Send SMS Messages from Flow with the New Messaging Notification Flow Action

The Digital Engagement team in Service Cloud has added a useful new action for sending SMS messages. It’s called Messaging Notification. Here’s what it looks like in Flow Builder and in Process Builder:

Currently, the input parameters are labelled quite differently between the two versions.

Configuring Flow Builder: How It Works

Set Recipient Record ID to either 1) the ID of a MessagingEndUser (this is a special record created by the messaging infrastructure) or 2) the ID of any other object that has at least one phone number field.

You can query for a MessagingEndUser record. Query for records where 1) their MessagingPlatformKey matches the phone number on a specific field of the context record field, and 2) their MessagingChannel is the same as the one specified in Messaging Channel Unique Name.

If the Recipient Record ID is set to the Id of an object other than a MesagingEndUser:

  • Also provide a Recipient Phone Number
  • Salesforce will create at runtime a Messaging End User out of this specified combination record Id & phone number field

If the Recipient Record ID is set to the ID of a MessagingEndUser:

Don’t specify a Recipient Phone Number because MEU’s have an associated specific phone number


Context Record Id is required. It is used for determining how to resolve merge fields. It’s based on the who/what context used by tasks and activities, so it needs to be something like a Contact or a Case.

ConversationBroadcast Record Id is optional, it’s used by the broadcast feature and just ties all the messages sent to that broadcast.

The field ‘Triggered Outbound Type’ is optional. Expected values are ‘Standard” and “Broadcast”. This is intended to work with the work.com broadcast feature.