Enhance Notifications with Dynamic Salesforce Chatter Mentions


AllCloud Blog:
Cloud Insights and Innovation

Chatter Mentions – Notify users without email clutter!

While working on a customer project, I needed a way to let the right people know when an opportunity is considered “stale”. The problem is, this particular customer loathes extra email, so regular old email notifications were out.That left me with Salesforce Chatter. No problem!

Regular users of Salesforce know that you can “@mention” a person or group in a Chatter notification. But did you know you can dynamically notify based on owner, manager, or anyone associated with the record?

A Chatter notification in a process builder looks like this:

This will always notify the same person, and when it posts in Chatter, it will retain the record context:

Let’s make it better!

Using merge fields, we can make this Chatter notification really sparkle. Instead of selecting one person to receive all of the Chatter notifications, we can tell Salesforce to notify the Opportunity Owner (and for good measure, the owner’s manager)

Adding a merge field will insert a link to the field, enclosed in {curly braces}

The trick is to further enclose the merge field with [square brackets]. This turns it into an @mention!

Our Chatter notification now looks like this:

Conclusion
By enhancing the Chatter posts, I can easily notify the proper individuals directly in Salesforce.

How? In Lightning Experience, when a user is notified via an @mention, there will be a red numeric icon on the notification bell icon, which is located in the top right of every Salesforce screen.

But what about the email?
This issue was solved using built-in Salesforce settings.

Users can opt to receive an email for each Chatter @mention (not ideal), no emails at all (also not ideal). The third option is a digest email which consolidates chatter posts on a daily or weekly basis.

By allowing the users to choose the volume of emails they receive from Salesforce, you put the power back in their hands.

Eran Gil

CEO

Read more posts by Eran Gil