The annual Spring, Summer, and Winter releases enhance Salesforce’s ever-resilient CRM platform. True to form, the Summer’20 release contains a host of new features and confirms Salesforce’s long-standing reputation for continuous improvement. This summer’s updates are even more noteworthy for helping enterprises adapt to the new ways of work forced by the COVID19 pandemic.
1. Improved Views
A slew of improved views helps enterprise users become more productive.
Full Views:
The Summer’ 20 release offers two default views for record page, the incumbent ‘Grouped View’, and a new ‘Full View’. Full view is a data-dense view, offering details of related lists and placing all information on the same page. The grouped view records information across many regions and tabs, as before.
Split View:
The new split view feature spares users from navigating back and forth between the list view and record. The update displays the list view and records side-by-side, enabling users to process records faster. Users may collapse the split view panel, to increase screen real estate for the record.
Improved Kanban Views:
Kanban view offers visibility to the movement of records through a process, allowing users to manage object records with ease. The new updates enhance Kanban views with guidance tips. With this, sales reps may update key opportunity fields quicker than before. Supervisors may guide sales reps to take actions to advance the opportunity. Also, users may toss confetti and celebrate on completing a specific milestone in a path! Confetti boosts employee morale and engagement in today’s remote work culture.
2. Process Enhancements
The Summer20’ release simplifies the start element and flow window. Users get more choices.
Users may select the required flow from the window with ease. The reduced number of taps to launch a flow enhances the user experience.
Users get the option to specify if the flow is to run before or after saving the record. Earlier, users could run a record triggered flow only before saving a record and make updates only to a new or updated record. Users wanting to validate or update a record automatically had to use Apex. The update removes these limitations.
Admins can run flows bypassing user permissions. For instance, they can allow guest users without direct access to create or edit records. This comes in handy to escalate a user’s privileges as they move through the process while denying such enhanced privileges outside of the flow.
In-App Guidance Builder:
The new in-app guidance builder allows admins to create reminders, prompt and walkthroughs for users. Such guidance prompts a consistent use of the system by users.
Enhanced Import Wizard for Lightning Essentials:
An enhanced import wizard makes it easy to upload customer data from spreadsheets to Lightning Essentials. The new wizard offers a guided step-by-step walkthrough, easing the process.
3. Improvement Sales Conversations
The new Summer ’20 release makes significant improvements to the Salesforce sales cloud.
AI-powered multi-touch attribution model pin-points the most effective channels and campaigns. It allows marketers to scan the customer’s journey across activities, and connect a prospect to an opportunity. The model plugs gaps and loose ends.
Telephony channels integrate with the service cloud, making voice calls part of the dynamic workspace. This furthers omni-channel capabilities. Real-time call transcripts connect workflows and next-best actions to voice conversations.
My Feed Alerts triggers responses to prospects in the right context, allowing sales reps to make contact at the right time.
Einstein Call coaching infuses conversational intelligence to sales. The new intelligent trend recognition capabilities allow sales teams to optimize customer interactions. Sales teams may create and refine strategies based on conversation trends. Post call insights give managers visibility into customer calls.
4. Interactive Emails and Chats
Salesforce becomes more interactive with the Sumer ’20 release.
The content builder enables interactive mail. Marketers may build and send in-email forms, and recipients may complete these forms without leaving their inbox. The data collected from such forms drive personalization. The content builder offers a choice of five in-email form templates.
Marketers and others can now design and embed surveys at any stage of the customer journey. They may, for instance, embed feedback surveys into the chat window, for feedback at the end of a chat session.
5. Dynamic Forms and Pages
The new Dynamic Forms allow users to create fields and page sections as individual components for the lightning app builder. Users no longer need the page layout editor to manage fields and sections on pages.
Aligning fields and sections with tabs and components reduce the load times of the page. Adjusting component visibility rules reduce the quantum of page layouts, further speeding up the page load.
The low-code Page Designer tool empowers business teams to create and manage e-commerce sites in a fast and visual way. But this tool was available only for static pages. With the latest updates, Page Designer can create and manage dynamic pages such as product landing pages and product detail pages.
6. Enhanced Customization and Personalization
The Summer ’20 release allows Salesforce users to personalize and customize their content better.
Users may:
- Override the New and Edit actions on standard and custom components, and customize the org using Lightning components.
- Target different content to different users. Users with a rich content base may use the navigation menus to point different content to different users.
- Automate and customize email notifications for opportunities that reach a threshold. The summer 20’ release extends this feature from Classic to Lightning.
The enhancements to communities allow deeper personalization.
7. Improved, Flexible Reports
The Summer ’20 release makes reports more flexible.
The improved account-based forecast reporting allows users to build composite reports. These reports allow analysing performance at a deeper level and make granular assessments. The new sales agreement reporting, for instance, offers composite reports displaying products and schedules, for sales agreements.
Embedded maps help visualize and plan store visits. The enhanced task framework enables users to create custom logic for KPIs, and define flow based on object-based tasks.
Updated visualizations make it easy to reimagine relationships. The improved visualization tool offers panoramic views of the customer and their relationships.
8. More Robust and Comprehensive Data Processing and Analytics
The summer ’20 release offers robust and comprehensive data processing and analytics capabilities.
Developers can now retrieve data from many Salesforce orgs with one query.
The new Data Lake solution processes granular, raw, and non-aggregated marketing data better. Marketers can extract and store raw data at scale, and load data for analysis and visualization easily.
Enhanced AI-powered insights delivered by Salesforce Einstein unlock several new use cases. For instance, it helps medical sales reps uncover key account, inventory, visit insights, and general trends faster. In large industries, marketers may track and analyse changes in forecasts at the account and product level.
Customer support teams leverage the enhanced intelligence on offer to improve performance. Einstein Reply Recommendations aids agents by giving AI-powered recommendations. The deep learning model looks at the previous messages to understand the context and suggests a reply. The Service Cloud Voice enhances gives supervisors insights into customer service trends.
9. Updates to Work.com
The updated workplace command center assesses an enterprises’ return-to-work readiness. The hub allows managers to check the preparedness of the facility to reopen post the pandemic. Managers may monitor employee wellness, and track training completion.
Work.com also enables shift scheduling. Employees may specify their availability through the Workplace Command Center. Workplace planners may manage shift and workplace density and shifts easily. They may communicate staggered arrival windows to follow social distancing. The emergency program management feature disseminates emergency information during crises.
10. Security Enhancements
The Summer ’20 release caters to the evolving security scenario through a slew of improved security features.
Improved event monitoring and threat detection capabilities offer greater visibility to threat events. Salesforce’s advanced machine learning algorithms detect threats in events with a higher level of accuracy than before.
Pattern-based data masking allows users to replace sensitive data in sandboxes. At times, libraries of data built into the data mask do not match an org’s custom objects and fields. Users have the option to upload specific datasets, to replace the data in sandboxes.
Salesforce Private Connect, which provides secure, private communication, extends to AWS. This allows users to send private traffic between Salesforce and AWS, without exposing the traffic to the public internet
There is a significant enhancement in two-factor authentication. Admins can enforce strong authentication for external users, through a simple checkbox.
The Summer’20 release, coming amid the COVID19 pandemic, reflect the new expectations and requirements of work. With Salesforce living up to the expectations, the latest release will entrench its position at the top of the CRM table.
