Welcome to another “How I Solved It.” In this series, we do a deep dive into a specific business problem and share how one Awesome Admin chose to solve it. Once you learn how they solved their specific problem, you’ll be inspired to try their solution yourself! Watch how Paolo Sambrano operationalized data collection using both Salesforce and Slack.
Our executive team wanted an org-wide dashboard that showed the progress and performance of the three different programs at our nonprofit. The dashboard had to be accessed at any time by people in our organization and populated with the most up-to-date metrics.
The dashboard was built in CRM Analytics and pulls data from a custom object we built and use for tracking metrics in Salesforce.
However, stakeholders responsible for updating their metrics do not use Salesforce regularly. And as much as I love working and building things in Salesforce, the last thing I want to do as an admin is tell our stakeholders that in order to update their metrics (which happens on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis), they need to log in to a system (Salesforce) they hardly-to-never use, and navigate to a basic screen flow to enter a number. And then, 90 days later, they need to remember to do this one thing all over again.
I’m not a monster, I’m a Salesforce Admin! I look for clean, elegant, and efficient processes to help my stakeholders.
So the question becomes, how can I get our stakeholders to update their metrics on a schedule in Salesforce without them actually using Salesforce? Can this be done with a minimal amount of clicks and mental overhead? Well, lucky for us, we’re a Slack-first shop.
I was able to use both Slack Workflow Builder and Flow Builder to solve for this. Let’s break down how this solution works from a high level.
The example use case below demonstrates how I solved it. Let’s say I needed to submit how many skateboard kickflips I did in a month. That metric is represented as a new Salesforce record in our custom object, Cool Metrics. That data is then populated into a Salesforce report I built to track my progress.
Full disclosure, you need a paid Slack plan to use Workflow Builder. If you don’t have access to a paid Slack plan but would like to try this at home, check out the resources below with documentation on how to use Flow for Slack in Salesforce.
The main thing to solve for this use case was automating the reminder notifications and putting them on a set schedule. I don’t want our stakeholders to have to remember if it’s been 89 or 90 days since they last entered their metrics!
Workflow Rules can be triggered in numerous ways. For example, you can use a direct URL for a user to click on, have automation that triggers when someone uses an emoji or joins a channel, etc. Selecting the ‘On a schedule’ option was the perfect fit for us.
We can customize when we want to start our Workflow Rule, the time zone, and the frequency our Workflow Rule will fire. For our example, this Workflow Rule will fire every first Monday of the month, at 10:00 AM PST.
Once we set how it will be triggered, we now start to build out the Workflow Rule itself. This is what the stakeholder will interact with.
Building out a Workflow Rule is all declarative—no code required. We’re literally just dragging and dropping the steps we want to use into our rule. The following screenshot shows a sample of the actions you can add in Slack and all of the out-of-the-box (OOTB) integrations that come with Slack Workflow Builder!
This is how our Workflow Rule would look in Workflow Builder.
The structure makes sense logically.
1. We need to message the stakeholder with a reminder to enter their metrics.
2. The Form element houses their metrics input.
3. The Run a Flow action from the OOTB Salesforce integration in Slack Workflow Builder runs an autolaunched flow to pass the metric collected from the form into our flow. (More on this in a bit!)
📋 Note: When you’re linking the Salesforce user account that will fire the flow from Slack, make sure that account has the correct permission to access your object, fields, flow, etc. This could be a good place to use an integration user.
4. A confirmation message lets them know we received their metrics.
📋 Note: A Workflow Rule works linearly; you can’t use logic to have branching paths (for example, if a stakeholder enters less than 10 kickflips, have this step fire, and show this message that wouldn’t have happened if they entered 11 or more). Although, you theoretically could use a flow Decision element to simulate logic based on what a stakeholder entered from Slack on the Salesforce side of things. That’s another blog post. 😄
When our Workflow Rule is live in Slack, this is what our stakeholder sees.
Once the user clicks Continue, they are prompted to provide the number of kickflips.
Once they click Submit, they see a confirmation message.
Twenty-three kickflips! Wow, I’m making some real progress!
With the Slack Workflow Rule completed, let’s go to Salesforce to see how my 23 kickflips will make it to Salesforce.
We need to build an autolaunched flow to process the data coming in from Slack.
📋 Note: Slack Workflow Rules can only fire autolaunched flows. Be sure to keep this in mind when building your flow.
The autolaunched flow simply uses a Create Records element and a number variable (var_Kickflip_Number—this is receiving the number from Slack) mapped to the How Many Kickflips field on Cool Metrics to create a new record. It’s that simple!
This is the Create Records element that creates our Cool Metrics record to hold the kickflip number.
Oh simplicity, chef’s kiss. 😘
Now that we took our metric from Slack into Salesforce and Salesforce created a new Cool Metrics record with it, let’s check out the Cool Metrics record.
Now that’s what I call a Cool Metric. 😎
To tie everything up, let’s check out a report I created to track my progress. You can see my record (CS-0010) in the report!
And that’s how you keep your reports and dashboards up to date with Salesforce and Slack!
For our stakeholders, the automated reminders in Slack remove the mental overhead of needing to remember when they need to enter their metrics. It’s scheduled and will remind them automatically. They provide their metrics right from their reminder in Slack.
For the rest of our organization, any time someone looks up our CRM Analytics Dashboard (in Slack with the CRM Analytics app, naturally), they can be assured that the data displayed is always up to date with the freshest and latest data!
Do you have an ongoing process at your organization? Do your stakeholders need to remember to complete a task every week? Every month? With Scheduled Workflow Rules, you can remove the need for users to remember when they need to take action on their ongoing task.
The best thing about working in Slack Workflow Builder is that you don’t even need to necessarily think in a Slack/Salesforce binary! Does your process involve Asana, Box, or DocuSign, for example? Slack Workflow Builder comes with a ton of OOTB integrations with other apps that are available at your fingertips right now!
That widens up the possibilities with what you can build to make your stakeholders’ lives easier!
Don’t have a paid Slack plan? Use the OOTB Flow for Slack feature! Be sure to download the Salesforce for Slack app from the Slack Marketplace.
The same principles apply from above: notify the user, collect information, and create new record. You’re just working all in Flow Builder instead of using Salesforce and Slack. For this, you’ll need two flows.
1. A scheduled flow to launch a Slack action that sends a screen flow to users’ Slack instance
2. A screen flow with a screen to collect information and a Create Records element
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