What is Salesforce Flow, and Why Do You Need It?

As a cloud-based customer management platform, Salesforce offers businesses a bunch of tools to leverage their performance and customer service quality. And since at Synebo we work with Salesforce and are well-versed in all Salesforce technologies, we’d like to educate others a little and show how each of them works.

We’ve already started our anthology about Salesforce clouds, and today we will cover another important tool the platform offers the users – Salesforce flow. So, let’s figure out what the flow is, how it works and what you get from using it.

Understanding Salesforce flow

Salesforce flow is a no-code automation tool. Simply put, it’s a technology that helps your company automate some platform actions without writing code. Thanks to this, you can expand managing opportunities for Salesforce Admins and save their time.

Salesforce flow main concepts

To dig a little bit deeper into the understanding of how Salesforce flow works, we’ll talk about its main concepts. There are five of them:

Elements. These are the parts your Flow is built of.

Resources. They are used as placeholders for the information the system requires to run a specific flow. It might be the client’s name, their date of birth, etc.

Trigger. Salesforce Flow trigger is used to (surprise) trigger an action inside your flow.

Logic. Every flow has a logic – a path you set for it to take (basically, what happens when certain actions are taken, the order of actions)

Result. That’s what you created the Flow for, like sending an email, recording data, etc.

What is Flow Builder?

Flow Builder is a space for creating Flows. There you can easily build rules for automating your workflow. The builder has a pretty intuitive interface, making the process go smoothly: you use different elements, connectors to connect them, and resources to create a flow for the action you need to run automatically.

Why should you use Salesforce flow?

First, it’s all about automating work processes. Business automation helps companies deliver high–quality customer service while saving time and money. When your team members don’t spend time manually talking to each and every client and use Flow that’s triggered by clicking a certain button or after filling out the form, they can work on more challenging and valuable tasks.

Second, creating Salesforce Flow takes much lesser time than developing a solution with Apex. It doesn’t require any knowledge of code, and thanks to the ease of Flow Builder use, it won’t take long for your Admins to learn how to do it.

In some cases, when a business has more complex challenges, coding is the only way. However, you can always try to cover your needs with Flows first.

The main Salesforce flow types

Flows can be different, use different data, and perform different actions. They use different triggers and can help you automate all tasks related to your company’s customer management. So, in this block, we’ll take at some of the main Salesforce flow types: Screen Flow, Autolaunched Flow, Record-Triggered Flow, Schedule-Triggered Flow, and Platform-Triggered Flow.

Screen Flow

Screen Flows are your way to better understand your customers. They display screens where users can input their data. So, you can use Screen Flow to automate data collection and make it easier to reach your clients.

Autolaunched Flow

Autolaunched Flow is the one that launches automatically, meaning without the person needing to enter any data. Here, you don’t actually interact with people, and your users don’t know which action of theirs triggers the flow. Autolaunched Flow is also the one that gave rise to all the next types of flows.

Record-Triggered Flow

This Flow is triggered by any record change, whether it’s creating a record, updating, saving, or deleting it. So, you can use it, for example, to delete all associated records when deleting a contact. The action itself can be triggered in different ways, both before and after the trigger, every time the changes happen or after the changes meet special criteria.

Schedule-Triggered Flow

That’s a pretty obvious one and works exactly the way it sounds – on schedule. For instance, you might need to automatically send congratulatory messages to your customers every Christmas Eve, so you just create a flow and set a date for it to be triggered.

Platform Event-Triggered Flow

Such flows work with different Platform Events (actions platform performs) and are triggered by them. Let’s say, your platform has problems with processing a user’s payment. In this situation you might need your CRM to send a message to your technical team to see what caused the error, so you create a Platform Event-Triggered Flow.

Conclusion

As you see, Salesforce Flow is a pretty useful and available tool. But we understand that not everyone wants to into the details and figure it out on their own. Creating flows is easy, but having people who create everything for yourself is, actually, easier. So, if you need any help with understanding or managing your flows, just contact Synebo team and rest assured everything works the way it’s supposed to do.