In this article, I would like to discuss the power and some use cases of Salesforce Notes. Salesforce Notes are not new, but it is not widely used across different Salesforce implementations. In some cases, it is used but we are not using all the great features of this tool. While Salesforce Tasks and Activities are used during most of the Salesforce engagements, most of the time we decide to skip the Salesforce Notes, or we just enable it and do not educate the business user about all the capabilities.
Well, do not get confused here, Salesforce Notes and Salesforce Tasks are two completely different modules, and they are used for different use cases. As the name suggests, Salesforce Task is an action that we have completed, or we are planning to perform in future. Salesforce Notes is your documentation tool that allows you to write-down information related to your interactions or your strategies and in other word your personal diary that we have been using before computer-age.
Use Cases for Salesforce Notes
I am going to list down few use cases where you as an architect, need to consider Salesforce Notes. I have listed few just to illustrate the power and features that can be used but it is not the complete list.
Call Center Interactions
This is one of the most common use-case scenarios for leveraging power of Salesforce Notes. Most of the Call Center interactions are captured as Case and we use Case Subject, Description, Case Comments and few custom fields to document the interactions. We can use Salesforce Notes to capture these interactions and notes would be associated with Case and Client records. You can associate a note with multiple different records and objects.
You can create several notes as a result of one interaction: –
- A note that tells more details about the interaction. This would have its time-stamp. You can use Notes template to ensure you capture all necessary information
- You can additionally create a private note as your rough draft. Yes that is correct, Salesforce notes provide ability to create a private note that would be visible to you and admin only and your colleague with access to same record would not be able to view it
- You can also create a privately shared Salesforce note. This is other great feature of Salesforce note where you can share some of the information to specific people or group of people. This is very common scenario if you are in Finance or Healthcare industry and you do not want to share some of the financial information or PHI data to everyone with access to Case record
You would have understood the power of Salesforce Notes and if you are not using Private Notes and Privately Shared notes feature of Salesforce then this is time to explore it. You can use Case Team to share the cases with set of agents, but notes provide you the ability to share the information that is part of same case record to selected group of people. Also, this is not controlled by profile and permission-set that your admin would setup for you. You as an agent can decide whom you would like to share some of the notes you are capturing.
Sales Engagement – Opportunity Management
We can use Salesforce Notes to capture all different kinds of details during entire Sales cycle. We can leverage Private Note & Privately Shared notes along with regular notes to control the details that need to be shared with different user groups. We can use notes to define and capture strategies to winning new deals. Most of the scenario that I put above would be applicable for all different scenarios.
Some of the challenges
Salesforce notes also provides little challenges. I would list down few here: –
- Complex Data Model: – Salesforce note uses content data model. You actually creating a content document, so each note is internally maintained as content document of type defined for notes. Content data model is relatively complex, and you need to understand it properly to do any kind of customizations.
- Auto-Save of Note: – Salesforce keeps on saving note record automatically so if you are planning to write any trigger on note (content object) then you have to consider that it may trigger several times during a note capture so if you are planning to send the notes to any other system then most likely you have to use batch solution to ensure you are not sending incomplete note or sending the same notes multiple times
Summary
I would close this article with some of the great features of Salesforce Notes. Public Note, Private Note, and Privately Shared Notes are some of the great features that makes this a great documentation module. You can also write an APEX to generate consolidated notes that could be very useful if you are reviewing all the interactions. You can also create a small widget similar to Activity Timeline that can show the notes as timeline.
Refer the Salesforce documentation for Salesforce Notes. Understand the data model for Salesforce notes. Explore all the limitations and challenges it can bring to for example writing triggers, using SOQLs and notes sharing.