Tools to Automate Business Processes in Salesforce

Salesforce provides many automation tools to automate your organization’s repetitive business processes. It helps the organization to improve employee’s productivity.  It is not limited to only increase productivity but also increases sales win rates, reduces the sales cycle duration, and improves revenue. With automation tool, you do not have to rely on your users to perform each part of your business process, you can automate it. The benefits are two-fold: your users can spend their time on other tasks, and you can trust, that the process is always done.

Salesforce automation tools can perform several kinds of business processes: workflow process, approval processes, wizard processes, and much more. These tools don’t require you to write code, they all are point-and-click. Tools offered by Salesforce for business process automation are:

Process Builder: It allows us to easily automate business processes using a convenient graphical representation of process as we build.  Automated processes in the process builder consist of:

• If/Then Condition will decide when to execute actions.
• Immediate and scheduled actions to be executed when those criteria have met.

Process builder allows us to execute wide range of actions, including

• Create Records
• Email Alert
• Launch a Flow- It is also an automation tool
• Post to Chatter
• Send an Email
• Submit for Approval

Workflows: To save time across the organization, it allows us to automate standard internal procedures and processes. It works on If/Then statements, which means if certain conditions are true, then specified action will be initiated.

Workflows allow us to execute the following actions,

• Field Update
• Email Alert
• Create Task
• Outbound Message Key Considerations

Visual Workflows: Visual workflows allow us to create flows, which are triggered by users rather than the events. With visual workflows, we can automate much more complex business processes. It offers screens to display and collect information from the user, running the flow.

Visual workflows allow us to an executive a wide range of actions, including

• Call scripting for inbound or outbound call centers
• Diagnostics & troubleshooting guides
• Sales quotations
• Employee on-boarding

Approvals: It is an automated process that we can set up to process the approval of records within the organization. It is a combination of steps for a record to be approved and the person has to approve it in each step.

• Approval processes are triggered explicitly when we click on submit for approval.
• An approval process is a combination of multiple steps.
• Some attributes can’t be modified in the approval process.
• To delete, approval process must be deactivated.