Docomotion – Reap the Benefits of Automated Document Generation

Last Updated on April 3, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta

Note.:- Today, I am going to review Docomotion – Interactive Salesforce Document Generation.

Let’s start with an example, a quote can now be sent digitally to customers, and they can sign with an e-signature. The basic idea behind automation is to handle day-to-day processes and operations more efficiently, more accurately and more profitably, and if we get it right, it can also enhance customer service and visibility of our organization.

As the digital world advances, more and more traditional processes that have until now been implemented manually are being switched to automated mechanisms. But more than that, the automated processes themselves are becoming increasingly efficient and accurate, resulting in increased profitability for the organizations that use them. And there’s plenty of room for improvement.

Take another example of e-signature; yes the client can sign directly onto the document on the screen in front of them, without printing out the page, grabbing a pen to sign on the dotted line, finding an envelope and stamp and mailing it back to you. But does the process of incorporating that electronically-signed document into your records really happen automatically, with no further manual input once the client has sent it back to you? And, if you are sending documents to your customers via an automated system, does it all come unstuck when you need different content for different clients? And what happens if your salesperson is in the field, actually generating sales, and not at their desk where they can deal with other documents – does this hold up the sales process?

Creating an automated process allows you to pre-define the route and points through which the customer journey will pass in order to achieve your process goal – be it customer care, customer retention, sales, service, etc. – but also to adjust each scenario to ensure that it is relevant to each particular customer, keeping them on that path and leading them to the final destination you set at the beginning of the journey. As such, automation is the creation of a set of rules based on cause and effect. The trigger can be almost any customer interaction following which a response is required from you; for example, when a customer has received a quote, signed it and returned it to you, you may want them to receive a welcome email within 24 hours in response.

As business owners and marketers, you need to look strategically at your processes, including document generation, making sure that, rather than occasional sporadic communications with your customers, every opportunity you have to engage with them adds true value.

Here are just three examples of routine processes that can be automated, using the Docomotion app:

Use Case 1: Sending a quote to customers – Quick Action button

Let’s take the daily task of a sales rep who wants to send a quote to a customer through an email address saved in a Salesforce contact. The sales rep wants to complete this task quickly and easily, with just one click. They can achieve this by Salesforce Process Builder silently ‘calling’ Docomotion, without the sales rep having to write a single line of code.

The system admin needs to create a checkbox on the Opportunity object (or any other object from which the form is generated) that will be used to trigger the process, for example, Generate Quote to Decision Maker.

Then a ‘quick action’ needs to be defined, to invoke the Process Builder process when the field value changes according to a formula rule (in this case, ‘checkbox selected’).

The Process Builder condition that triggers this change is shown here:

The admin then defines the document generation action as follows:

From the Action Type drop-down list, select Apex (available only if Docomotion package is installed in the organization)
In the Action Name text box, enter a name for the action.
From the Apex Class dropdown list, select one of the following (depending on the required outcome):
1. Generate Document: The output is generated to the specified channel, in the selected format.
2. Generate Link: A link to the output is sent to the recipient.
3. Mail Body: The output is generated as email body text, and sent to the recipient.
4. Mail with Attachment: The output is generated in the selected format, attached to an email of the specified template and sent to the recipient.

For this use case, we will select the Apex class, Generate Link.

The admin then sets the Apex variables:
Note: The options in the Set Apex Variables dropdown list change, according to the Apex class selected.

The required values are entered in the Type and Value columns, as shown in the following screenshot:

The admin then sets the Form ID number, chooses the main object of the Docomotion Form for the generation (in our case, Opportunity) in Generate On, selects Signer – this is the decision-maker who will receive and sign the quote – and whether to use an Active or Published Version of the form.

Now that everything is set, the sales rep can simply click on the New Action button that has been created for them, and the quote will be sent directly to the contact, in the specific form and via the specific channel (interactive link) selected.

Use Case 2 – Mass generation and advanced automation

This use case is very popular with non-profit organizations and concerns the customer management process for donation collection. It includes:

Successful collection of donations, assisted by Salesforce CRM
Contacting donors with a ‘thank you’ acknowledgment letter
Collecting feedback about the donation process and finding out more about the donors, by sending them a questionnaire and updating the data received into Salesforce.

In the following screen, the non-profit’s account manager can see donations per donor, which have been collected and saved in the Salesforce CRM.

The account manager now has three options for how to send an automatic ‘thank you’ acknowledgment letter to each donor:

Manually – clicking the Generate Document button in each donation
Automatically – creating a new donation record automatically generates an email with an attachment that will be sent to the donor by Salesforce Process Builder, using the Docomotion API
One-click batch – sending a batch of ‘thank you’ letters, once a month or once a quarter, using Docomotion.

Let’s see how the third option works:

The first step is to click Generate from Report in Docomotion to activate the Mass Generate from Report feature.

Now, the previously-defined report is selected in the Report Name column, which includes all donors who have not yet been sent a ‘thank you’ letter (Opportunities with Donation Report).

Then the form to be generated is chosen:

the recipient contact:

output format:

and the output channel, with email subject:

Then Generate is clicked to generate the document.

The system admin has defined the form of ‘thank you’ letter in the Form Settings page under the Activity Settings, and this determines that each time the form is generated, a task with the unique name ‘Thank you letter sent’ will automatically be created:

The generation activity in the Docomotion app will trigger a Process Builder action, set up as illustrated in Use Case 1, which automatically updates the Salesforce donation record to show that a ‘thank you’ letter has been sent:

It’s worth mentioning that the content of the sent document can be customized per donor; for example, you can inform donors who made large donations that they are ‘champion donors’, or add a different message if the donor is a family and not a single named individual. This logic can be defined in the Docomotion Designer logic editor.

Now let’s consider feedback possibilities…. a month after the ‘thank you’ letter is sent, the non-profit organization wants to send a survey form, inviting donors to provide feedback about the donation process which can be used in reports, dashboards, etc. The survey also enables donors to update their contact details etc. All they need do is complete the interactive form they receive, and click Submit; the relevant contact record in Salesforce is then automatically updated with the new data. All this can be achieved using Docomotion’s native automation feature to auto-create a task during form generation, and the app’s unique integration with Salesforce automation tools, such as Process Builder.

Note: This process begins by creating the form and setting a data model based on the custom donation object and related entities (account, user, contact).

The feedback form is generated with the Docomotion API and another Process Builder process with parameters for form generation, such as a form ID, format, and output channel. This new process verifies that the first form (the ‘thank you’ letter) has been generated, and triggers a new action to generate an additional form (an interactive survey) to be sent as a link to the donor.

You’ll be happy to learn that this process requires absolutely no custom code development!

Use Case 3: Flow (Validate before sending quote)

Let’s go back to the scenario where a sales rep wants to generate a quote and send it to a customer.

As in the previous use case, this should also be done automatically, but let’s now add an automatic validation confirming that the sales opportunity meets specific business criteria for sending out a quote.

This can be done with Visual Screen Flow in Lightning. The wizard of the flow is displayed in the Opportunity; it notifies the sales rep that a quote will be sent by email after adding the products and verifying that the Opportunity stage is set to Value Proposition.

If the sales rep clicks Next in this screen, the business rules will be evaluated and a warning message will appear because, in this case, the stage is set to Proposal/ Price Quote, not Value Proposition.

After selecting the Value Proposition stage in the path and clicking Next, the quote is created.

Let’s see how the flow has been set up with Docomotion.

The screenshot below shows a Flow that defines the screen options and the conditions for pulling the relevant Opportunity record which meets the business logic criteria and generates a quote email with the document.

Depending on whether the conditions – in our case ‘products added’ and ‘stage set at Value Proposition’ – are met, the user will receive either a warning message, as above or the quote will be sent using Apex action – Send Email.

System admins can simply fill in the details of the recipient, which in this case will be the decision-maker of the Opportunity, the form ID, the format to be used (in this case PDF), the Generate on value (the main object – Opportunity), and the specific ID of the email template.

Now let’s add this screen flow to the Lightning page

This is a great feature that is fairly simple to set up with the automatic walkthrough wizard and can automate document generation with the Salesforce Lighting Flow validating relevant business rules.

So, there you have it…. these three use cases clearly demonstrate how easy it is to use the Docomotion automated document generation app to create complex customized documents quickly, simply and without writing any code lines.

Happy data collecting!