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Customize Task assignment notification emails

When you create a Task, you choose whether to send an email to the owner by checking the "Send Notification Email" check box. The email cannot be configured as it is a system-generated email.

Use a Process Builder flow as an alternative to the automated email

As an alternative method to sending the default task notification email, you can Send an Email from a Process using Process Builder.  Be sure to create an Email Template and Email Alert Actions to use in the flow.  Notes:  

• Workflow on tasks do not allow the Send an Email option.
• If Single Sign-on is enabled in the org, users should login to the org and then click the email notification link. The link will automatically redirect to the My Domain url for the organization.

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About 10 mins

Learning Objectives

Activity timeline, recap the latest activities, find the activities that matter most, more activity timeline features, tasks and task lists, keep your to-dos up to date, view other calendars, see your salesforce data as dates on a calendar, calendars in action, send email from anywhere, email features in lightning experience, send an email to a group, email templates, list email and email templates in action.

• Challenge +100 points

Manage Your Tasks, Events, and Email

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Review your activity history and see what’s coming up next in the activity timeline.
• Update tasks.
• Work efficiently with calendar events.
• Identify two places from which you can send email in Lightning Experience.

When you look at a record in Salesforce Classic, such as a contact or opportunity, you use the Open Activity and Activity History related lists to stay on top of activities.

In Lightning Experience, the details in those lists are surfaced in a more intelligent way in the activity timeline.

It’s like an activity control center for everything relating to the record you’re on. Instead of going to different related lists to get an overview, it’s all in one place, and directly in the record that you’re focused on.

And it’s exclusive to Lightning Experience, so enjoy!

Your colleague is out of the office, and you’re handling their accounts until they get back. When a client calls, how do you get up to speed on what’s been happening?

Or maybe it’s you who’s been out of the office. Now you’re back, and need to find out what’s happened while you’ve been gone.

In either case, the activity timeline is your best friend.

Let’s look at some of the ways you can review what’s been going on with this client.

The first thing you notice is that the activity timeline is divided into Upcoming & Overdue (1) and past months (2), so you can see what’s planned and what’s already happened. You can expand and close a month by clicking the buttons (3).

If you need more details about an activity, click the expand button (4) next to the left of the activity and click the button again to close it when you’re done. Or, click Expand All (5) to see details for all the activities.

See more of what’s coming up by clicking View More (6).

If you’ve been working with an account, opportunity, or other record for any length of time, you probably have a mix of activities in the activity timeline. How do you find the details you’re looking for?

Use the filters in settings to narrow your search. By filtering on activity type and date range, you can find the key details in no time.

There’s so much more that you can do in the activity timeline.

As you review the list, you can update an activity. From the activity row, click the dropdown arrow and editing options appear.

Or, as you complete a task, click the checkbox to mark it complete.

You can find many ways to use the activity timeline as you explore Lightning Experience.

There’s no Tasks tab in Salesforce Classic beyond the My Tasks list on the Home page.

But sometimes you want to see what’s on your whole to-do list, not just what’s coming up for a particular contact or account. And wouldn’t it be nice to jump straight to your task lists from any page instead of always needing to navigate to the Home page?

That’s when the Lightning Experience tasks page comes in handy.

It’s easy to get to, plus it’s a one-stop shop for creating tasks and managing what’s already on your plate. Click the Tasks tab, or click View All from the Today's Tasks list on the Lightning Experience Home page.

Another great aspect of the task list is that while you see the list on the left, expanded details appear to the right for whichever task you have selected.

Click a task on the left, and see that info on the right.

Lightning Experience includes several quick actions in the detail view—just click the dropdown —that make it efficient to update tasks. You can change status, change priority, edit, and delete.

Or, click Mark Complete to mark the task complete. You can also mark tasks complete from any list view. Of course, tasks are also shown in the activity timeline for the record you are looking at, and you can edit them there too.

Salesforce Classic includes a calendar to help remind you about appointments.

But the calendar in Lightning Experience takes it further, to keep you working even more efficiently.

The first thing you notice is the Calendar tab, making it easy to get to your schedule.

Creating an event is quick and easy too. Click New Event , or click the day and time the event starts and drag the cursor to the time the event ends. The New Event dialog box appears, with the start and end times already filled out. Enter the event details, and click Save .

What’s especially helpful in Lightning Experience is how you can share your calendar and view calendars your colleagues have shared with you, all from your calendar. 

Plus, you can add multiple calendars at the same time with user lists. If you don’t see user lists as a search category in the Add Calendars dialog box, ask your admin about setting up user list calendars.

Shared calendars make it easy to see when events overlap. For example, you can see when a coworker is busy to make sure she’s available for a day-long event that you need to schedule.

Keep in mind that your admin can limit the details that everyone can share with others. Also, admins with the View All Data permission can view user calendars even if they’re not shared.

If you want to focus on just one calendar, click the colored squares for the other calendars to stop seeing them. Click the squares again to make a calendar reappear.

A handy way to use a calendar is to see your Salesforce data as events on a calendar. This screenshot shows opportunity close dates on your calendar.

It’s easy to do—just create a calendar for the data you’re interested in.

Choose the object you want to see on your calendar, and select date fields that represent the data you want to track, like pending close dates.

Now you’ve got a bird’s-eye view of what’s coming up. Examining the screenshot, it looks like you’ll have a busy week of closing deals. Now you can plan accordingly and reschedule some meetings, or just block out some time to “always be closing.”

If pictures are worth a thousand words, then videos are even better at bringing concepts to life. So here’s a quick one about using calendars in Lightning Experience.

Even though there are many ways to communicate today, your customers still rely heavily on email, and so do you.

In Salesforce Classic, you generally create and send emails from the HTML Email Status related list.

That’s also where you can see what’s already been sent.

In Lightning Experience, you have several options for creating and sending emails. The Activity Composer on a record and the Global Actions menu are the options you’ll probably use most.

As you can see in this screenshot of the email composer, just like Salesforce Classic, when you send an email from a record, it fills in the To address for you. If a Person Account has an email address, it’s also filled in automatically—but only in Lightning Experience.

Imagine that you’ve just remembered that you need to send a thank-you note to a contact. Click the Email quick action to open the email composer—you don’t need to be on the correct record first—and fill in the details. Remember to update the To field so it’s going to the correct person! You’ll see the email on the recipient’s activity timeline.

Within the email composer, there are several features that make your email even more powerful.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that you can relate the email to another record, like the opportunity you’re working on.

Then you’ll see the email in context, in the activity timeline, when you look at the opportunity.

You can also do more in the email composer: add attachments, insert merge fields, insert or create a template, preview your email before you send it, erase what’s in the email and start over, and expand the email composer for more space.

You’ve used group emails—called Mass Email in Salesforce Classic—to reach many customers at once.

You can do the same in Lightning Experience for contacts and leads, with the List Email feature. In Lightning Experience, you start from a saved list view, where your list has already been filtered to focus on a group of recipients.

In the list email, you can include templates and merge fields, as well as attachments (2), to be even more efficient. And be sure to check the Review tab to confirm that the recipients and any merge fields appear the way you want them to (1) before clicking Send .

Sending emails to a group can do a lot for increasing your outreach efforts.

Lightning Experience includes two new types of email templates that you can create. With Lightning templates, including templates you can create in Email Template Builder, you enjoy rich text support and easy file preview and sharing. Just send the email attachment as a link. And it’s easy to keep these templates up-to-date.

However, if you need Letterhead, Custom HTML, or Visualforce templates, you may want to continue using your Classic templates until these features are available in Lightning templates.

You can easily access your existing Classic Text, Custom HTML, and Letterhead email templates in Lightning Experience. You just edit them in Salesforce Classic. When selecting a template, choose All Classic Templates from the dropdown list.

Let’s wrap up by seeing List Email and email templates in action. This video shows how to send personalized emails to a group.

• Help: Keyboard Shortcuts
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• Help: Tasks
• Help: Calendar Views in Lightning Experience
• Help: Use Calendars to Track and Visualize Dates in Salesforce Objects in Lightning Experience
• Help: Send Email Through Salesforce
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Effective Task Notifications in Salesforce – Simplifying Sales Workflow for Maximum Efficiency

Introduction.

Task notifications are a crucial part of any sales workflow in Salesforce. These notifications provide timely updates and reminders about tasks that need to be completed, ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks. In this blog post, we will explore the importance of effective task notifications in sales workflow and provide tips on how to configure and optimize these notifications for maximum efficiency.

Understanding Task Notifications in Salesforce

Task notifications in Salesforce are notifications that are triggered when a task is assigned, updated, or due. These notifications can be delivered through various channels, such as email notifications or mobile push notifications. Both types of notifications serve the same purpose – to keep sales reps informed and on top of their tasks.

Types of Task Notifications in Salesforce

Salesforce provides two main types of task notifications – email notifications and mobile push notifications. Email notifications are delivered directly to a sales rep’s inbox, providing a convenient way to stay informed even when they are not actively working in Salesforce. Mobile push notifications, on the other hand, are sent to a sales rep’s mobile device, ensuring that they receive timely updates and reminders no matter where they are.

Benefits of Task Notifications in Sales Workflow

Effective task notifications play a crucial role in sales workflow efficiency. They help sales reps stay organized, prioritize their tasks, and meet deadlines. By providing timely updates and reminders, task notifications ensure that no important task is overlooked or forgotten. This ultimately leads to improved productivity, increased sales performance, and better customer satisfaction.

Configuring Task Notifications for Maximum Efficiency

To maximize the efficiency of task notifications in Salesforce, it is essential to configure the notification settings appropriately. By setting up default notification settings and customizing them for specific users or roles, you can ensure that each sales rep receives the right notifications at the right time.

Set up Default Notification Settings

Salesforce allows you to set default notification preferences for all users in your organization. This ensures that everyone receives consistent notifications based on your organization’s requirements. You can specify whether users should receive notifications for every task or only for specific tasks, define the notification frequency (e.g., immediate, daily digest), and choose the preferred notification channel (email or mobile push).

Setting Notification Preferences

When configuring default notification settings, it is important to consider the preferences and needs of your sales reps. Some reps may prefer to receive notifications for every task, while others may find it overwhelming and prefer to receive notifications only for specific tasks. By allowing individual customization of notification preferences, you can ensure that each sales rep receives notifications in a way that suits their working style and preferences.

Defining Notification Frequency

The frequency of task notifications can greatly impact sales reps’ productivity and focus. Some sales reps may prefer immediate notifications for real-time updates, while others may find it distracting and prefer to receive a daily digest of notifications. By defining the notification frequency, you can strike a balance between keeping sales reps informed and preventing notification overload.

Customizing Notification Settings for Specific Users or Roles

In addition to default notification settings, Salesforce allows you to customize notification settings for specific users or roles. This flexibility enables you to provide tailored notifications to different teams or individuals based on their responsibilities and needs. For example, you can set up more frequent notifications for sales managers who need real-time updates on their team’s progress, while setting up less frequent notifications for individual sales reps.

Utilizing Salesforce Chatter for Task Notifications

Salesforce Chatter, a collaboration platform within Salesforce, can be leveraged to enhance task notifications. Chatter allows sales reps to stay connected, collaborate, and receive notifications in real time. By utilizing Chatter, sales reps can receive task notifications in a more interactive and engaging manner, making it easier to track progress, collaborate with teammates, and stay informed.

Best Practices for Effective Task Notifications

To ensure that task notifications effectively serve their purpose, it is important to follow certain best practices. These practices can help clarify task priorities, optimize notification content, and personalize notifications for targeted recipients.

Clarify Task Priorities and Deadlines

Clarifying task priorities and deadlines is crucial for effective task management. By using urgency levels and setting due dates and reminders, sales reps can better prioritize their tasks and ensure that nothing important falls through the cracks.

Using Urgency Levels

Assigning different urgency levels to tasks can help sales reps quickly identify and prioritize tasks based on their importance and deadline. Urgency levels can be customized based on your organization’s needs and can range from low, medium, to high. When a task notification is received, the urgency level can provide guidance on how quickly the task needs to be addressed.

Setting Due Dates and Reminders

Every task should have a due date to ensure that it is completed within the desired timeframe. Salesforce allows sales reps to set due dates for tasks and even set reminders to receive notifications before the due date. This ensures that sales reps have enough time to complete the task and helps in better time management.

Optimize Notification Content

The content of task notifications plays a crucial role in their effectiveness. By crafting clear and concise messages and including relevant information, sales reps can quickly understand the task requirements and take appropriate action.

Crafting Clear and Concise Messages

Task notification messages should be brief, easy to understand, and actionable. Avoid using jargon or complex language that may confuse the recipient. Include clear instructions and specify any additional resources or information needed to complete the task.

Including Relevant Information

Task notifications should provide enough context and relevant information for sales reps to understand the task’s purpose and requirements. Include details such as the task title, description, associated contact or account, and any relevant attachments or links. This helps sales reps make informed decisions and reduces the time spent searching for additional information.

Personalize Notifications for Targeted Recipients

Personalizing task notifications based on recipient roles or responsibilities can greatly improve their effectiveness. By segmenting recipients and customizing notification templates, you can ensure that each sales rep receives highly relevant and tailored notifications.

Segmenting Recipients Based on Role or Responsibility

Different sales roles may require different types of task notifications. For example, sales managers may want to receive notifications about their team’s progress, while individual sales reps may be more interested in notifications specific to their assigned tasks. By segmenting recipients based on their role or responsibility, you can ensure that each sales rep receives notifications that are relevant to their specific needs.

Customizing Notification Templates

Salesforce allows you to create custom notification templates that can be used for specific types of tasks or recipients. By customizing notification templates, you can ensure consistency in the content and format of task notifications, while also tailoring them to the specific requirements of each recipient or task type.

Troubleshooting Task Notifications

While task notifications in Salesforce are designed to be reliable, occasional issues may occur. Understanding common issues and following troubleshooting steps can help resolve these problems effectively.

Common Issues with Task Notifications

Two common issues with task notifications are notifications not being received and notifications being sent to spam folders. These issues can prevent sales reps from staying informed and hinder their productivity.

Notifications Not Being Received

If a sales rep is not receiving task notifications, it could be due to various reasons. It is important to check the notification settings to ensure that notifications are enabled for the specific user or role. Additionally, checking email settings, spam filters, and mobile device configurations can help diagnose and resolve this issue.

Notifications Being Sent to Spam Folders

Task notifications being sent to spam folders can be frustrating and may lead to important notifications being missed. To prevent this, it is essential to educate sales reps about the importance of marking task notifications as trusted or adding the sender’s email address to their whitelist. This simple step can ensure that task notifications land directly in the sales rep’s inbox.

Troubleshooting Steps for Notification Problems

When task notification issues arise, following certain troubleshooting steps can help identify and resolve the problem quickly.

Checking Email Settings and Filters

If task notifications are not being received via email, it is important to check the user’s email settings within Salesforce. Ensure that the correct email address is entered and that email notifications are enabled. Additionally, check any email filters or rules that may be diverting task notifications to specific folders or spam filters.

Verifying Mobile Device Configurations

If task notifications are not being received on a mobile device, verify the device’s settings to ensure that push notifications are enabled for the Salesforce application. Additionally, check the device’s notification settings to ensure that notifications from Salesforce are not being blocked or silenced.

Case Studies: Real-Life Examples of Effective Task Notifications

To further illustrate the power and effectiveness of task notifications in sales workflow, let’s explore two real-life examples of how organizations have streamlined their sales processes using task notifications in Salesforce.

Example 1: Streamlining Lead Assignment Notifications

Company X had a manual process for assigning leads to their sales reps. This often resulted in delays and confusion. By leveraging task notifications in Salesforce, they automated the lead assignment process and ensured that each sales rep received timely notifications when a new lead was assigned to them. The notifications included all relevant lead information, such as lead source, contact details, and any notes or attachments. This streamlined process increased sales reps’ responsiveness and helped them quickly prioritize and follow up on new leads.

Example 2: Enhancing Opportunity Stage Change Notifications

Organization Y struggled with visibility and collaboration around opportunity stage changes. By implementing task notifications in Salesforce, they were able to notify relevant sales reps and managers whenever an opportunity moved to a different stage. The notifications included the reason for the stage change, the updated opportunity information, and any required actions or next steps. This improved transparency and enabled sales reps to take immediate action, resulting in faster opportunity progression and increased win rates.

Effective task notifications are essential for optimizing sales workflow efficiency in Salesforce. By understanding the types of task notifications available, configuring notification settings for maximum efficiency, following best practices, and troubleshooting any issues that arise, organizations can ensure that their sales reps stay informed, productive, and focused on their tasks. Task notifications play a crucial role in driving sales performance and customer satisfaction, ultimately contributing to the overall success of the organization.

Key takeaways for improving sales workflow efficiency through task notifications include:

• Configure default notification settings and customize them for specific users or roles
• Utilize Salesforce Chatter for interactive and real-time task notifications
• Clarify task priorities and deadlines using urgency levels, due dates, and reminders
• Optimize notification content by crafting clear and concise messages with relevant information
• Personalize notifications for targeted recipients based on roles or responsibilities
• Troubleshoot any notification issues by checking settings and configurations
• Learn from real-life examples of how task notifications can streamline sales processes

By implementing these best practices and continuously refining task notification strategies, organizations can enhance sales productivity, improve customer engagement, and drive business growth in the highly competitive sales landscape.

Related articles:

• The Ultimate Guide – Training Sales Reps for Success
• Unlocking Success – How to Become a Salesforce ISV Partner and Boost Your Sales
• Step-by-Step Guide – How to Create a Salesforce Account and Supercharge Your Business
• Unveiling the Truth – Selling Reps as Real – A Game-Changer in the Industry

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How do I Configure Salesforce Notifications?

The sending of emails when tasks are assigned is controlled by your Salesforce configuration. To change the settings, you can take the following steps in Salesforce.

Check your organization's activity notification settings.  To do this, the Salesforce admin will navigate to Setup -> Customize -> Activities -> Activity Settings.  The following screen shot shows user control enabled (about half way down)

For Organizations who have the "Enable user control over task assignment notifications" feature enabled, User can disable email notifications for task assignments by going to My Settings -> Reminders & Alerts -> Events and Tasks and click to turn off  Email me when someone assigns me a task .

For organizations without the "Enable user control over task assignment notifications" setting enabled users can set their default preference via the following steps:

1. Go to the Home Tab (If you already have an existing Task open click the Edit button, skip step 2, and go to step 3). 2. Click the New button under My Tasks. 3. Click the "Send Notification Email" checkbox to either add or remove the check. 4. Click on the "Make this the default setting." checkbox, that appears under "Send Notification Email", to insert a check. 5. Click Save.

Note: This default setting will apply to all Task creation/edit pages under all objects and related lists throughout the application, and can be changed back the next time a non-default value is selected.

For example, if you select "false" as the default, the next time you select "true" for the checkbox, you should be prompted with the "make this default setting" option again to make the "true" value the default if desired. The only exception, is the "log a call" task page, where there are two "send notification email" checkboxes. The "make this the default setting" checkbox doesn't work on this page.

If this checkbox does not appear and you are certain that your "Enable user control over task assignment notifications" setting is off, open the Activities Page Layout and under the Layout Properties you will see the two check boxes which control this behavior.  Both items need to be checked to give the control described above.

Reminders are also controlled through Salesforce settings.

To set Reminders, open your Salesforce settings and configure My Personal Information -> Activity Reminders and choose the settings which suite you and then Save.

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Home » Video » Implement a Scalable Incident Creation and Notification Process | Automate This!

• Implement a Scalable Incident Creation and Notification Process | Automate This!

Welcome to another “Automate This!” In this live-streamed video series, we cover all things automation, from use cases and best practices to showcasing solutions built by Awesome Admin Trailblazers like you. With automation, you can remove manual tasks, drive efficiency, and eliminate friction and redundancy. In this episode, let’s see how Aleksandra Radovanovic created automation that helps streamline and improve the process for capturing incidents and outages and communicating with customers in a timely fashion.

Use case: Streamline incident capture and communication process

Working for an identity management company made me realize how important it is to keep customers updated about different incidents, outages, and system maintenance. It’s essential to not only let customers know what’s happening in a timely manner but also provide complete and accurate information. Furthermore, it’s crucial to capture all the relevant information for the purposes of internal audit and service reporting. This way, leadership can have complete information that can further be used in analytics and reporting when it comes to resources organization and yearly planning. Having a streamlined and easily upgradeable process to capture this information is absolutely crucial in these situations.

Manual process as a default solution

When the support team first started using Trust records to track incidents and maintenance schedules, they followed a manual process that was pretty time consuming. They would go to the Trust object and click Create New. They would have to select the record type and then populate fields on the record create page, going through the tedious process of completing text fields and choosing values from numerous picklists while paying attention if all fields were relevant to the creation process. This process frequently led to errors in the values that were entered, typos in text fields, or important information missing.

Interim solution with a screen flow

With the introduction of screen flows, we decided to try to automate the creation of Trust records as much as possible. We built a screen flow with dozens of screens trying to capture all the information that was relevant while making decisions based on the entered value. As the process became more complex, we had to add more Decision elements and Assignments, making the automation more complex as well. This new process was slightly better than the manual record creation since it ensured that necessary data will be populated. Screen flows also simplified the training process for new agents and guidance on how to create Trust records. It also enabled us to create multiple conditional logical processes for different types of Trust records and prepopulated some of the fields.

This flow, however, had too many steps and required so many clicks that even though the process was automated, the user experience (UX) for support agents was not improved much. Maintaining this flow and adding new logic with new fields became such a time-consuming task that everyone dreaded enhancing the flow. While we moved from a manual to automated process that helped with reducing data entry errors and ensuring all required fields are filled out accurately, based on user feedback and measuring the time needed to create a Trust record and notify customers, we didn’t notice the expected impact on process efficiency.

Final solution: Dynamic Forms in screen flows

With the exciting news coming from the Flow team that Dynamic Forms for Flow is going GA in Winter ’23, we decided to revamp the screen flow used for Trust record creation. The main goal was to increase efficiency and streamline the process, lowering the number of screen elements and, with that, lowering the number of clicks the user must make to create a record. Dynamic Forms for Flow provided a flexible and responsive user interface (UI) based on specific criteria, ensuring the agent sees only relevant fields and sections. Thanks to conditional visibility on page components, we tailored screens to show or hide certain fields and options based on the user’s input. This had a significant impact on enhancing the UX and improving efficiency. Agents were presented with a streamlined process and a clean screen displaying all the relevant information at each step of the flow.

To make it easier for agents to access this form, we created a new Lightning App Incident Creation and added a screen flow to its home page. Thanks to this approach, agents have a quick and easy way to start new record creation in situations where every second counts. The creation process starts with asking the agent to define the date and time when the incident or outage happened, and then select a radio button to define what they’re creating.

This is where the magic happens. Depending on the radio button selected, a different section with a set of fields will be displayed. And it all shows up on this same screen! There are no additional clicks needed and no screen or context change. In our example, let’s say the agent is creating a new record for a security incident. This is how this screen will change and look like after they select that radio button:

We notice that the new section called Incident Impact shows up with a set of relevant fields for this type of incident. If the agent decides to create a new record for maintenance type, the screen will have a different section and set of fields.

We can see the power of conditional visibility in the example where impacted audience is selected. If org admins are impacted with the incident, we immediately need to know if it’s impacting all the admins or if there’s a partial impact.

This is how the input screen looks when selecting an impacted audience other than Admin:

However, if admins are part of the impacted audience, we would like to capture additional information so that the change is also reflected on the screen:

Once the agent captures all of the information in the first screen and clicks Next, they will be presented with a second screen showing the summary of all of the information recorded that will be used in record creation. Since this information will be used to display information on the status site, we’re also showing text that will be published once the record is created. This is displayed in the long text area field, and agents can add any information that might be relevant for this specific incident. Since this information is going to be published on the website, we’re allowing formatting directly from this page. We have three different event types, so that means we’ll have three different text templates that are going to be displayed along with gathered information.

Once all of the information is added and confirmed, the agent can click Next and the link for the newly created record will be displayed.

Under the hood of the incident creation screen flow

The magic happens in that first screen where Dynamic Forms for Flow and conditional visibility enables us to have only one screen for capturing information for all three types of records. That’s achieved by adding a separate section for each record and then setting up visibility based on the radio button selection on the initial screen.

To make the record creation process streamlined, we’re also using conditional visibility within the sections, setting up dependency on the value of the field within that section. Based on the established business process, we want to send email notifications to customers only for incidents that have high or critical severity. For incidents with lower severity, we don’t want to even show an email notification possibility to the user creating the record. To achieve that, we set up field visibility based on the value the user chooses in the Severity field on the screen.

However, in case the user is creating an Incident record of a different type, like Outage, we want to always include the possibility to notify the customers. In this situation there’s no conditional visibility setup for the same Email Customers field.

Once all the information is gathered, we follow a similar approach on the screen showing the summary of the information based on the selected record type. We set up conditional visibility for each section so the user sees only the relevant information.

For additional flexibility, we’re also displaying a predefined text template that includes some of the information gathered on the initial screen. This text is shown in the long text area, giving the user the option to add or adjust the text template as needed. To keep this selection simple and easy to change or upgrade, we’re leveraging the power of formulas in flows. In the Assignment element, we assign the value to the long text area field Log value based on the record type selected on the initial screen. Since we want to provide different information and embed different fields, we’re using conditional logic in the formula.

In order to catch any errors that might show up, we’re using the Validation Checker Flow Action created by Eric Smith. This custom flow action provides the opportunity to capture the message and redirect the user to the initial screen while displaying the error message in a user-friendly manner. This way, the user can see what needs to be fixed and proceed with record creation without wasting time trying to determine what went wrong.

We finish this flow with the Create Records element and a screen showing the link for the newly created record.

Once again, we’re using a formula in the flow to be able to create a link for a newly created record and display it in the finishing screen in a user-friendly format.

LEFT({!$Api.Partner_Server_URL_260}, FIND( '/services', {!$Api.Partner_Server_URL_260}))&{!IncidentRecord.Id}

Even though automation can improve the manual record creation process, adding some specific new features in Flow can turbocharge users’ productivity and help create a scalable solution. Based on everything we learned in this process, here are the main benefits of our approach.

• The new flow has much better adaptability for varied scenarios. Beside incident and outages, we were able to add maintenance tracking too. Despite adding one more use case, the agent always sees only specific details and relevant fields for a given context. This way, we reduce the chance of errors and ensure that the agent can focus on quickly creating a record, avoiding the distraction of numerous irrelevant fields.
• With conditional visibility in Flow, we provided a guided UX for agents creating Trust records. Fields and sections are displayed or hidden based on the user selections or input, which provides clear guidance on the required information at each screen or stage.
• Using Dynamic Forms for Flow, we organized fields in logical sequence, presenting them dynamically as the user progresses through record creation. This way, the user can focus on relevant information without wasting time determining whether the field should be filled—and this improves user efficiency. This approach also ensures that critical information is captured before moving to the next step.
• Simplifying and streamlining the process, we noticed that user engagement and Salesforce adoption increased. Feedback from the agent showed that they are more likely to create Trust records themselves (instead of assigning that task to others in the team) because the process was more intuitive and tailored to their specific process. As a result, we noticed that data quality increased, reporting became more reliable, and we had more accurate record-keeping overall.
• Last but not least, Dynamic Forms for Flow and conditional visibility in screen flows made it easier to make updates to the flow as the support process evolves and new requirements emerge. If additional steps or new fields are needed in the future, they can be seamlessly added to the flow without significant redesign. This scalability ensures that our solution stays effective and aligned with ever-changing business processes and improvements.

Thanks to Dynamic Forms for Flow and conditional visibility in flows, we finally have a robust approach for managing security incidents, outages, and system maintenance announcements.

• Salesforce Help: Make Flow Screens Dynamic with Conditional Visibility
• Salesforce Admins Blog: 3 Ways to Drive Productivity with Dynamic Forms
• Salesforce Help: Flow Conditional Visibility Considerations
• Trailhead: Screen Flows

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Aleksandra radovanovic.

Aleksandra Radovanovic is a Salesforce MVP and Business Technology Architect who has worked in the Salesforce ecosystem for more than 9 years. She loves being part of the Trailblazer Community and is very passionate about automation processes, declarative development, and data architecture. She’s also a Vancouver Admin Group leader, Platform Champion alumni, Flownatic, and Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology member. When she’s not working, Aleks enjoys reading and exploring the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

• Automate This! — Use Formulas in Record-Triggered Flows with Aleksandra Radovanovic
• Automate This! — Migrate Workflow Rules and Processes to Flow

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