Think of driving employees to complete compliance training, pushing them to fill out a GPTW annual survey or sending reminders for completing Salesforce certification maintenance exams. Salesforce Floating prompts can assist you to drive employee actions, broadcast company news, send recurring reminders & more.
Let us look at an illustration for a Floating prompt. Below prompt is meant to drive all Project managers to complete the forecasting activity for the current month when they view their Salesforce landing page.
Before deep diving into the creation of a Floating prompt, let us review the org-wide prompt settings.
Review Org-Wide Prompt Settings
Go to Setup-> In-App Guidance -> Add Prompt -> Prompt Settings.
- Display between prompts: This decides the time delay between showing two prompts per app. With the current custom setting of 2 hours, you would be able to see another prompt after viewing one in the same app only after a delay of 2 hours.
- Salesforce standard prompts: You would’ve come across these prompts in your org for introduction/highlighting of new Salesforce features like Recycle bin in Lightning or Controlling the density feature. These prompts are part of in-app guidance offered by Salesforce which can be activated/deactivated from this path
- Custom Prompts: You can activate/deactivate all the custom prompts in your org using this option.
Setting up a Floating Prompt
The Authoring Bar
Let’s see the origins of the Floating prompt introduced earlier. First step would be to reach the Prompt authoring bar. You can go there from this path: “Setup-> In-App Guidance -> Add Prompt -> Open Authoring Bar”.
Once opened, the authoring bar would remain at the top of an App. You would be able to navigate between different pages here like you do when working within an app by switching between Home Page, record pages, list views & more. When you are on a page(see above screenshot), you would see the already added prompts to the page from 1) “Prompts on this Page” drop down. You can also add more prompts on the page you are using 2) “Add Prompt” button.
When clicking on “Prompts on this page”, you will be able preview & edit prompts already defined on the current page.
Add a New Prompt: Select Type & Position
From the “Add Prompt” option on the authoring bar, you will be taken to the prompt wizard. Select “Floating Prompt” from the below screen:
Select the “Floating Prompt” option on the above screen. Next you can decide Prompt’s location. There are 6 locations where a floating prompt can be placed. Be sure you do not have important information on that part of the page as you can’t temporarily minimise the prompt without interacting with it. You can select the “Top Left” option for the current case.
Visibility
On the next screen, you’ll have to decide whether to restrict this prompt to certain profiles & permission set assignees or keep it open to all. In the current example, you will be allocating this to a specific profile since this message is targeted towards the Project managers group.
Additionally, you can add permission sets from the next screen which essentially means you can set the prompt’s visibility based on a combination of Profile & Permission sets. You can currently have a combination of upto 10 profiles & permissions on a Prompt.
Add Content
Next, comes the all important content section.
A floating prompt’s content consists of:
- Title – Header for the prompt
- Body – Accepts plain text only with 240 chars. The content should be concise & convey the message effectively without any ambiguity.
- Dismiss Button Label – Name of the Dismiss Button label
- Action Button Label (Optional) – Name of the Action Button label
- Action button URL (If Action button Label has values) – The “Action” button can redirect you to another URL. It does not invoke a flow or a process. For the current example, you can redirect the user to another app page where forecasting activity is done.
Scheduling
Finally, fix a date range during which you want the prompt to show up for the target audience. Since the expectation is to complete the forecasting activity by end of 1st week of May, we would keep the date range from 1st – 8th May’20
Configure the frequency at which this prompt would show. Add the no. of times it should show & the days between each occurrence in the “Times to Show” & the “Days in Between” fields respectively.
The “Show prompt when the page loads” checkbox overrides the default time gap set in “Prompt Settings” & shows the prompt every time the page loads if the user hasn’t interacted with the prompt. You can use this option to reinforce the importance of the current prompt’s message over other configured prompts.
Add remaining details & Preview
Post configuring the schedule, you can add remaining details for the prompt like Prompt Name, API name & description on the last page of the creation wizard.
Once done, you can Save & Preview the Prompt.
You can make further edits to the prompt using the “Edit” button or make it ready for use by marking it “Done”.
User Interaction & its impact on Floating Prompt’s Occurrences
Scenario:1 “Action” button is defined on the Floating Prompt
Since an “Action” button is defined, the intent is for the user to complete the action. Till the action button is clicked, the Prompt would show up based on its schedule settings.
Below are the Prompt behaviours which occur based on User Actions:
| Sr. No. | User Action | Prompt Behaviour |
| 1 | Do nothing, stay on the page | Prompt stays |
| 2 | Do nothing on Prompt – Navigate to another page & come back to the first page where prompt is defined | Show prompt when user navigates back to same page** |
| 3 | Close the prompt using ‘X’ on top right | Show prompt when user navigates back to same page** |
| 4 | Click on “Do it Later” | Show prompt after 1 day*** |
| 5 | Click on “Forecast Now” | Stop showing prompt even if more recurrences are scheduled |
** Org-wide delay of 2 hrs set earlier in “Prompt Settings” is overwritten by “Show Prompt when Page loads” checkbox set in the Floating prompt’s schedule we’ve defined. If the checkbox was unchecked, the system would wait for 2 hrs from occurrence of any other prompt on the current app before showing the Floating Prompt on the current page again.
*** Since in the Prompt’s Schedule settings “Days in between” is set to 1.
Scenario:2 “Action” button is not created on the floating prompt
With all remaining settings being the same as in Scenario:1, Sr. No. 1-3 from the “User Action – Prompt Behaviour” mapping table in the previous scenario would still hold. Sr. No. 4’s behaviour would change to -> Stop showing prompt even if more recurrences are scheduled. This is because without the action button, the prompt only expects the user to view the message. An appropriate example can be:
Conclusion
As mentioned in the introduction, Floating prompts are meant to drive user action. But there is another engagement activity which Salesforce prompts support – User Adoption. The other category of prompts i.e Docked prompts are primarily used for driving adoption using step by step instructions & in-prompt videos. You can expect another post on it soon 🙂 ! Meanwhile, hope you enjoyed this blog !! Thank you for your time !!!
