Salesforce Alerts

Using Alerts to Stay On Top of Everything. 

Want to be alerted two weeks before a donor’s birthday to mail them a birthday card? No problem. 

Want to track the expiration date on licenses and certifications for your staff? No problem. 

Want to be reminded to complete paperwork for each client three months after their open date with your organization? No problem. 

If you can think of a type of reminder or alert you’d like to receive, it can be built into Salesforce for you.

Let’s look at the basic components of an alert so you can get a better sense of how customizable it all is.

Don’t Forget About List Views, Reports, Dashboards, and Calendar

I want to note before jumping into alerts that list views, non-emailed reports, and dashboards – as covered in the previous part of this series – are incredibly valuable tools to keep on top of everything. 

Salesforce also has a calendar feature that you can integrate with Google or Microsoft which can also be very helpful. 

But this post is about “Alerts” which require “triggers” (unlike views and dashboards which are always accessible whenever you want to view them). What is a “trigger” you might be asking? Keep reading to find out.

The Components of an Alert

There are five components of an alert: (1) the goal, (2) trigger, (3) message, (4) audience, and (5) method.

Let’s think about it in a non-computer context.

Let’s say your friend is picking you up from your place and you want to know in advance when exactly they’re arriving. You ask them to text you when they pass by a gas station that’s near your house so you know how much longer until they arrive to get you. 

• The goal is knowing when they’ll arrive
• The trigger is them passing the gas station
• The message is that they’ve arrived at the gas station
• The audience is you
• The method is a text message

You could come up with different triggers, messages, and methods to achieve the same goal. An alternative trigger could be for them to text you when they leave their house (rather than passing by the gas station). Or rather than a physical landmark, you could ask them to text you when their maps app says they’re 5 minutes away. An alternative message could be telling you how much traffic there currently is. And for the method, you could have them call you instead of texting. Or they could set off a flare, but that’s probably not realistic.

These components work the same way with a database. Let’s say you need to track the end dates of hundreds of clients. You need this information so you can decide whether you should prepare to close their engagement or make a request for further program enrollment.

• The goal is to identify when each of your 300 clients is nearing the end of their program (which can start and finish at different times). 
• The trigger should be two weeks before closing so you have enough time to do the wrap-up work on your end. 
• The message should include the name of the client and the ending date with a warning about an imminent closing. 
• The audience should be the staff person working most directly with the client. 
• The method should be… well there are a bunch of options for that!

Let’s dig into all of the different methods for alerts.

Methods of Sending Alerts

Flags

Flags are warnings or instructions within Salesforce on a particular record. 

In the screenshot below, there’s a flag in big red text indicating the Authorization date is approaching. In other words, the “method of communication” for this trigger is the big red text. This flag is based on the date field that's circled in red below.

Without this flag, we’d have to look at the “Auth End Date” field and manually compare it to today’s date. This manual method would be much less effective to grab someone’s attention.

You can also create flags for multiple things at once. In the screenshot below, the trigger happens when certain fields are empty. This is then communicated via a flag at the top of the Contact record, visible to anyone viewing it.

Flags are very useful. And, for very important situations, instead of – or in addition to – a flag, you want something proactive. You will only see flags if you go find a particular record. Sometimes though, you want an alert that will come find you.

Email Alerts

Email alerts can also be sent to one or multiple email addresses based on any trigger you can imagine. This one below is the same trigger as the program end date mentioned previously, but the “method of communication” is an email.

This particular email alert gets sent to staff assigned to the client. They’ll receive an individual email for each and every client that nears the end of their program. 

But sometimes you don’t want individual emails like this. If you regularly have 50 clients ending their programs each week, you wouldn’t want to receive 50 separate emails. Instead, at the beginning of each week, you would want a single email that contains data on those 50 clients all at once.

The simplest solution is an emailed report. You simply create the report you want in Salesforce and then you schedule it to send at the desired frequency (daily, weekly, monthly). 

In this case, the trigger is based on a date and time (i.e. Mondays at 5am). It would look something like this, which I talked about in the previous blog post about reports.

There are some limitations to scheduled reports that require more advanced solutions. Each emailed report and audience must be set up individually. So if you had 30 staff and wanted each of them to receive a list of their clients nearing the end of their program, you’d have to set up 30 different reports, and would have to set up a new one for any new staff member who joined. 

That means if you wanted to update something on the report, you would have to make 30 different changes to the 30 reports. It would become a headache to manage. 

Rather than do that, you could set up a single more advanced process that would send each person their individualized information. This takes more time to set up than a scheduled report, but would ultimately save time, depending on the situation.

Alright! I just covered email alerts, which are incredibly useful because they seek you out – you don’t have to find them. 

However, a limitation of an email is that once you’ve looked at it, it’s easy to forget about. You open an email, see that a client’s program end date is coming up, and then you get a phone call about something important, click away from that email, and 15 minutes later it’s like that email never existed.

The last type of alert, tasks, helps with this.

Salesforce’s Built-in To-Do List: Tasks

Salesforce has a very handy system of Tasks that can be as simple or complex as you want. 

You can create tasks manually, but you can also create them from triggers. Tasks are useful because you can view them as a list, assign due dates, and check them off when you’re done. Once you’ve built a habit of reviewing your tasks in Salesforce, adding new ones will help you make sure you’re on top of everything.

Here’s what an automatically created Task record looks like for a client’s program end date approaching (i.e. the “method of communication” is creating this task).

And of course you can view your task list as a List View. This List View below shows just the tasks related to clients whose end dates are approaching.

You can create and choose from many different Task list views, including ones that shows all incomplete tasks.

I’m not going to cover Tasks in their entirety because there’s a lot more to them – but the point is that automatically created Tasks from triggers can play a key role in keeping on top of everything you need.

Conclusion

These tools are very helpful to manage the many moving pieces in your organization. They’re not exclusive either – for the most important things you need to track, you’ll probably want to use most or all of these tools. You decide what’s going to be best for you and everything can be customized around that.

Pretty soon you’ll be wishing you could create alerts for everything in your life. I personally dream of being able to set a flag alert on each of my plants that would notify me if it hasn’t been watered in a week or more. 

Or an emailed report that I get every week letting me know which types of food in my kitchen are getting low that I need to replace. What kind of alerts would help you stay on top of the important tasks in your life?

Book a free 15 minute call with me to chat about your organization and how alerts can save you a ton of headaches in the near future. 

And also please keep reading to dive deeper into what Salesforce has to offer!