The News: Salesforce Flow, the automation suite for the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, is expanding with the release of several new features, the company revealed at TrailblazerDX. Through data collection and low-code integration, these updates promise to deliver business value quickly by accelerating processes and providing better customer experiences. Read the Press Release from Salesforce here.
Salesforce Flow Automation Suite Expands with Addition of Impressive New Features
Analyst Take: Salesforce Flow continues to take the work out of workflow automation through the addition of new and innovative features announced at TrailblazerDX. Flow, the automation suite for the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, is designed to facilitate the automation of complex business processes, integrating systems, empowering people, and enabling better customer experiences. I’m always excited to see new features focused on providing customers with the ability to more quickly deliver business value and these new features appear to be designed to do just that.
The improvements to Salesforce Flow are tailored to help address the realities we’re dealing with in the business world today, including supply chain disruptions, rising inflation, and labor shortages, all of which make workflow automation not simply a nice to have option, but a fundamental business need. This isn’t news, by any stretch. We know that by simplifying complex processes and eliminating redundancies, automation is a game-changer, enabling businesses to do more with less and frees up time for high value pursuits. Salesforce reports that its customers already save a total of 109 billion hours every month through Salesforce Flow automation tools, and these newly announced features stand to substantially increase the impact of the platform.
New Salesforce Flow Features Help Users Innovate and Thrive
Among the capabilities announced at TrailblazerDX, Salesforce Flow now includes Flow in Slack, which combines the collaboration streamlining abilities of Slack with low-code automation tools to bring processes built in Flow directly to where people are already working and communicating. It’s good to see Salesforce leveraging Slack following its $27 billion acquisition of the messaging and collaboration platform that closed in July of 2021. With hybrid work a reality in the workplace today, being able to use exactly the tool you need in the platform you want to work in seamlessly and effectively is important. Solutions like Salesforce Flow that facilitate and enable productivity and collaboration are key.
Flow Actions, another new feature, offers customers the ability to launch workflows directly from Tableau dashboards and accelerate the insight-to-action pipeline, while Flow Orchestration automates multi-step and multi-user processes.
Salesforce’s considerable investment in Salesforce Flow also includes the Flow Integration feature, which enables fast and efficient data integration from any system into Salesforce Flow. End-to-end automation of every step in a workflow (even in legacy systems) will be made possible through FlowRPA by leveraging robotic process automation technology from MuleSoft. And finally, Salesforce Flow now supports low-code testing functionality to enhance automated testing and version control.
This range of features for Salesforce Flow is a deeply impressive indication of Saleforce’s commitment to continual innovation on behalf of its customers. I also see this as further confirmation that the investments Salesforce has made over the last number of years in acquiring Tableau, Mulesoft, Slack, and others are panning out in beneficial ways.
Tools and functionality that empowers businesses to work faster, not harder — giving them the ability to put their attention where it really counts — are what’s needed today. Salesforce Flow provides automation solutions within a platform that’s already well-established and widely used which will, I believe, help accelerate automation journeys and allow businesses to address some of today’s biggest challenges, and their customers (and their customer’s customers) will thank them for it.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum Research:
Salesforce Safety Cloud Launches, Designed to Streamline COVID Testing and Status Reporting
Making Markets EP19: Oracle Soars, C3 DoD, Intel Spins, HPE, Salesforce, Splunk, and Marvell do Well
Image Credit: Salesforce
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a serial entrepreneur with a technology-centric focus. She has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation.
