Highlights of the Salesforce Winter ’22 Release Notes

Every year, Salesforce brings out three big releases that set the roadmap for companies that use its many services. A Salesforce release is packed with numerous new features and updates that help companies elevate their user experience and drive sales. As Salesforce admins, it is great to have release strategies that can help you plan ahead and make the most of the new functionalities.

Salesforce has always been synonymous with innovation and change. This year low-code, AI and RPA are the biggest buzzwords. The new Salesforce Winter ’22 release notes reveal tools that will explore these game changing technologies, helping a company become AI-first and more predictive about their customers. 

Here is the hotly anticipated list of Salesforce Winter ’22 release features!

Einstein Conversation Insights and Einstein Search

The Salesforce Winter ’22 release features enhancements to the Einstein Conversation Insights. You can now match conversation data from phone and video chats to the corresponding opportunities. This allows you to get an all-round view of the deal. When you glean keywords from these calls, you can add filters based on specific users, teams, and data such as call date and record type.

With the Einstein Conversation Dashboard’s new features and incredible new insights, you can separate sales calls from service calls and review the stats from your calls and match them to prospective opportunities. A great new update is that Einstein Conversation Insights gives you insights for calls made from Amazon Connect or Partner Telephony, supported by Service Cloud Voice.  

All features of Einstein Search are now available by default and at no extra cost. You can drive personalized results using the new updates of Einstein Search, mining a user’s activity to get relevant data. Using natural language search, you can filter keywords with an eye on driving specific outcomes. The Einstein Search enables you to view and control permission set licenses with more ease and functionality. It also comes with a new user interface with more calls-to-action, with users creating records directly from the search box. 

Appointment Assistant

With the Appointment Assistant and Self-Service Scheduling, customers can digitally create, manage, cancel, or reschedule appointments, all in real-time. This update allows for flexible scheduling, which truly enhances customer satisfaction, because this feature significantly reduces call volume. Agent workload comes down significantly and agents would be able to serve customers better. The Customer Satisfaction and Net Promoter Score surveys will help you get very specific feedback from your customers. These surveys are now enabled through the Service Setup Assistant and are great new features to the Appointment Assistant. 

Microsites for Lead Development

An exciting new update is the option of using Microsites. Microsites help you build web pages, landing pages, event pages, and blogs. You can drag and drop components and customize these pages with Salesforce’s Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) templates. CMS integration allows for seamless content delivery. Once you are done with Microsites, you can archive them and create dynamic sites that drive productivity and performance. You can also collect user data with Microsites and track opportunities. You can use your website to generate and track leads, all this without the burden of managing a website using traditional and time-consuming ways of running them.  

Salesforce Flow

One of the most anticipated updates in the Winter ’22 release is the Salesforce Flow enhancement. Salesforce Flow is an application that we use to automate and simplify complex business processes.

Here are some of the many new Salesforce Flow features listed in the Winter ’22 release.   

• The Flow Builder helps you automate all processes.
• You can use the enhancements to the Salesforce Optimizer app in order to adjust to Flow Builder.
• Instead of developing a separate component to edit footer labels, you can now edit Button Labels in the Flow Screen Footer, although this feature is in the Beta stage.
• Use the Salesforce Optimizer app to transition out of Workflow, deleting redundant and inactive workflows and improving Flow Builder implementation.
• Another release update for Salesforce Flow is the Use Process Builder, which you can use to examine original record values. The previous version posed problems with evolution criteria, but the updates resolves these issues. 
• Instead of conducting a Scheduled Path only for a restricted number of hours or days, you can use several iterations. This helps you avoid exceeding a per-transaction Apex limit or Apex governor restrictions.
• Another feature still in Beta mode is the new Go-To connection to connect more elements in the Auto-Layout Canvas.  
• Updates to Salesforce Flow make it easier for admins to customize screen flows, and they do not have to create new flows from a template. 

Service Cloud Updates

Service Cloud is one of the most highly-rated customer service software solutions, bringing cutting-edge improvements to B2C companies looking at elevating their customer experiences and support.

Service Cloud is all about AI-powered automation tools and features, aimed to predict and resolve users’ problems and fulfill their needs. Here are some of the features and updates of Service Cloud.

Customer Service Incident Management: You can use this feature to diagnose, track, and ensure that there are no service setbacks. You can also use it to get complete insight into customer data. This in turn has many tools. In particular, you can use Occurrence Management to fine-tune agent activities and reduce downtime significantly. 

Einstein Bots: Create an intelligent bot in a short time with just a few clicks! Everything is provided to you – templates, dialogues, workflows, sales cases. The Beta feature here is to program your bot to use different languages. Article Answers offers superior language support, and this really drives AI-powered data and insights at lightning speed. You can use External Services and Model Sharing to scale your bots up in the Sales Cloud platform.  

Service Cloud Voice: As mentioned above, the Service Cloud Voice enables you to link your Partner Telephony or Amazon Connect accounts to your contact centers to enable a single sign-on. 

Visual Remote Assistant: Use this to schedule virtual appointments between agents and clients. This feature cuts down on expenses, ensures security, and increases productivity.

Sales Cloud Updates

The Winter ’22 release notes come with incredible new features to Sales Cloud. Here are the key updates:

Einstein Deal Insights: Use AI to its maximum capacity by implementing Einstein Deal Insights in order to check which sales deals are likely to close in a particular timeframe. Use predictive analyses and data to estimate sales, understand pipelines, and plan campaigns. 

Territory Planning Enhancements: Plan your team based on their skill levels, seniority, in-person or remote status, and other criteria, enabling teams to work together seamlessly. 

Variant Testing: As the name suggests, Variant Testing helps you analyze and test email templates and call scripts, helping you to use the ones designed for better success.   

Sales Cadence Enhancements: Make real-time adjustments and updates to your Live Sales Cadences, optimizing your sales cycles, boosting efficiency, and delivering results.  

Updates to Salesforce Nonprofit

The Salesforce Winter ’22 release notes have some exciting new updates that will interest nonprofits and grantmakers, enabling some of the unique requirements that they might have. Here are some of the best new Winter’ 22 Nonprofit Release features.

Marketing Cloud for Nonprofits (MCNGO): An update on the Marketing Cloud Pro edition, Marketing Cloud for Nonprofits helps you use CRM data to create email campaigns, customizing these email campaigns to suit different donors. You can use MCNGO to increase donor engagement. Many of the functionalities are the same, which makes it easier to transition to this update.

Synchronized Data Source: You can synchronize data from both Salesforce and Marketing Cloud by creating a Synchronized Data Source. This automatically carries your Salesforce data into Marketing Cloud. Access relevant and up-to-date donor information by updating Contact data to Marketing Cloud. 

New Features added to Elevate: Salesforce’s Elevate enhancements will help you get the best out of your donation forms, helping you to increase the number of conversions by optimizing the donation forms. Features like NPSP Data Importer can be used with Elevate to process data stored in Elevate. 

Grant Management Enhancements: This is useful to streamline and unify the grant application evaluation system by enabling Grant Management Enhancements.   

Other Updates

There are so many updates to Salesforce as listed in its Winter ’22 Release Notes. If you want to scale up, Salesforce Functions helps you increase your business bandwidth by improving upon your workflows. It also helps you raise productivity by using your data to the fullest, integrating Function as a Service (FaaS) applications with your company. You can also control what you want your users to see by optimizing the search results. 

The features that are listed as ‘Beta’ in the Winter ’22 Salesforce Release are still being tested publicly, and they may not be given much support in terms of their features. 

From automatically tuning your dashboards to your business goals and boosting Salesforce Flow capabilities to Multi-Factor Authentication to ensure data protection, there are many excellent updates listed in the Salesforce Winter ’22 Release Features that you must examine in order to make the best use of its remarkable tools and to prepare for the actual release.