Chatter is a powerful communication and collaboration tool housed within the Salesforce platform. With it, users can make Chatter posts on profiles, groups, and records. You can use it to collaborate on sales opportunities, service cases, campaigns, projects, and other Salesforce objects. By allowing your users to access important Salesforce updates as they occur, it increases transparency within and between business teams. On its own, Chatter usage can improve inter-departmental communication, but that’s only the beginning. With the help of Process Builder, you can automate post publication to supplement user-generated content. Imagine seeing a Chatter post announcing a project’s completion as soon as the status is changed. Or a post that alerts management when opportunities are created over a certain value. All of this can be done with Lightning Process Builder.
What is Process Builder?
Lightning Process Builder is a point-and-click tool for automating if/then business processes within Salesforce. Without any coding, admins can use this tool to create graphical representations of processes that run automatically in the platform. Every process contains a trigger (when a process should run), a criteria node (the if/then evaluation), and an action (what the process should do). With Process Builder, you can create or update records, send emails, post to Chatter, and much more. You can even configure actions to run immediately or after a specified time delay.
Why Automate Chatter Posts
There are many reasons to automate Chatter posts with Process Builder. First and foremost, automation saves time and money. By setting Chatter updates to run, you are freeing up personnel resources that would normally make the posts manually. This may not seem like a big deal for one or two Chatter posts, but on a corporate scale, the time difference can be substantial. In a scenario where potentially dozens of processes require Chatter updates, automation streamlines the process by removing a manual step.
Secondly, Chatter automation provides consistency without room for human error. If you want information to be communicated whenever certain criteria are met, an automated process will never fail. If you had to post an update to management whenever you created an opportunity with a certain value, chances are that you would forget from time to time. With an automated process, not only do you never have to worry about making the post yourself, but management will always be alerted.
Additionally, automated Chatter posts can be configured to provide the right information to the right people at the right time. You can merge fields into automated Chatter posts to provide precise information with every execution. You can also make posts directly to individuals or groups that need the information. And updates can happen immediately or after a delay, depending on when information needs to be delivered. On top of that, you can do all of this without writing a line of code. Just set it up once, and you never have to worry about it again.
How to Set Up Chatter Automation
In this example, we will walk through how to set up Chatter automation. Our test case will involve posting to a Chatter group called “Management” every time an opportunity is created with an amount greater than $5,000.
- From Setup, type Process Builder and click New.
- Enter a name and description for your process.
- Select the trigger for your process. In this example, we want it to start when A Record Changes.
- Click Add Object and select the object you want with the trigger. In this case, we are using Opportunity and Only when a record is created.
- Click Add Criteria to create the if/then condition. Name your criteria and set the conditions. Here, we want this to evaluate for when Amount is Greater than 5,000.
- Click Add Action to specify which action you’d like to run. In our example, we want to post a message to the Chatter group titled Management.
- Click Activate when you have finished in order to activate the process.
Further Assistance Available
If you’d like additional assistance with Chatter automation, contact Ntegro online. With years of experience helping our clients, we are happy to lend our expertise on any Salesforce project. We can start by helping you identify use cases that will save your team time while promoting collaboration and transparency. From there, we can set up processes to post to Chatter with Process Builder. By doing this, we optimize your communication methods to minimize meetings and provide consistent updates. Contact us today to let us know how we can help!
Have you used Chatter automation before? Share your success stories in the comments to let us know how your company is leveraging this functionality!
