on them is the kind of whiplash that erodes trust faster than any single bad (company) decision would on its own.
The AI Side and All The Renaming
We’ve argued that the real Agentforce risk isn’t slow adoption, but actually exhaustion. Between Einstein becoming Agentforce, Data Cloud becoming Data 360, Service Cloud becoming Agentforce Service, and so on, Salesforce is growing a list of agent products that are becoming harder to tell apart.
This pattern of renaming goes way back, and you can actually go to Renameforce to keep track of Salesforce’s product name changes over the years. One look at the Salesforce subreddit or on LinkedIn will show you that plenty of admins and consultants have openly admitted they’ve lost track of what’s actually new versus rebranded. This seems to be the sentiment that Salesforce’s latest community survey’s AI-confidence questions are built to surface.
This same renaming behavior has even reached certifications. Recently, Salesforce announced that it’s retiring 24 certs, and renaming 16. And if you look through the list of renamed certs, take a guess: yep, they’ve mostly added “Agentforce”. CPQ retiring hit particularly hard for people who built their whole careers on it, and some even pointed out they now hold certs that are being renamed for products they’d never touched. As someone who’s never used Agentforce before, having it in the title of a cert you hold feels misleading and makes no sense.
It’s the same theme yet again. At the end of the day, people don’t just want change explained after the fact. They want to be able to trust that what they’ve built (whether that’s a skill, a cert, or expertise in a specific product) will still mean something in the next quarter.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve ever felt the “admin tax” of constant re-learning, or watched a certification you earned get retired, or found out about a major change from a post on LinkedIn before Salesforce ever announced it directly, then this survey is the closest thing to an official outlet for that frustration. Salesforce has shown it takes into account all that it hears back – even the uncomfortable parts.
Whether the community’s response actually changes anything is a fair thing to be skeptical about, but skipping it guarantees it won’t. The survey closes July 19. Take 10 minutes (or 45, if you have a lot to say) to grab the chance to make your voice heard.
