Using Salesforce OmniStudio to deliver business process efficiency

The drive for growth and efficiency is currently top priority for business leaders. Rising costs, economic volatility and disrupted markets are putting the focus on improving organisational efficiency and productivity with the requirement to do more with less. This challenging landscape presents significant opportunities for business platforms such as Salesforce which has a long track record of promoting business process efficiency through system automation. A recent Harvard Business Review article provides a good summary of this from Salesforce’s point of view.

In this article I will dive deeper into this subject and demonstrate a business scenario example of how Salesforce was customised to deliver a specific business process automation, and then show how the Salesforce platform has since been extended to enable faster and easier to develop customisations through the use of Salesforce's digital experience solution, OmniStudio.

The business scenario we will look at is around sales lead assignment. A significant part of a business sales operation is the ability to process inbound sales leads so they are effectively qualified and assigned to the correct sales team for further qualification and commencing the appropriate sales process. Salesforce manages this initial qualification through its Leads object which will support traditional sales and marketing techniques such as segmentation and lead assignment rules.

One particular example of this from the authors experience was a customer requirement to process inbound enquires by capturing key pieces of information at point of initial enquiry to facilitate automatic allocation of the sales lead. The customer business process required the enquiry to be identified by:

• geographical area using postal code
• the customers industry segment
• buying behaviour through a simple criteria check - have they bought before and if so and how many times a year do they buy.

A fairly extensive lookup table covering all postal codes was used to drive the allocation of the enquiry to the correct sales team - in this customer’s case either the local inside sales team or an industry specialist sales rep for the appropriate geographic territory and industry sector.?

Building the solution at the time utilised Salesforce's coded custom development techniques. Salesforce’s Visualforce user interface programming capabilities combined with Apex code for database queries and implementing custom business logic.

Using coding techniques such as these does add complexity to a solution build. Technical developer resources are required which potentially increases cost and requires additional processes to be performed as part of the solution deployment.?

The emphasis within Salesforce is on providing a business platform which can be customised on a customer by customer basis using point and click configuration techniques. These can typically be performed by a system administrator or business analyst, and so reducing cost and complexity associated with a solution build. However these configuration techniques may not be sufficient for all requirements which will drive the solution to utilise coded techniques instead.

As the Salesforce platform has evolved these limitations have been addressed with more sophisticated tools to support point and click configuration covering more complex business requirements. One example of this evolution is OmniStudio which is now delivered through the Salesforce Industries platform. OmniStudio provides a set of point and click tools delivering a customised digital experience with the capability to build complex business scripts to support the business process logic and to integrate with back end databases and application interface layers.?

Using the advanced tools provided by OmniStudio improves significantly the scaleability of the Salesforce platform while reducing the overall cost of ownership. Mass customisation becomes more feasible using lower cost development techniques which then drives enhanced customer experiences and improved business performance. All helping to meet the challenges outlined above around improving growth and efficiency.?

So lets take a look in detail at some of the specific capabilities of OmniStudio which can be utilised in delivering the business process requirements for sales enquiry segmentation and assignment.?

The principal components of OmniStudio are shown below

In this example we are going to demonstrate the use of OmniScript to construct a digital experience and business logic layer, and DataRaptors for access to the Salesforce database. We will also incorporate an associated feature, the Business Rules Engine, which allows for the configuration of complex Decision Matrices and Tables.

The solution starts with OmniScript. Using this we can build a guided digital experience for the user which is embedded within the Salesforce system. The user in this case is someone capturing an initial sales enquiry and entering details into the system.

OmniScript presents a series of steps where this can be done as shown below.

The first part of the business process asks for the name of the company and their post code and then checks if the company currently exists as an account record on the Salesforce system. This enables us to link the Lead record to an existing account record as a point of reference.

Checking for an existing account can be done in a number of ways but here we are showing how OmniScripts type ahead function can be used to provide a dynamic search and find capability offering a good user experience.

If an existing account is not identified the new account name is entered along with the post code followed by the next step where additional customer segmentation information is requested.

Additional details requested includes the potential customer industry sector, buying habits, and contact details, utilising radio buttons and drop down menu controls.

This information combined with the post code captured earlier is passed to the Business Rules Engine to determine the appropriate sales rep who the lead should be assigned to.

The Business Rules Engine uses a table called a Decision Matrix. This consists of a data record for each postal code which identifies the sales rep for inside sales and each industry segment associated with the post code. The table used to construct the Decision Matrix can be built initially as a CSV file and imported into the Decision Matrix.

This Decision Matrix provides a very flexible way of managing the lead assignment. Some geographies may be very granular and require detailed setup of data with numerous individuals being defined for inside sales and industry segment. Other geographies may be broader and the same individual could cover multiple industry segments if required. The key thing is it gives the business flexibility.

In order to perform the assignment the OmniScript uses a Decision Matrix action which takes the postal code as input and retrieves the sales rep names for the industry segments from the table.

The business logic is then completed using a Formula rule which selects Inside Sales if first time purchase, or the industry sector specialist for more frequent purchase behaviour.

Once the sales rep has been established the system user id of the sales rep can be obtained using a DataRaptor Extract Action and a DataRaptor Post Action used to create the Salesforce lead record and assign to that user.

Using OmniStudio all of the above business logic and process management has been enabled in the Salesforce system using a no code point and click configuration approach. Sophisticated user interface techniques such as type ahead lookups are available as off the shelf components. When applied to a specific customer scenario which was originally developed with Visualforce and Apex coding we can see how Salesforce has evolved to deliver customisation capabilities which can be implemented by a broader range of staff with lower cost of development and support.

All of this combines to enhance Salesforce's capabilities as a scaleable platform for business process automation and a more powerful enabler of business growth and efficiency.

Colin Campbell is a Salesforce Solution Architect and Consultant and has worked on over 40 Salesforce projects.