Top 5 problems Welkin’s Customizable Path can solve making your users feel happier

We could describe all the great features of Welkin’s Customizable Path and let you figure out how to improve your Salesforce org with its help on your own. But instead, we would like to share our top 5 examples demonstrating how Welkin’s Customizable Path can help you get a better Salesforce organization without any code and with minimal effort!

Problem #1 - Users change status although they are not supposed to

It might be the most common situation solved by Salesforce admins and developers while setting up sales, support, and other processes. We won’t be wrong if we say that almost every process involves people from different teams - Marketing, Sales, Support, Accounting, Project Management Office. Once had a customer whose Sales process for an Opportunity involved six different teams. It seems very wise not to allow, for example, the Marketing team to complete the Risk check stage or the Logistics team to clear invoices, doesn’t it?

Our customers do care about correct user permissions in Salesforce, but there's no built-in feature to limit access to certain status changes. As a result, to enforce the existing limitations, they start creating tens or hundreds of validation rules. All in all, they give up, but there's already a mess of different validations that will significantly complicate their further org development.

Sounds familiar? Isn't it better to use a tool that has this important security feature out of the box?

Creating and editing any path in Welkin's Customizable Path, you can separately restrict each transition to certain profiles and/or roles. You just need to open your Path configuration, switch to the Transitions tab, and click on the "Configuration" for transition's permissions. It takes less than a couple of hours to fully configure Welkin's Customizable Path, including proper permissions, whereas doing the same in the "common way" usually takes a couple of days + a lot of future maintenance.

Don't hesitate to refine your Salesforce organization - get Welkin’s Customizable Path from the AppExchange!

Problem #2 - You have fields that are required on certain status changes, but optional otherwise

Another common pain that most Salesforce users and partners face - conditionally required fields. You don't care about the "Reason Lost" field while completing the Opportunity, but you do care about it if you lose it. Or, let's say, you manage your H.R. progress in Salesforce and there's no need in the "Start Date" when rejecting a candidate, but it is essential when an offer is accepted. You can probably name at least ten examples on your Org (if no - give us a shout, please).

So what shall we do? We can either constantly remind our Sales/H.R. teams to fill out corresponding fields (why using CRM then if we can't help our users with that?) or add another dozen (or two) of validation rules. Even if your Salesforce admins have a black belt in managing validations and you don't care about getting drown in them - your users won't be happy when they get a bunch of validation errors trying to save a record. We call this "error-driven UX", or, simply put, "bad and not productive UX". 

Instead, you can use Welkin's Customizable Path to configure transition screens with all relevant fields. Just take a look at how easy it is to do it - no code, no validation rules, no expressions, no mess:

Welkin's Customizable Path provides a simple way to create "screens" for each transition out of the box, including:

• a list of fields to be filled - both optional and mandatory

• guidance (it can be different when transferring from New to Lost and when transferring from Legal to Lost)

• even a way for you to build a 2-step status change with 2nd screen having fields that are shown or hidden depending on values in fields from the 1st screen

So, just to summarize – the only thing you need to do is create a screen as shown on the screenshot above and assign it to the required transitions (as shown on the screenshot below). Creating a screen with 10 fields and even assigning it to 5 different transitions takes less time than just creating one validation rule to make a field mandatory. It's a huge timesaver.

Now it's time for you to save your time and improve your Salesforce organization with Welkin’s Customizable Path from the AppExchange!

Problem #3 - You have more than 5 key fields that you want to show your users

It is possible that a couple of years ago, Marc Benioff paraphrased the classic by Bill Gates, saying, "5 key fields ought to be enough for anybody", otherwise we don't see a reason for enforcing such a hard limitation… Yes, yes, we understand that if we have 100 key fields - they are… umm… actually, not so "key", but having 7, or 9, or even 15 fields might be necessary in some cases.

So in Welkin's Customizable Path, we do not limit the number of fields you can include in different types of screens - Key fields, Transition Prerequisites, and Transition details. Add here that your "Key fields" screen is shown only for the current status, while the "Transition Prerequisites" screen is displayed when you select a different status - there's even a chance that with more types of screens here, you might need fewer fields in each of them compared to the Salesforce Path.

Anyway here’s a screenshot that you expect - Welkin’s Customizable Path transition screen with a bit more than 5 fields on it.

Problem #4 - You have complicated processes and your users don't always remember them

We often encounter one of the two "strategical" approaches related to the way businesses split their processes into stages:

• Minimum steps for "better flexibility", so that no one can forget "the flow" (read Open → Working → Closed)

• Ultimately atomic steps for "better control", so that no one needs to think what to do, as it's explained in statuses (read Open → Website analyzed → Key contacts identified → Products of interest → Competitors identified → Introduction email sent → ∞)

Maybe not exactly these strategies but somewhere close to them . Anyway, the golden ratio is somewhere in-between. If you have more than 3 stages - users might not remember each arrow in the complicated stage transition diagram that your Business Analysts compiled. And that's ok - they know and remember a lot of other stuff that's important to keep succeeding in their business.

Let's examine what tools we have to guide our users through the process. Oh, cool, good old validation rules… How many of them do we already have? And again, that incredibly motivating "error-driven UX"?

It seems to be much more efficient to grab your user's hands and help them going through the flow. For each and every record they process. Without you, of course.

What we do with Welkin’s Customizable Path to achieve this - in the "Transitions" tab for a Path, we need to locate our "source" status in the first column and click on the "Add Transition" button nearby. In this way, we can add all allowed transitions between statuses without involving any other tools. The great benefit of such an approach is that it makes it very easy to implement any stage transition diagram in this way - you just add transitions one by one and you're done.

Once you've configured transitions, your users will automatically see allowed transitions highlighted and clickable, while transitions that are not available will be disabled. As a result, they will know in advance what they're supposed to do with the record.

Problem #5 - You are heavily using Approvals, and your users complain about the bad visibility of locked records

Using Salesforce Approvals is a great way to support your Salesforce users with some assistance from their managers or other team members. There's almost everything great with Salesforce Approvals other than the fact that users need to pay extra attention to spot that a record is locked as a part of an Approval process.

However, in Welkin's Customizable Path, you don't even need to do anything about that. The Path component automatically detects if a record is locked and displays this for users in the most important part of a record page - in the Path!

It’s time to improve your Salesforce org today

Although we've described only 5 picks for situations when Welkin's Customizable Path can improve the current situation right away, there are many other tasks and challenges where it can benefit you and your users a lot.

Don’t waste your time - install the package from AppExchange and implement the ultimate Path experience in your organization. You don't need a detailed user guide, and there's no rocket science involved - you will get the first meaningful result in 30 minutes (including 10 minutes that you've already spent on this article).