Simplifying Processes through Design
Automation to Increase Salesforce’s Stickiness
Process automation is a set of rules that make something happen without human intervention. It saves people time and cuts down on cost. For example, your company might want to send an email whenever a customer case is escalated. Instead of relying on a customer service representative to remember to manually send that email, you can use Salesforce to write a process to do that automatically. A simple process is written as an if-then statement: if a case is escalated, then email the account’s owner.
When we first built Salesforce’s automation tools, they were for two different use cases: admins creating very simple if-then statements, and complicated flows that required developers to build. We decided to build a tool that was powerful, yet easy to use for admins who were not developers.
Why Use Process Automation?
For our customers, process automation saves users hours and hours of manual data entry; it also cuts down on costs resulting from human error. Our business intelligence reports show a strong correlation between customers who use process automation and those who are most successful using Salesforce. Companies who use Salesforce to automate their business processes tend to have much more robust and successful deployments than those who use it for data storage only. This makes sense because no business works exactly the same. The more businesses customize Salesforce, the better it works for them and the more they use it.
We took a close look at our existing automation tools and who was using them; what we found surprised us. Salesforce is configured by admins with a wide range of experience and skills. Larger companies have full-time, certified Salesforce admins; small ones have business users who are ad-hoc Salesforce admins in their spare time.
Our more experienced admins are people who’ve been using Salesforce for years or have a background in Computer Science. Our less experienced admins are non-technical business people who know what they wanted to automate, but have trouble building it with our tools. We decided to build a new tool that business people understood, in order to empower them to create their own process automations. By democratizing process automation, we hoped to increase our customers’ success with Salesforce.
Our Existing Tools
We already had two existing tools for process automation:
- Workflow Rules. This was a tool built back in the 1990’s. It’s a series of form-based pages that allow admins to build a single if-then statement. This tool is used by experienced Salesforce admins. It’s widely adopted by companies who employ full-time Salesforce admins, rarely by those who don’t.
- Visual Workflow. This is a powerful tool that allows admins to use drag-and-drop elements to build a flow diagram representing if-then statements. You can create pages that collect information from users, take that information and change data in Salesforce. You can create branching logic and loops. It has lots of features that make programmers happy. Although Visual Workflow is a visual tool, each element has many complicated settings, and the entire flow is difficult to debug. This tool is used by our most advanced Salesforce admins, those who can also write code — that’s only 5% of our admins.
A Tool for Everyone Else
We needed a tool for our least experienced Salesforce admins. These are users for whom Salesforce administration is a small portion of their job responsibilities. For them, we wanted a tool that wasn’t a series of form-based pages. We wanted something that reminded them of Visio, a popular tool for drawing flow diagrams.
After many, many design iterations and rounds of research, in January of 2015 we released Process Builder to great acclaim from our customers.
With Process Builder, you can create multiple if-then statements. You can write a process that works across different Salesforce objects. This means a single process can take the place of multiple workflow rules. And you can do it all without code, using point-and-click configuration!
Like with Visual Workflow, a process looks like a flow diagram. Unlike Visual Workflow, Process Builder isn’t all-powerful; you can’t create complex branching logic, nor can you iterate through a list of records via a loop. You can only create straightforward if-then statements. The majority of our customers aren’t looking for that kind of power anyway.
With Process Builder, we found the sweet spot. We created a visual tool that was more powerful and easier to use than Workflow Rules, but not as powerful or complicated as Visual Workflow.
What Our Users Are Saying
When Process Builder was in pilot, we tested it with admins of varying levels. Admins with less experience immediately understood the visual diagram aspect of Process Builder. And advanced admins were delighted that it could replace much of the code they were used to writing.
“It looks just like Visio, thats a good thing. I’ve used Visio for years for flow diagrams. The shape of each thing means something different. A diamond is a decision, a rectangle is a task.” — Research Participant, Admin with Less Experience
“This is the best thing that Salesforce has come out with since I started. It gives functionality that used to only be available through APEX. Easy to learn and much faster to develop than APEX.” — Research Participant, Experienced Admin
In talking to our customers, several people enthusiastically compared Process Builder to a Swiss Army knife. We loved the analogy so much that we were inspired to create a t-shirt to give our customers. These were in very high demand at Dreamforce 2015.
Show Me the Data
Process Builder usage has continued to grow and grow. As shown in the graphs below, we have a very healthy growth curve for both the number of processes run and the number of companies using Process Builder each month. We expect this trend to continue.
Conclusion
We don’t yet have data that specifically correlates using Process Builder with more successful Salesforce deployments. Nor do we know with certainty that less experienced admins are using this tool. But once we have this data, we believe that’s what we’ll find. We built Process Builder specifically for less experienced admins. We’re betting that with the release of Process Builder, more people will write their own process automations; and as a result find Salesforce more useful to their companies and therefore irreplaceable.
Designers who worked on Process Builder prior to me include Anna Mieritz, Jamie No and John Shin. Researchers include Becky Buck and Mabel Chan.
