Lightning Flow: Process Automation for Every App, Portal, and Experience

Have you recently purchased a movie ticket, paid a bill, or changed a restaurant reservation online? At their core, these app experiences are a series of steps, or a process — a sequential flow that walks you through an activity based on your selections or answers. Digital channels are driving more process-based app experiences than ever before. And today, customers and employees expect these experiences to be seamless, personalized, and connected.

Meeting these expectations is hard. It often requires integrating siloed data, building complex logic, designing beautiful UIs, and then these experiences must be embedded in every touchpoint. The path is challenging, time-consuming, and requires lots of code. Often times, businesses resort to managing customer engagement manually or through ad-hoc, disconnected systems. The results? Frustrating experiences for the customers, and costly delays plus lost opportunities for the business. We’ve all been there. Think about the time you called a business to update your order and were routed to several customer support agents. Maybe you had to repeat yourself several times, or were placed on hold for what felt like hours. Now think about how it should have happened. You should have been routed to the right agent equipped with the right information. Or, you should have been able to make the request easily in their app or on their website. 

Introducing Lightning Flow

This is where Lightning Flow changes the game. Lightning Flow is a new Lightning Platform service that empowers any business to create and extend the power of process automation to any customer or employee experience. By applying the power of low-code, drag-and-drop functionality to customer engagement, Lightning Flow delivers an innovative new way for businesses to realize the benefits of process automation — including reduced wait times for customers, digitized business workflows, and improved team productivity. Now anyone can declaratively build and embed component-based processes, Lightning fast.

Lightning Flow brings together several innovations native to the Lightning Platform, including:

• Lightning Flow Components. Leverage reusable Lightning components to design rich flow screens and guided, visual processes.
• Integrated Processes. Orchestrate workflows and 3rd party services with Platform Events, External Services, and Local Actions.
• Process-Driven Apps. Embed Lightning Flow processes into every customer and employee app experience using Lightning App Builder and Community Builder.

We’ve added the power of Lightning into the flow technology. With the new Lightning Flow, you can create guided, visual processes with Lightning components and easily add them to a record, app, portal and console — enabling full control over the user experience for customers and employees. Lightning Flow can even connect processes running on the Salesforce Platform to any other platform or system through External Services, Platform Events, and Local Actions. Now, events from any system can launch flows, and those same flows can connect across any system, empowering the right people to take the right actions anywhere, and for those actions to orchestrate process anywhere. And finally, flows can be embedded anywhere — on any Lightning page across the entire application, whether it be your Lightning console, or a community portal across desktop or mobile, allowing you to deliver phenomenal customer and employee experiences. As a matter of fact, Trailblazers across all industries are already transforming the way they deliver experiences with Lightning Flow. They’re running more than 180 billion process flows every month!

There are shining examples of companies delivering incredible experiences with Lightning Flow in nearly every industry. For example, Shire, a global leader in pharmaceuticals, turned to Lightning Flow after seeing customers unable to fill prescriptions due to insurance rejections. These patients had policies, but were unable to provide insurance information because legacy customer engagement apps suffered from missing fields for data entry. Using Lightning Flow, Shire’s developers built a new, guided flow ensuring insurance acceptance with better data quality, improving the customer experience and increasing successful prescription fulfillment by 20 percent.

A leading medical device company turned to Lightning Flow to streamline customer on-boarding. The company was growing and had recently acquired other businesses. These acquired businesses were generating net-new customers. Using Lightning Flow, the medical device company created a guided, visual experience that allowed new customers to set up their own accounts and validated mailing addresses against USPS to ensure data accuracy. Lightning Flow delivered an incredible experience that customers wanted, while automating work, streamlining business operations, and boosting productivity for the business.

But we’re only scratching the surface. A leading retailer is using Lightning Flow to manage and process merchandise returns. A manufacturing company is using Lightning Flow for warranty management. Financial services companies are using Lightning Flow for dispute resolution and auto insurance claims. The list goes on and on. But most importantly… what will you do with Lightning Flow?

Lightning Flow is a powerful example of how the Lightning Platform works together to make our Trailblazers more productive, and deliver the experiences customers and employees love. It marks the beginning of what is going to be a big transformation of Salesforce towards process-driven applications.

Lightning Flow is now generally available and included with any Platform, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Community Cloud license. Ready to kickstart your journey with Lightning Flow? Check out the resources below:

• Automate Your Business Processes Trailhead Trail
• Spring ’18 for Developers: Go with the Flow Like Never Before
• Lightning Flow Github