Triggering an email the first time a user does (X)

With headless flows making their way to pilot, and hopefully production by summer, my mind has been tinkering away on what I will do w/ them.

I just received confirmation that the flows will run in system mode, like a workflow rule, which adds many possibilities. For example, presumably the flow should be able to update a field on the running user’s user record.

This would allow triggering a notification the first time (and only the first time) a user does a specific action. Simply create a checkbox for every action you want to measure, say creating a lead. Create a workflow rule which fires when the lead is created, with criteria of: $User.Has_Created_Lead__c = FALSE. That triggers an immediate email to the user that says “hey, nice work, way to create your first lead,” and it also triggers a headless flow that updates the checkbox to TRUE, so that it will never fire again.

Now, why would you want to do this? I can think of a few reasons.

Admins can take advantage of the mass-customizing-real-time-social-mobile ideas that are driving b2c marketing, but targeting your internal Salesforce users. Hit your user when they are most likely to consume that bit of wisdom you seek to impart. And you can get as granular with it as you want - triggering different information based on the record type, opp amount, etc.

You could even get big brother on it, and trigger notifications for users that have not created a lead within a month after having their account created - “hey joe, where you been?”.

I’m still working on a way to trigger a workflow rule off the first login date for a user, which would allow even more big brotherly action, but have not figured that out yet. Last login behaves like a formula field, so it will not trigger a field update when it is modified, but with headless flows, so much will be possible, that perhaps I can think of a solution for this too.

 
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