As the new year fast approaches, there are a few highlights from Salesforce Winter 2023 release for you to keep in mind until the Spring 2023 release arrives mid-January.
With an overall focus on facilitating continuous growth, improved productivity and refined user experience, this Salesforce Winter release introduces several new and improved features. But to help you declutter the key updates from the long list of improvements, here’s a quick rundown of Salesforce Winter 2023 release highlights.
Sales Cloud
Salesforce Winter 23 release includes many enhancements in Sales Cloud focused on improving productivity through automated and flexible processes.
Pipeline Inspection
Einstein Conversation Insights and Email Insights are now available in Pipeline Inspection to help sales agents get insights into the deal health from customer interactions. They can summarise pipeline metrics by standard and custom number or currency fields and edit the opportunity amount field inline in Pipeline Inspection views.
Dynamic Forms Enhancements
The new dynamic forms enhancements add more flexibility for creating accounts, contacts and opportunities. Users can migrate fields and sections as individual components without the page layout editor. They can also customise how fields and sections appear as they need.
Sales Cadence Screen Flows
This update allows sales managers to define a screen flow as a cadence step. Sales representatives can use screen flow steps to create a case, event, or tasks. Additionally, teams can improve sales and add automation with admin-enabled screen flows that are triggered upon cadence step completion.
Collaborative Forecasts
Sales managers can now add custom-calculated columns to tailor their forecasts based on business requirements. They can also filter forecasts by custom fields with critical business data. Visualisation of forecasts becomes more effective with usability enhancements like quota attainment progress bar. Managers can also view territory-based forecast types in the Salesforce mobile app.
Service Cloud
The latest Winter 2023 release expands the functionalities of Service Cloud to enable businesses to deliver effective services more flexibly and efficiently than before.
Boost Agent Productivity with Einstein Search for Knowledge
Using Einstein Seach for Knowledge, service agents can quickly find contextual articles and respond to clients more accurately without delays. This way, client cases and issues get resolved much faster, thus, improving service quality and customer satisfaction.
Customer Service Incident Management
This will allow Salesforce users to broadcast incident status updates to their stakeholders seamlessly across digital channels like email and self-service sites. That means incident administrators can send proactive mass updates to customers and internal users right from the incident record.
Preventive Maintenance Enhancements
With this update, preventive maintenance plans for assets are now easy to create based on usage. In addition, managers can schedule the next maintenance either by a fixed cadence or a floating work order, which automatically adjusts based on the usage since the last maintenance.
Help Agents Navigate the Messaging for In-App and Web Conversation with New Tools
The new tools allow agents to scroll through messaging for in-app and web history and quickly switch to the most recent conversation. It also alerts agents with notifications in the conversation window when they receive a new message. This enables agents to easily gather contextual information and stay informed when communicating with customers.
Marketing Cloud
When it comes to marketing, the Salesforce Winter 2023 release seeks to optimise and personalise marketing functionalities based on unified buyer data to enhance customer experience. Here are some key updates in marketing.
Einstein Content Selection
Marketers can now improve their testing results for content more quickly and easily by leveraging AI. It automates testing activities, thus, making them much easier to set up and scale. The AI enables this functionality to evolve and learn to select content as prospects open and read marketing emails. Moreover, marketers can have real-time access to analytics visualised in dashboards that allow for content-level visibility and actionable insights for improved results.
Ecommerce Marketing Insights
Ecommerce and marketing data now integrate automatically in Salesforce. This provides out-of-the-box insights into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns in driving ecommerce revenue. For instance, with visibility into sales, returns, and cancellations, marketers can better calibrate their efforts to drive ecommerce outcomes like meeting target revenue or boosting sales and even improving customer loyalty.
Pardot Classic App retirement
Salesforce retired Pardot on 17 October 2022. Users can still access the legacy application at pi.pardot.com. However, to get the latest features, they need to enable the Account Engagement Lightning app in Salesforce. With this new update, marketers can now use External Actions to automate tasks and engage with customers that use third-party apps outside of Account Engagement. Marketers can also manage and extend account engagement with a flexible licensing option for Account Engagement users that does not require a full Salesforce subscription.
Commerce Cloud
Salesforce Winter 2023 release adds new enhancements and capabilities for B2B and B2B2C commerce.
Order Management Enhancements
These new enhancements bring productivity to managing orders and fulfilment. Service agents can now place orders on behalf of buyers using APIs for a streamlined buying experience. Store staff can also locate new orders, track fulfilment, and complete orders for both buy online pick up in store (BOPIS) and ship-from-store purchases. Additionally, stores can easily handle high traffic during promotions and holidays by ingesting up to 5,000 Salesforce B2C Commerce orders per minute and processing 2,500 orders per minute.
B2B Commerce and B2B2C Enhancements
Subscription Management comes with an in-built integration to Commerce Cloud from Revenue Cloud. This means recurring revenues for B2B and B2B2C are better managed. Companies can also set up a direct-to-customer (D2C) website or portal for new markets easily with support for local taxes and multiple languages. Moreover, shoppers can use SKU details to quickly search for products and provide more insight into their buying intent through Semantic Search.
Analytics
Salesforce aims to speed up data processes and reporting with the new enhancements in analytics. There are improvements in user experience and collaboration as well as in the real-time assessment of outcomes and impact on dashboards.
CRM Analytics
Users can browse Lightning Reports, dashboards and CRM Analytics assets in a single user interface with search filters. Ask Data for Salesforce can recommend insights right on the Search page. Also, CRM Analytics for Slack enables teams to access, share and subscribe to reports for seamless collaboration.
Einstein Discovery
It is now possible to run predictions from previously deployed models with live external Snowflake data. This means users do not need to move or maintain the data with the predictive models now supporting the live data outside Salesforce. The new update also helps business analytics to pinpoint the most critical variables in their models and measure the quality of models for each group in a variable. This allows builders to better understand their models, assess the quality and make better decisions.
Industries
Salesforce also brings many feature and capability updates for various industries with its Winter 2023 release to help businesses achieve operational efficiencies and improve customer loyalty.
Manufacturing Cloud
Manufacturing for Service
These enhancements in Service Console for Manufacturing provide a unified, holistic view of the customer so that service agents can quickly and effortlessly resolve customer issues. This way, companies can deliver excellent customer service experience and improve satisfaction and trust.
Service agents can use a single screen to manage end-to-end customer interactions with this console. It comes with a predefined identity verification flow, a preconfigured timeline view of interactions, and a unified, holistic view of customers with related assets and accounts.
They can also receive timely alerts on record changes, search for knowledge articles, capture interaction details and take contextual actions using the console.
Manufacturing for Sales
This Winter 2023 release improves Sales Agreements, Account Forecasting, and Advanced Account Forecasting in Manufacturing for Sales.
The new enhancements allow for detailed planning and predictions of business transactions. Sales supervisors can also create sales agreements in one-time or recurring weekly schedules, update multiple values in advanced account forecasts and use advanced filters to get meaningful forecasts, all thanks to this update.
Financial Services Cloud
Actionable Relationship Center (ARC) Enhancements
The new improvement in ARC provides users with more relevant customer relationship data. They can also save time with customisable ARC graph templates connected with Einstein Relationship Insights. The pre-built templates provide users with pre-configured nodes that show B2C and B2B client relationships, offering a head start while building graphs. This saves time and adds to productivity while enabling relationship clarity.
Streamline the Know Your Customer (KYC) Process
With this functionality, financial service providers can streamline identity verification and risk assessment processes for their customers. The new KYC data model allows companies to use external data sources to validate documents, explore more information about a prospect, and even categorise them based on risk assessment outcomes.
Loyalty Management
Member Engagement Widgets
These new interactive member widgets are embedded in external sites or portals and drive member engagement. Designing these widgets is easy, as is deploying them, with customisable out-of-the-box templates.
Loyalty Journeys for Marketing Cloud
The new Loyalty Journeys helps marketers quickly build a journey for every new member using template journeys. This also automates member incentives and engagement rates. Activities, like welcoming new members, celebrating birthdays, and informing members about benefits, become effortless and quick with unique sets of contextual emails that can be further customised. This change allows marketers to improve member journeys and experiences without spending too much time for each member.
Member Badges
Reward members with badges for engaging with loyalty programs and celebrating member milestones. Member badges appear on member profiles and external portals, providing recognition and a sense of achievement for members, thus boosting loyalty.
Development
Flow Builder Enhancements
The new flow builder enhancements introduce cut-and-paste flow elements for the first time to enable faster changing of flow elements in auto-layout. Also, all incoming go-to-connected elements are now listed in one place so finding these connections becomes much easier.
Pub/Sub API
With this new API, users get a single interface for publishing and subscribing to platform events. It allows for real-time event visibility and changing of data capture events efficiently.
Security
Scoping Rules Enhancements
This update boosts productivity by limiting the number of records users can see using scoping rules. It is designed to help users focus on records that are relevant to a specific brand, team or department.
In Summary
With every new release, Salesforce empowers its clients to scale their businesses and streamline operations effortlessly and sustainably. This Winter 2023 release is no exception to that. It helps companies save time and cost while enabling staff to work with more productivity and efficiency to drive business outcomes.
