The Best of what Salesforce Spring’20 has to offer

It’s a new decade and that calls for innovations that are game-changing. Salesforce Spring 20 comes with extended innovations that deliver on the Customer 360 promise, enabling users to connect with customers in new ways. Let’s take a look at the key changes and upgrades.

Sales Cloud

•  Email enhancements – Like Service Cloud users, Sales Cloud users can now save emails as a draft. Emails can also be scheduled to be sent later. Users can view all their scheduled email and adjust them as need be. Those who use mass email functionality can save time while building List Emails by using Account data as a filter criterion to shorten the list.
  
  The improved email relay functionality allows users to initiate multiple email relays and decide what emails should use via the company’s own email relay, thus not relying on Salesforce’s relay. All this can be set up without the help of customer support.
  
  The Activity Timeline component now has Email Threading that groups email conversations into single threads. With just a click, users can expand the thread to display the whole conversation in a single place.

• Einstein features – The most exciting aspect of the Spring 20 release is the availability of Einstein Opportunity Scoring for free, for all Sales Cloud users. Einstein Opportunity Scoring is a great tool to check the opportunity score of a lead against that of a sales rep’s, especially in situations when you have a poor source and yet your sales rep has given it a high forecast. This is a must-add to all Sales Cloud orgs.
  
  Another cool Einstein feature is the Voice Assistant. It is available in beta with Spring 20 via the Salesforce app. Voice Assistant allows users to make updates to Salesforce by voice, such as logging events, creating a contact, updating opportunity, etc. These voice skills enable users to build custom skills tailored to their most common tasks, generating more high-quality Salesforce data for informed decision making.
  
  Spring 20 offers Prediction Builder for free, allowing users to build up to ten different prediction models and have one active model without purchasing additional licenses. It’s a great opportunity, especially for advanced admins, who can utilize the AI and upgrade their instance significantly.

• Report enhancements – A couple of handy report building beta features come into full GA in Spring 20; Field to Field filters and Count Unique Values features, for instance. In addition, users can attach a spreadsheet to their report subscriptions that includes a formatted spreadsheet with all of the report details in the email sent to the subscribers of a report. Another feature is the ability to turn off the Report Preview while editing reports, which helps speed up the process of report building.

• Search enhancements – Searching for Opportunities and Contacts has become simpler with this enhancement. A search will automatically display the instant results and recent items from the Account they belong to. Reps can also add filters to their search terms in the conversational search feature, making it a whole lot smarter.

• Cloning related records – With Spring 20, when a user duplicates a record, he can select whether he also wants to make copies of related records. Admins must add this option to the page layouts they want it on.

• Assigning activity to a Queue – Users can now assign activities to Queues instead of assigning it to an individual. It allows agents to share their assignments easily. All they have to do is set tasks to their shared queues. Different reps can select tasks from the queue’s list view.

• Searching through Opportunity Products – If reps have a number of items in the product catalogs, it becomes difficult to find a specific product. Spring 20 has made searching for specific products easier; they can use filters to find exact products, which they want to add to opportunities. With this feature, reps don’t have to scroll through long list of products, saving them precious time.

• Inline Editing for Forecasting – A handy time-saver feature is the inline editing feature on the forecast page. This enables users to edit multiple Opportunities at once without having to leave the page. There are some enhancements for Territories users too, where they can forecast quantities and schedule date by Territory.

• Enhancements in Custom Buttons / Links – A new function enables creation of custom buttons and links that pass default field values to a new record. This function basically lets users start a new record with automatic defaults, and even add logic to it, among other values. This new feature, however, does not work within a custom field formula.

• Testing Lightning features with Chrome – A fun way to try out different UI/UX enhancements to Lightning is to do it with a Lightning extension app, which is limited to Chrome. But it’s great to experiment all that’s new.

• More global news on Lightning – With Spring 20, Lightning News delivers news articles from Japan, Germany, India, Netherlands, France, and Brazil. This helps with reports for international accounts.

• Advanced Currency Management – Users can now access and manage the dated exchange rates via the Advanced Currency Management within Lightning.

• Recycling Bin Updates – Updates include the ability to undelete Reports and Dashboards; and delete the entire Org’s bin with one click.

Read More: Why Salesforce Sales Cloud is the leader of CRM solutions

Service Cloud

• Case merge enhancement – Case merge is now GA in Spring 20. It allows users to merge three Cases to create a singlular master Case, and juxtapose the records for comparison. The enhancement coming with the new release is the option to either delete the merged non-master Cases or soft-delete them. The merged cases are also appended with “[Merged]” in the front of the subject so that users can identify them. This solves issues of duplicates. It also eliminates confusions with case numbers, and enables reps to identify the original case and work on them promptly.

• Messaging enhancements – Spring 20 has brought in many useful messaging enhancements. A beta feature that goes GA this spring is support for Whatsapp (pretty popular outside the US), which allows agents to have conversations with customers over this messaging app. The great news is that Einstein works in Whatsapp as well.
  
  Lightning now supports Short Codes in the US that allows users to send high-volume promotional messages, as well as one-time alerts with short codes. If customers reply to these messages, the new feature allows agents to get into conversational chats with them.
  
  The Start Conversation button enables agents to start an outbound messaging conversation, allowing them to update customers on the status of their cases. The Start Conversation button is now available on the Person Account, Case, Lead, and Opportunity record detail pages.
  
  A great new enhancement is one that provides flexibility in managing customer’s consent on different channels, like messaging and email, as each has its own set of laws. Spring 20 offers options that help agents to guide customers through the consent process.

• List View Case Hover – A welcome time-saving enhancement for agents who work out of list views is a slick hover that provides a compact view of the Case without clicking it. While viewing key details, agents can also edit or delete the Case.

• Einstein Article Recommendations – This new addition uses data from past cases to identify Knowledge articles, which can help agents respond to customer inquiries. When agents have access to articles that helped previous reps solve similar cases, it saves their time, and also leads to productivity improvements.

Read More: How Einstein-powered Salesforce Service Cloud enables you to delight the customer

• Knowledge improvements – There are many new features here. When users send Articles via email, they can exclude related files within the Article and field labels. Agents can also share links to Articles within Chat and Messaging, instead of replicating the content from the Article.
  
  Knowledge Managers also have the ability to compare Articles and see the changes, with an easy side-by-side comparison with highlights. In addition, Data Category limits have been increased to 50 from the earlier 25.

• Web Chat enhancements – For customers who use screen readers, Chat will focus only on the embedded chat, while removing the web page. The web page will return only after that chat window is closed. This improves the reading experience of the customer.
  
  Agents can set the language of the chat window, ensuring that the user’s default browser settings do not change the chat language.
  
  The Web Chat interface can now be extended to leverage Lightning Web components. Users can add their own pre-chat and minimized state components.

• Salesforce Survey Enhancements – Agents can now personalize questions based on answers received for earlier questions. The answers can also be used to determine what the next question or page will be. There are useful features that can make surveys more dynamic.
  
  There are a bunch of UI improvements too, such as a new auto-progress option, ability to add flash and images to elements like pages, questions, etc., option of adding color to Net Promoter Score question, among others.

Einstein Bots

• Model Management Dashboard – Model Management gets an upgraded Dashboard that displays recommendations to better model quality, which leads to improved intent training, and thereby enhanced bot performance.

• Conditional Messaging is a great feature that improves bot conversations with customers. Bots get the capability to respond intelligently and handle nuanced discussion. These chatbots come with built-in logic to send customized messages based on conversation, hence delivering personalized experiences to customers.

• Granular Conversation Logs – The conversation logs are more granular in Spring 20, giving admins deeper understanding of where bots need improvement. The entire dialog logs are visible to admins, displaying both customer inputs and bot action, so that they can see every movement of the bots.

• Conversation Repair – With Conversation Repair, you will be able to capture formatted data, like email and phone, more intelligently, and suggest corrections when there is a formatting error. If the customer needs further assistance, the bot will be able to route the customer to an agent.

• Smart Transfers for SMS – In the previous release, bots could check the availability of an agent before transferring a conversation on Chat to an agent. With Spring 20, this functionality has been extended to the SMS messaging channel, providing a seamless multi-channel experience between bots and customers.

• Chatbot Typing Indicator – This is a feature added to reassure customers, while chatting with a bot. Three dots that mimic messaging apps signify that the bot is drafting a message, reassuring the customer that the bot is actively processing their request.

• Einstein Case Classifications –  This new feature improves the quality of predicted fields for agents. It refines data set with predictive models for each business segment. It enables training of models with the best data, and then facilitates managing up to five models with new setup and model management.

Communities

• Report Builder – This new feature allows Community users to create, edit, delete and run their own reports.

• Guest User lockdowns – This is a critical update as many Guest User capabilities are being locked down for security reasons. Primarily, going forward, Guest Users will only be able to View or Create, and not Edit or Delete. Some permissions are also being removed, like View All User, View Topics, etc.

• ExperienceBundle – A great new way to deploy Communities that allows bundling of everything into a single deployment. This is a potential time-saver, but suitable only for developers or advanced admins who are comfortable with code.

• Expanded Audiences – Total number of audience one can create is now 1500, facilitating more granular audience groups for the Community.

• Lightning Locker Off/On Toggle – Spring 20 allows users to turn the Lightning Locker toggle off or on, based on the level of security they need.

• Account & Opportunity Team Related Lists – The new release has given Community the ability to customize Account and Opportunity team objects. Now Community users can see all the changes made to objects.

• No self-registration to use standard profiles – Spring 20 is deactivating the ability for self-registration to use standard profiles to encourage best practice of using a custom profile. However, users can override this, though it’s Salesforce’s way of passing the responsibility on to the user to make the right choice.

Others

• The Field Service mobile app gets a cool offline priming interface. It gives field workers the confidence that their information is accessible. The UI shows the priming progress and allows you to start a full sync explicitly.
• Field Service Lightning comes with enhanced optimization that allows for smarter optimization of schedules, thanks to a wide range of key metrics.
• Admins can create shifts on ad hoc basis, outside of standard regular scheduling.
• Quip Associated Documents Lightning component enables users to view Quip documents that are related to the records they are on.
• Other Quip related upgrades like Dynamic Live Apps, Process Builder Actions, and Insights Dashboard.  

There are so many terrific upgrades, and perhaps some overwhelming changes in the Spring 20 release, that one blog cannot cover it all. Talk to our Salesforce experts at services@suyati.com if you have specific questions regarding the new release, or want us to help you with your Salesforce projects.

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