Explore Action Plans
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the Action Plans feature.
- Explain the difference between action plan templates and action plans.
- List the type of items that can be included in an action plan template.
- List the Salesforce objects supported by action plan templates.
- Describe how action plan templates and action plans work together.
Introduction
Ryan Dobson is a part-time admin and full-time financial advisor. Ryan works hard to understand his clients’ financial needs and always goes the extra mile to help them plan their finances and secure their future. This is what makes Ryan such an asset to Cumulus.
Ryan can’t do this all alone. He’s ably assisted by Srilakshmi Maajid, who recently joined the team as a client associate. Her job is to assist financial advisors like Ryan in planning, organizing, and scheduling so they can focus on what’s important: helping clients succeed.
Better Planning, Fewer Errors
In fact, as Cumulus Cloud Bank strives to be a modern financial institution, there’s more than enough work to go around for everyone at the bank. While that’s usually no problem for his team, lately a few routine tasks have been missed.
This has Ryan concerned. As a veteran financial advisor, he has a view of everything that goes on within the Wealth Management division of Cumulus Bank. He understands how processes and tasks must work in concert so that the team captures and meets customers' needs on time.
Top of mind, he wants to make sure that the quarterly financial plan review meetings with high-net-worth clients continue to go smoothly. There’s a fair amount of planning and prep work that happens before each such meeting, including:
- Scheduling client meetings well in advance
- Creating client’s financial performance report
- Reviewing the report
While these tasks are simple, with so many other priorities, Ryan’s afraid that a few can get missed. These tasks must be done, done on time, and someone has to do them.
Meet Action Plans
Ryan hears about Action Plans in Financial Services Cloud, and he’s curious to see if it can help solve his team’s task management woes. He contacts a Salesforce representative to get more details.
Ryan learns that the Action Plans feature lets him capture repeatable tasks and automate the sequence of those tasks—improving collaboration and productivity. Using Action Plans, his team can automatically assign task owners and deadlines to specific client engagements, such as financial plan meetings, account openings, loan approvals, and claims processing.
The Action Plans feature also makes it easy to create reports and dashboards, so Ryan can monitor progress and ensure compliance.
Action Plan Templates Vs. Action Plans
When you work with Action Plans, you first create action plan templates. So what's the difference between an action plan template and an action plan?
In an action plan template, you capture the repeatable tasks involved in a specific type of engagement, for example, financial plan review meetings with clients. For such engagements, financial advisors must set up a meeting in advance, collect financial documentation, and review the documentation. You set up the action plan template one time, and update it as your understanding of the repeatable tasks refines over time.
An action plan, on the other hand, is a run-time instance of the template that allows you to automate the sequence of the tasks you defined in the template. You generate an action plan from the template for each engagement, such as Ryan’s next quarterly plan review meeting with his client, Rachel Adams.
This works the same way a meeting minutes template works in a word-processing software. You define the structure and placeholder content in the template one time and create instances of the template in a document after every weekly team meeting.
Supported Salesforce Objects
You can create an action plan template (and therefore action plans as well) for various objects, depending on your Salesforce configuration and available licenses. Target objects for action plan templates include:
- Account
- Assets and Liabilities
- Business Milestone
- Campaign
- Card
- Contact
- Contract
- Financial Account
- Financial Deal
- Financial Goal
- Financial Holding
- Insurance Policy
- Insurance Policy Coverage
- Lead
- Opportunity
- Person Life Event
- Residential Loan Application
You can create action plan templates for custom objects too.
What’s Inside an Action Plan
The types of items that can be included in an action plan template and its generated action plans include the following or a combination of both.
Document Checklist Item
Action Plans lets you define repeatable tasks and sequences, and then automate task assignment and tracking. Often those tasks involve collecting and reviewing supporting documents needed for processes like loan origination or claim management. By including document checklist items in action plan templates, you can standardize and automate document tracking and approval steps for these processes. Document tracking streamlines borrower engagement by allowing borrowers, loan officers, and mortgage underwriters to upload and review supporting documents that are required for a mortgage application.
For more information on this feature, check out the Mortgage Mastery with Financial Services Cloud Trailhead module.
Task
Tasks are a trusty old Salesforce feature. With tasks, you can keep your to-do list in Salesforce and stay right on top of your deals and accounts. Easily relate every task to records for leads, contacts, campaigns, contracts, and other information that you need. Salesforce gives you different tools to maximize productivity—quick ways to create and update tasks, prefiltered task lists, and task notification options.
Find out more about tasks in Salesforce Help.
How Action Plan Templates and Action Plans Work Together
In an action plan template, you assign each task or other item to a person, a role, a queue, or the action plan creator. When creating templates with the UI, the plan creator becomes the plan owner. When creating templates using the API, you can designate a plan owner different from the plan creator.
When you create an action plan from a template for a specific target record:
- Items that have no assigned user are assigned to the user who creates the action plan.
- Items assigned to a role shared by two or more users are assigned to the user who creates the action plan.
- Item deadlines are calculated using the start date and date offset defined in the action plan template. However, the plan creator can choose whether the date calculation is based on the calendar or working days.
When an action plan starts, users see the tasks assigned to them through the standard Salesforce task lists and views. Users record task status information using the standard interfaces for tasks or other items, or the Action Plans details view. Target records, such as accounts or contacts, also show lists of related action plans.
What’s Next
After learning about Action Plans in this unit, Ryan is excited by the possibilities. Follow along in the next unit as Ryan uses Action Plans to make sure that his team keeps up with all the tasks. Let’s go!
