Salesforce is back with its Summer 2023 Release updates from April 20 to June 9. The release is an eagerly anticipated upgrade that brings a plethora of features and enhancements across multiple clouds to elevate your business operations. From Sales and Service to Marketing and Commerce, these cutting-edge capabilities are designed to empower your teams, streamline workflows, and maximise operational efficiency. With real-time insights, simplified processes, and improved analytics at your fingertips, make well-informed decisions, amplify sales performance, and effortlessly achieve your targets.
Join us as we explore the key highlights of this release and discover how Salesforce can help you thrive in today’s dynamic market.
SALES
1. Achieve Targets with Real-Time Sales Insights
The new Sales Rep Command Centre simplifies sales reps’ workflows by providing remote access to essential sales information and tools that will improve sales performance and achieve targets. Your sales representatives will now have real-time insights on sales quotas, stuck opportunities, overdue activities, step progression, and amount changes, ensuring they are equipped with the right information to make informed decisions.
Note: This change applies to Revenue Intelligence in Sales Cloud in Lightning Experience in Enterprise and Unlimited editions for an additional cost.
The command centre also enables you to unlock sales opportunities by tapping into untapped revenue streams with the Product Whitespace feature. With tools like Sales stage analysis, identifying bottlenecks in the sales process is easier and managing overdue tasks is much more efficient. From this release on, you can also connect to the tool dashboard from your devices, even when on the go.
2. Evaluate Sales Forecasts with Built-In Charts
Collaborative Forecasts now include built-in charts. Your sales managers can use these built-in charts to visualise the state of their forecasts and better assist their sales executives in meeting their sales targets.
These charts provide a comprehensive view of every current forecast change and facilitate easy comparisons with previous forecasts, eliminating the need for manual calculations. The visually presented data are easier to understand, enabling you to make data-driven decisions.
To optimise the chart benefits, ensure ‘Historical Trending’ is enabled and set the appropriate retention period. Historical Trending enables direct comparison between current and past forecasts that offer valuable insights into identifying areas where you may require assistance and where you excel, thus fostering improved support and guidance.
3. Streamline Sales Strategy and Maximise Effectiveness with Sales Planning
Sales Planning simplifies sales operations, maximising the effectiveness of your sales strategy. Foster collaboration among stakeholders within your organisation to enhance strategies and gather valuable input. Set revenue targets, quotas and strategically design territories using maps or tree structures. It also enables continuous planning for significant events like product launches or economic changes. Effortlessly segment tasks by employing a combination of automated and manual assignments at different organisational levels. Plan owners can evaluate sales plans for optimal outcomes, empowering sales teams to stay competitive in dynamic markets.
4. Einstein for Sales
a. Explore Einstein Conversation Insights in Multiple Languages
Einstein Conversation Insights (ECI) has expanded its language support to include 16 languages and multiple dialects. This enhancement empowers your sales and service teams to seamlessly access call transcripts, extract valuable insights from conversations, and provide coaching recommendations. ECI automatically detects the language from call recordings and applies insights based on the available features for each supported language, aligned with your call insights settings. For a tailored experience, you have the flexibility to create language-specific call insights as well.
However, while most features are translated, certain features of reports and dashboards may not be fully available in all languages.
b. Supercharge Your Sales Cycles with Einstein Bots for Sales (Beta)
Prepare for a seamless onboarding experience with the upcoming release of Einstein Bots for Sales. Through this customer-centric website bot, you will engage in personalised conversations and generate valuable leads. Get ready to revolutionise the web-to-lead experience as Einstein Bots for Sales empower you to establish and nurture customer relationships on a larger scale. The bots will be equipped with purpose-built dialogues and automation flows to streamline your sales process. They will effectively promote the value of your products to customers even beyond regular business hours, collect information, and schedule meetings. The icing on the cake is that you can easily customise these bots to align with your unique business needs, maximising the benefits for your organisation.
SERVICE
1. Add Email Conversations to Conversation Mining Reports (Pilot)
Enhance your analysis capabilities with Einstein Conversation Mining by including email conversations when building your reports. Unlike before, where Conversation Mining only analysed live chat transcripts, this feature will empower you to gain a comprehensive understanding of customer issues and identify common cases. However, this feature is currently in the pilot phase and available only to select customers.
2. Make your Service Catalogue accessible to Customers and Partners
Optimise the accessibility of your company’s products and services by leveraging the power of the Service Catalogue. This feature serves as a self-service platform for your customers and partners, seamlessly transforming their requests into approved and well-documented orders.
With the Service Catalogue site, you can create a user-friendly portal where customers and partners can easily browse and request items from your catalogue. Setting up the site is easy, thanks to the prebuilt templates and customisable, code-free Aura components specifically designed for the Service Catalogue in Experience Cloud. By simply dragging and dropping these components onto your site pages in Experience Cloud, you can customise their appearance to align with your brand.
3. Einstein for Service
a. Scheduling Appointments
Now, the enhanced bot can offer your customers the convenience of scheduling appointments or deliveries. It includes a time selector messaging component that enables customers to select a preferred time slot from a list, which is then saved for future reference.
b. Building Bots Faster (Beta)
Save yourself time and effort in bot-building with Einstein Bot Blocks (Beta). These blocks will offer powerful functionalities that can be reused across multiple bots by adding a dialogue group instead of building a new one every time. Available bot blocks include payment processors, conversational experiences, and workflow integrations.
c. Ask Questions with Dynamic Options
With the latest upgrade, the enhanced bots offer dynamic question options, enabling them to ask personalised questions based on the customer’s specific records. This means the bot gathers customer data and uses it to amend these records or transfer them to a dedicated agent for further assistance. For instance, customers can be prompted to select from a list of their recent cases using formats like text, images, and buttons, which creates an engaging and interactive experience. This feature works in plain-text conversations as well.
Field Service
1. Empowering Your Mobile Workforce with Field Service Mobile
The Salesforce Summer release introduces multiple enhancements aimed at enhancing the functionality of the Field Service mobile app for businesses. These enhancements include utilising Lightning web components to tailor the app according to specific needs, optimising image uploads, providing a Field Service widget to track appointments, redesigning related lists for improved visibility, and implementing location-based actions to enable workers to access useful information at the right time. These improvements allow mobile workers to efficiently manage appointments, upload images with descriptions, and access necessary data easily to facilitate efficient remote working.
2. Prioritise Lead Time on Usage-Based Work Orders
Optimise your preventive maintenance process by considering lead time for your usage-based work orders. By factoring in lead time, you can effectively plan and prepare for prerequisite tasks like notifying customers in advance, arranging site access, and coordinating the required resources. This strategic approach ensures seamless completion of work orders, reducing delays and maximising overall productivity.
3. Schedule Follow-Up Appointments from Anywhere
Empower your mobile workforce to efficiently manage follow-up appointments for customers by enabling the Follow-Up Appointment Lightning web component (LWC). This powerful functionality allows your mobile workers to create and schedule follow-up appointments directly from their mobile devices without contacting customer services. The feature is available in the Field Service mobile app for both Android and iOS platforms.
Marketing Cloud
1. Automate Actions to Enhance Prospect Engagement
Improve your strategies to enhance prospect engagement with a powerful new feature that allows you to trigger external actions based on specific interactions. When a prospect completes a sign-up form or clicks a custom redirect link, you can automate actions such as registering them for a webinar or sending a targeted message. Moreover, you can set up alerts for your sales team whenever a prospect visits a pricing page. This feature optimises your prospect engagement process, enabling your sales team to promptly follow up and increase sales conversions while maximising opportunities for your business.
2. Improved List Management: Convert Dynamic Lists to Static
The Salesforce Summer release upgrade allows you to convert outdated or unused dynamic lists into static lists. This simple process helps save processing power since static lists no longer update automatically based on predefined criteria. To convert these lists, select the unused dynamic lists and access the table action dropdown menu. However, after the conversion, you’ll have to manually add or remove prospects from the list. Additionally, you can convert individual lists directly from the record home. This feature simplifies list management and enhances resource allocation within your business unit, resulting in increased productivity.
3. Customer Data Platform is now Data Cloud
Data Cloud, formerly known as the Customer Data Platform, introduces a range of enhanced capabilities for data ingestion, harmonisation, unification, and streaming this summer release. Explore the latest Cloud features—nested segments, exclusion criteria, and expanded data refresh options, providing greater control and flexibility. You can also save time with auto-mapping suggestions. Additionally, you can integrate Data Cloud profiles into your B2C commerce to create personalised customer marketing journeys that adapt and respond in real time, which increases customer engagement.
Commerce Cloud
1. Integrated Payment Solutions for Salesforce Commerce
Salesforce Payments is now integrated into the Salesforce platform, providing compatibility with B2B Commerce, D2C Commerce, and Salesforce Order Management. You’ll have the flexibility to assign permission sets based on user roles, allowing you to precisely control access to payment functionality. Creating merchant accounts and tailoring payment methods to align with your business requirements gets even better. By customising sets of payment types, you can optimise the checkout experience for your customers. They can conveniently store their preferred payment methods for faster transactions or future use. The Payment Workspace offers a centralised view of payment information, empowering merchants with comprehensive insights. Furthermore, you can issue refunds (beta) for partially captured payments before the authorisation process is complete.
2. Improved Order Processing in Salesforce Order Management
Salesforce Order Management introduces new features to improve order processing. Using updated flows, you can apply fees for returns and cancellations, streamlining the financial aspects of order management. Your customers can self-provision the order self-service connection to access their order status, manage returns, and initiate cancellations through a self-service portal. The order fulfilment process is optimised with pick tickets that simultaneously handle multiple orders while tracking the progress. Additionally, in B2B and D2C Commerce, service agents and account managers can place orders on behalf of customers to ensure a hassle-free ordering experience.
3. Other Noteworthy Features in Salesforce Commerce
Salesforce Commerce introduces many new features and enhancements to elevate your user experience. Some of them worth mentioning are:
- You can now enable guest shopping in B2B stores, segment stores based on market locale, and benefit from translated promotions and combined discounts.
- Additionally, you can enhance SEO with custom URLs (Beta), customise store searches, and achieve rich search results through structured data (Pilot).
- Furthermore, you can configure product fields (Pilot) and easily export product data.
- With the Commerce Assistant, you can effectively troubleshoot any store issues.
- Moreover, you gain access to an enhanced CMS for content management, expanded Commerce Search locales, Einstein Search Suggestions, streamlined reordering with the Reorder Portal, and improved functionality through various Commerce components.
We will dive into the details of these features in our upcoming blogs. So, stay tuned!
Analytics
1. A Unified Platform for All Your Analytics (Generally Available)
Simplify your CRM Analytics management with the new Analytics home. This personalised environment empowers you to efficiently handle your CRM Analytics items, reports, and dashboards within a unified platform, eliminating the hassle of managing multiple apps. By combining Lightning and CRM Analytics dashboards into a single collection, you can easily organise and categorise your workload. This unified setup simplifies your analytics management, ensuring easy access to valuable insights for improved productivity.
2. Utilise Images, Rich Text, and Dashboard Widgets for Impactful Data Presentations
With the latest enhancements, deliver maximum impact with your data presentations, leveraging images, rich text, and dashboard widgets. Your Lightning dashboard charts are enhanced to make them more informative and visually appealing. You’ll be able to clearly explain metrics and KPIs and provide descriptive text within tables to convey insights for better decision-making. Your dashboards can be personalised with company logos, branding elements, and embedded images. Further enrich your data exploration experience using section titles, narrative text, and animated GIFs. In the Unlimited Edition, take advantage of up to 25 widgets per dashboard, including 20 charts and tables, two images, and 25 rich text widgets. Previously, the limit was up to 20 widgets.
3. Enhanced Data Analysis with More Dashboard Filters
You no longer must duplicate dashboards for different teams and business units with the latest enhancements in filtering options. The latest upgrade offers five filters on your Lightning dashboards to enhance your data analysis, allowing you to precisely refine and target your insights. Previously limited to only three filters, this increased limit promotes efficiency and streamlines your dashboard management.
In conclusion
The Salesforce Summer Release 2023 brings a multitude of features and enhancements, providing a significant boost to your business operations. Here at Dogma, we are dedicated to helping you harness the full potential of these upgrades and support fluid digital transformations. Discover how you can leverage these enhancements to unlock your business’s true potential.
Upgrade your business with Salesforce Summer Release now.
