Is your Salesforce Authenticator playing up? I have the solution. And if I don’t have the solution, I very much know a Salesforce internal team that wants to hear from you!

Issue

I deal with many clients. When I login to Salesforce, sometimes the Salesforce Authenticator popup shows and I can press “accept”, for other clients the popup does not show and I have to enter a code manually. To be honest, when I encountered this I just sigh, and manually typed the code in rather than just clicking the “Accept” button.

Then my largest client complained.

I might just get on with it, but they had 450 very non-technical workers and the product wasn’t working as described.

I asked my friends and network if they experienced the same problem; only then I realised I wasn’t alone. Not by a long way. The bug was severe enough to cause annoyance, but not severe enough to induce anyone to want to tackle Salesforce Support.

Dealing with Salesforce Support

Uninstalling and reinstalling would fix the problem temporarily but not permanently, so I wrote a message to Salesforce Support. In doing so my mind clicked into gear. What questions would Salesforce Support ask? Reproducibility.

It started me thinking – finally. What was the difference between my clients where it worked, and the ones where it didn’t? Then I realised: Authenticator failed when I was logging into the same client with two browsers (Chrome and Edge) rather than just one. Bingo!

An Awesome Team

I logged the ticket, and it was rapidly escalated. I found myself face-to-face – via Zoom – with 6 people from the Salesforce Authenticator team. It felt like a “war room”. They had received reports, but never been able to reproduce the issue at their end. By assembling the whole team, it guaranteed that they had the necessary skill set at hand so could always dive deeper into the cause. It also helped me understand that the team are primarily developers so they don’t log in and out of Salesforce as frequently as I do, nor on as many devices so I suspect they gained a level of awareness as to how their product was being used in the outside world.

I was enrolled onto the Google Play Store beta program, then they upgraded my logging, then my Salesforce Authenticator started acting even more oddly.

One particular tool we used was using another phone to film me logging in. Sometimes the simplest tools are the best! With my assistance the developers could track what was happening in real time at their end and, creating additional logging as required, take into account the unexpected scenarios I managed to create, of which there were quite a few. 😂 (it’s a speciality!)

Each bug had to be dealt with in turn, and then the original bug itself. The cause? I’m not privy to that, but I do know that Salesforce Authenticator is now a lot more stable and better behaving for my clients and that the “accept” button does appear when expected.

I would also like to extend my thanks to the team. I ended up meeting them on a number of occasions. This is a good, efficient, way of solving knotty problems where the cause can traverse multiple disciplines, or even just where new insights are needed because the previous approaches haven’t worked, or the existing method is taking too long to produce tangible end results.

Fixing your Salesforce Authenticator

In the first instance, upgrading to the latest version (v4.2.1 or higher) via the phone’s App Store should fix the issue. If that doesn’t work, however, this is the full “belt and braces” approach:

• Disconnect Salesforce Authenticator via “App Registration: Salesforce Authenticator” on the User Detail screen within Salesforce
• Uninstall Salesforce Authenticator
• Reboot phone
• Reinstall Salesforce Authenticator
• Log into Salesforce again (the person will have to re-pair the Salesforce Authenticator app with Salesforce again)

And that’s it.

I’m particularly proud of this one because I calculate it will benefit thousands of Salesforce users, in terms of both time and frustration, both at my client and beyond. It’s all about making Salesforce an enjoyable experience – if their first experience isn’t a brick wall, this can only be a good thing.

n.b. If you are still experiencing problems, drop me a line and I’ll forward them to the relevant team, as I have a shortcut now 🙂

Pay It Forward?

Speaking of benefiting others, how about making the Idea Exchange more effect and upvote this Idea on reducing clicks for fellow Salesforce Admins? (remember that you’ll need to click twice – the irony – the first time you’ll be prompted to log in, and then click to actually vote)

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