Salesforce recently released its latest Spring release from January-February 2023. And with it, Salesforce brings in some of the highly anticipated features and updates that can only ease and enhance the experience of your company’s fluid digital transformation.
Salesforce updates always strive to bring you better design updates and improved ergonomics that keep your work efficiently automated and your workforce positively motivated to produce better results. The latest release also promotes many useful enhancements that will help you nurture a loyal customer base and maintain an interactive customer-brand engagement.
1. Sales Cloud
i. Collaborative Forecasts
Make better and smarter decisions for your company by getting more flexibility and control over the data you use to make sales forecasts. Using custom components and values in customisable forecast pages, you can obtain even better and more accurate results based on your company’s unique operating needs. Your sales team can generate better predictions of sales using unique values of custom date, custom currency and number fields. You will not need to compromise accuracy by having to adhere to the page’s previously rigid standards. Share your information with the concerned teams in real time and design and access multiple forecast pages simultaneously to accommodate diverse variables to predict better forecasts.
ii. Gain Better Insights on Sales Processes for Increased Productivity
Help your sales team grasp a proper understanding of their sales prospects and how to engage with customers better to expedite their sales performance using conversational AI features. Einstein Conversation Insights (ECI) can now be integrated into Enablement programmes to analyse a compilation of company-recorded conversations to gain better insights into customer behaviour. The ECI-processed information provides a base to assess how your sales reps have been approaching customers to close more deals, identify why there have been delays in the sales process, and/or why some deals fall apart. Such insights are a great asset for Enablement teams to strategise better and personalised ways to coach their sales teams and redefine sales KPIs to boost performance.
iii. Understand Your Pipeline Health Better
Monitor your pipeline health and the fluctuations in it over time using fresh pipeline inspection features. This improved group of metrics—such as new opportunities created, overdue opportunities, and increases and decreases in amounts, allows your sales team to favourably examine the status of their pipeline, identify opportunities and changes, and plan strategies to drive the sales team to close more sales.
2. Marketing Cloud
i. Analyse Your Data Better with Visual Pivot Tables
As effective as the pivot tables were before, with added functionalities, data analysis with pivot tables gets even better. Arrange the way your data looks to compare and study trends and patterns to conveniently sum up your data to help you capture useful insights from various perspectives. With this update, you can create visual widgets to visualise data using charts or bars. And access multiple-case scenarios to calculate, summarise and analyse data. The new update further allows you to see analysis results as you enter data changes without actually having to wait to apply them until the end. As an Intelligence Reports Advanced user, you can formulate and edit calculated fields within a pivot table in Intelligence Reports to make data analysis even easier.
ii. Simplified Data Stream Control Centre
Now, monitor and control your continuous streams of data sources with a streamlined Data Stream Control Centre. Evaluate data quality and maintain data hygiene by regularly checking for faulty streams and keeping data clean and accurate; get actionable insights by viewing data stream status; identify errors and data ingestion issues, among others, from the control centre dashboard. The centre is by default programmed to filter data for ‘Today’, making it easier to retrieve data. With an easy single-view interface, get an overview of the status of data streams by data source (like Ads, social networks, web)—whether it is successful, failed, in standby or in progress—and manage data streams accordingly.
3. Service Cloud
i. Assign and Schedule Shifts in Salesforce Contact Centre
With an improved Shift Scheduling feature, you can properly designate shifts for your field agents. Schedule assignments to the right agent based on the territory they cover or the skills they possess to provide your customers with the best possible service and assistance. Improve your Contact Centre operations with scheduling planner tools to swiftly manage shifts and find the perfect agent for any available task.
ii. Gain more Flexibility and Mobility to Work with Mobile Offline Extensibility
Your trusted mobile app can be shaped to your needs with new offline-capable functionalities built using Lightning web components. In addition, the mobile app now has improved ergonomics and a neatly optimised workspace that showcases relevant data in a dashboard to conveniently access your business needs while mobile.
Enhanced functionalities, like split-screen, make navigation between multiple task screens easy, thus giving your field agents more fluidity to work between tasks. They can access primed records directly from the app, even offline, to prepare for meetings or to corroborate exact ideas with customers on-site. And before heading out for any assignments, field agents can filter out unavailable products to organise their inventory list, which will avoid confusion and save time while on the go.
4. Commerce Cloud
i. Improved SEO for Your Stores
Get the organic traffic rolling on your store with new URL configurations. Create SEO-friendly URL slugs for every product page so your store’s pages don’t go drowning in search engines. Alternatively, you can also set dynamic URL redirect rules to identify your URL slugs and redirect them to a Salesforce B2B Commerce URL.
ii. Save Time with Asynchronous Data Import
Save time when importing data because commerce data import is now asynchronous. Meaning you can multitask even when the data import is ongoing. Asynchronous import also offers faster performance and imports as many as 10,000 products with nine images in one go in CSV import file format.
iii. Marketplace for Salesforce Commerce
Give your customers the luxury to choose and compare different offers for the same products in a common marketplace. Export your store’s and third-party sellers’ categories and price catalogues to create a common marketplace by integrating your Salesforce Commerce storefront into the Commerce Marketplace app.
Your customers will never have to scratch their heads to determine different shipping costs from multiple sellers. By setting your marketplace up for custom shipping cost calculation, customers can opt for a single delivery method while your app calculates the total cost of the order.
iv. Manage Your Customers’ Orders efficiently
By using the Store Fulfilment App, store associates can now conveniently add items to shipments and/or set reasons why shipping was rejected for certain orders. You can even charge fees in case of simple returns and cancellations as per custom standard RMA, Return Item, and Cancel Item Flows settings. And with a new Order on Behalf of UI flow in place, your customer support representatives can easily place and manage orders on your customer’s behalf.
5. Loyalty Management
Create adept customer service to engage and serve your loyalty program members. Enrich your engagement levels with loyalty members with freely customisable widgets to enhance your members’ loyalty experience. Using the Loyalty Widget Designer, you can also design your own-of-the-box member engagement widgets that reflect your brand image better, using custom fonts, text, colours and images.
i. Simplified Customer Service
Customer service reps (CSRs) can use Identity Verification Flows to identify loyalty programme members or their authorised representatives for effective loyalty management. The Loyalty Excellence service console additionally offers complete details on the loyalty members’ activities, which the CSRs can use to engage loyalty programme members, resolve their conflicts, entertain requests and queries, and address their issues efficiently.
ii. Create New Promotions for Your Loyal Customers
Engage your brand with customers by setting up new promotions and reward schemes to manage your loyalty programs. Using the guided Quick Promotion wizard, you can quickly devise a promotion for customers, define rules for who can be eligible for the event, how to gain rewards and activate it when the criteria are met.
Also, let your loyalty members keep track of their activities and transactions, the points earned during promotions, expiration dates of those points and redeemable voucher details by simply enabling a widget. Based on their eligibility, members can also view and choose from a number of benefits they can enjoy.
So, keep your loyalty members engaged with various promotional events for cumulative purchases by rewarding them with vouchers and benefits. You can also embed a widget that shows the promotion scheme and members’ progress to keep them motivated. And give them a sense of achievement by awarding badges that can be later viewed from the View Member Badges widget.
6. Analytics
i. Personalised View of Reports
Reports and dashboards see huge updates in this release. Now you can create more relevant, concise and personalised reports for each member of the teams concerned. Setting up a dynamic report filter displays a personalised result that is relevant only to the member accessing it.
ii. Monitor your Dashboard and Report Subscriptions
Stay in the loop to know what reports, dashboards, and analytic assets your users are subscribed to. You can then create a custom report type to ascertain the source, owner, running users and subscriptions schedule.
The new release has also increased its subscription limit for reports and dashboards from seven to 15 each. With this, you can get more useful reports and dashboards with the latest data.
iii. Create Curated Collections of Reports and Dashboards
Prioritise and organise reports and dashboards that are important to you and create collections to group them from multiple folders. These collections will make the navigation of multiple reports much simpler and easier. You can then pin the Collection that you want to share with others to your home page.
In Summary
Having perfect control over the data you need is always a challenge, even more so when taking that crucial step to mark your journey into digital transformation. The new Salesforce Spring release does more and some to help you achieve a trusted solution to your problems. Enhanced functionalities make it easier for users to read, navigate, and access data whenever they want and wherever they might be working from.
The release emphasises the use of simplified features and user services to enhance productivity and get visible progress results in any given circumstance while continually adding improvements to boost healthy customer engagement.
