Summer 18 Mass Quick Actions

If you’re like me, you have your pet features in Salesforce that you are always excited to see get some love from the folks at the mothership.  For me, quick actions have always been an area that I simultaneously love but get frustrated with the limitations. I clapped with joy when watching the Release Readiness Live presentation to hear that my pet feature was seeing an update.

Wait, What’s a Quick Action?

Even if you don’t know what they are, quick actions are one of those amazing features that you probably already use all the time without realizing it. Quick actions are basically shortcuts that live in button form on a record and make it easy to perform multi-step tasks like logging a call or creating a child record.  If you have ever clicked the “New Contact” button at the top of the account record, then you’ve used a quick action!

Did you know you could create custom quick actions?  If your users perform the same basic task on records over and over, you can create custom actions to speed things up.  Custom quick actions can be a great way to translate your users’ needs into customizations that make their lives easier, and that kind of responsiveness can help drive user adoption.  Some quick actions are “global,” meaning they apply everywhere in Salesforce, but some are tied to specific objects and only work on that object.

Quick actions can also live on a list view.  In fact, you’ve probably used them many times before!    

Here are quick actions on a list view for Accounts.  They make it quick and easy for a user to add a new account to Salesforce, or even access the import Wizard.  As with quick actions living on a record, they too can be customized.

Quick actions are all a part of how the Lightning experience is shifting the focus from what users can SEE in Salesforce to what they can DO in Salesforce.

Mass Quick Actions - Spring ‘17

Quick actions got together to have a party for the first time with the Spring ‘17 Release and “Mass Quick Actions” were the result!  With this feature, users can quickly create or update up to 100 Lead and Case records from a list view with just a few clicks. For busy sales folks or support agents, this can be a tremendous time saver.  Some obvious use cases could be a service center manager adding a comment to a batch of cases to update agents on issues with these cases, or adding a task to every case to call customers about a new policy or product.  You can even update fields on the case -- like priority -- quickly and easily by selecting up to 100 cases, and performing a mass inline edit.

Not only can Mass Quick Actions save users tons of time, they are a great tool to help keep data clean.  Any admin who has had to tab through fields in a list view to fix poor data entry can appreciate having this tool in their arsenal.  But remember to use your power for good; there’s no “undo” for Mass Quick Actions.

Keeping a Good Thing Going with Spring ‘18

With the Spring ‘18 release, your users can now perform Mass Quick Actions on MORE objects.  They can now edit up to 100 records in a list of most standard objects AND custom objects. At Arkus the extension of this functionality to Custom Objects got us thinking about our nonprofit clients who do work in social services, advocacy, and training provision.  In nearly every service-based nonprofit you can find some sort of class, from informal seminars through to credential-awarding classroom training. Many nonprofit program implementations of Salesforce have “tracking attendance” as an option, and at Arkus we’ve built a number of custom ways to quickly and easily track these activities.  

With Mass Quick Actions freed to work their magic on more objects, including custom objects, there’s a new out-of-the-box tool that can be used to track attendance without having to build custom features.  With Mass Quick Actions, service providers could work from a custom list view of clients and their training sign up sheet and quickly update records to reflect attendees and no-shows in just a few clicks. Because Mass Quick Actions is now a core function of the Salesforce platform, it means one less customization for the nonprofit to maintain, but huge efficiencies realized.

Do you have a fun use case for Mass Quick actions?  Tell us all about it!
What experiences have you had with Mass Action Updates? Tell us about it in the comments below, on Twitter, the Salesforce Community, or chat with me