Salesforce Summer'21 Release highlights you will love
10 min
Salesforce has always been an innovative company and this summer it’s delivering on its promise of innovation once again. They have something new to offer for almost everyone in the industry: Sales, Services, Marketing and Loyalty Management, Commerce and Experience Cloud, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Goods, Media, Energy & Utilities, Public Sector, and Sustainability and More. It would be difficult to state them all in this article, but I’ll try to capture the most prominent updates.
1. So shall we start with Sharing (Records access)?
Record Access Reasons in Lightning Experience
Salesforce has always been considerate to its users. They have proved this yet again by providing Record Access Reason in Lighting Experience too. Earlier, it was just available in Classic, and the user had to keep shuffling back and forth between UI’s. With this feature, you can easily check why any user has access to a record. We all know it can sometimes be a little confusing to check the reason for the access as it could be anything related to records sharing in Salesforce like role, sharing rule, OWD etc. With the Record Sharing Hierarchy in Lightning Experience, you can now understand why a user has the access they do and which user has access to a specific record.
Sneak Peek into Restriction Rules to control access to Sensitive Data(beta)
You must have heard about sharing rules, but: Do Restriction Rules ring a bell?
Privacy is a prime factor in some of the conditions and Salesforce has introduced Restriction Rules in this release. Using sharing rules, we can easily extend the records access while also quickly restricting record access. You can create and control restriction rules via the Tooling and Metadata APIs. Prior to this, the user with access to a parent record -like an account- could see related records (like contracts, tasks, events, etc) as well, even if the default for OWD is set to Private.
With Restriction Rules coming into action, one can set up a truly private access for these records, limiting your users to strictly access records that are necessary to complete their tasks. This feature is currently in Beta.
2. Now let’s have a glance at Sales updates
- Seamless Pipeline Inspection:
- A sales pipeline is a composite picture that assesses the health of opportunities by combining separate clients into a unified sales funnel. The brand new graphical representation will give new dimensions to managers and reps to analyze their funnel in a better way, allowing them to focus on dominant customers. This new centralized view will help users recognize key opportunities leading to better outcomes.
- The following metrics are frequently used to assess pipeline health in Salesforce: closed date changes, stages of important opportunities, and its related forecast categories, an amount which will reflect revenue. With this new feature, they can all be tracked in one consolidated view. This view can give a clear idea of when the stage was changed or if there were any changes made in the closing date.
- Without leaving the opportunity page, you may rapidly identify and discover interesting deals.
- Sales Managers and Sales Reps won’t have to spend time on all opportunities and focus on closing relevant and important ones, as it will help them predict and close more deals, as well as more accurately and easily forecast their revenue.
- Users must have the pipeline inspection permission set to use this feature.
- Thrilling Einstein Lead Scoring Enhancements:
- You will be delighted to know that this release has introduced artificial intelligence to better score your leads from different groups and in different patterns. Scopes generated by this will definitely be more practical and beneficial, as we know that each lead has a notably different conversion pattern. With a few clicks, you just need to segregate your leads into different segments based on their fields. Einstein will take it from there, calculating more precise scores based on their patterns. For example, you can evaluate leads from events, (exhibitions like Dreamforce), and different campaigns separately so Einstein can figure out their individual conversion trends and give them better scores.
3. Moving on, let’s see what special features Summer ’21 has for the Public Sector
Relief from Manual data entry, Capture Application Data Automatically Using Mapping
In this world of digitalization; time-consuming and error-prone manual data entry needs to be reduced to the absolute minimum. This feature addresses this issue. Using Intelligent Form Reader’s optical character recognition (OCR) technology, the system can retrieve information from the documents uploaded by a constituent. Mapping can be done for the selected fields. Users just need to define the form type to be scanned and the object that will store this information. Different mappings can be created for different types of scanned documents. It will be easy for the intake officer to modify and verify an application record once the mapped document has been uploaded.
The screenshot below shows an example of a mapping of a manually uploaded application form and how the form reader extracts data.
This feature applies to Lightning Experience in Developer, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions where Public Sector Solutions are enabled.
4. Digging into Reports and Dashboards
Explore Inline Editing on Fields from the Report Run Page (Beta)
In this fast-paced world, speed is the name of the game. The new release features Inline Editing, which enables updating certain types of fields (with the pencil icon) while hovering on the Report Run Page, without going to the actual record page. Once changes are saved, the report will rerun automatically. It’s worth mentioning that this feature is only available in Lightning Experience and is in Beta currently. To know which fields are not editable, kindly refer to the Salesforce release notes.
5. Let’s peep into some interesting Commerce Cloud latest features
Einstein Search for B2B Commerce: Salesforce has always aimed for its users to reach new heights in their business. They have done it once again by introducing new features in Summer ’21 B2B Commerce.
- New features include:
- Powerful Search Engine: Features like misspelling correction, text suggesting, auto-complete from previous searches, and typo tolerance (for up to 3 letters) has been added. Einstein Search Suggestion and Grouping Search Results will be generally available. Redirecting buyers to no search page is also available. If you like to skip the redirect, a no-results experience can be created right on the Search Results page.
- A pilot has been launched for promotions. Users can create and display any discount (like a percentage off) to the customers they want related to their products.
- Increased Object Limits: Storefronts can now have up to 1 million products listed and 500 thousand Buyer Accounts.
- Product Quantity Rules: These are accessible so that users can customize and control quantity rules such as minimum, maximum and increments at the product level. For more information visit: What’s new in Ecommerce Experience Cloud Summer 21
6. How to forget about Salesforce Flows
Unbelievable Flow in Salesforce: I think marvelous would be the right word to describe what Salesforce has launched this summer in this category.
- Let’s have a closer look.
- Multicolumn Screen in Flow Builder: Making a multicolumn screen has never been more accessible. With just a few drags and clicks, this will enable you to segregate each flow screen into multiple partitions (vertically and horizontally) to create a visually appealing and effective layout. This layout is responsive, so for mobile phone applications, it stacks vertically. Isn’t it icing on the cake?
- Use “Is Changed” operator for Start and Decision elements: In record-triggered flows with the new “is changed” operator, you can specify conditions to examine whether any field values are modified in the current transaction. This is applicable to Start elements and Decision elements.
- ISCHANGED, ISNEW, and PRIORVALUE in Record-Triggered Flow Formulas: Except for delete records, you can use these formula functions for new and update records in record-triggered flows.
- Set Default Values for Display choices: In contrast to the previous situation where the default value could be set only for choice resources, now it will be available for any flow resource/ screen component.
- Switching Between Choice Components: It’s like a dream come true. Use the new Let Users Select Multiple Options and Component Type fields, now while on the flow screen you can choose one component and modify it to any other component.
- Place Fields automatically from Your Salesforce Objects into Flow Screens: With this new launch, when you make an effort to add a new record field to the flow screen, the field’s name, data type, help text, and existing values are automatically configured for you.
- Limiting and Sorting Date in Collection Sort element: This feature has lots of things in the bag. You can sort and limit the number of records; you can separate max and min values of collection values.
- Create Scheduled Paths in Auto-Layout: This feature works similarly to scheduled actions in Process Builder or time-dependent actions in workflow rules. Scheduled paths that can run part of a record-triggered flow after its triggering effect were added in Spring ’21.
7. Some latest interesting Service Cloud features
Wonders with Work Plan: It will make it easier than ever to manage your course of action. With a Work plan, you can set instructions step by step to be followed in a particular sequence for any given task. It will help you ensure that all procedures and actions you want the resource to complete are done the way you want them to be.
Reducing post-call handle time with Your Telephony Providers
A distinct feature that’s worth mentioning is Service Cloud Voice for Partner Telephony. The idea behind the introduction of Service Cloud Voice with Partner Telephony is to provide CRM intelligence and voice in real-time to agents handling customers on the phone without shifting back and forth from one app to another. Under one unified view, users can connect to a customer on the phone and retrieve all necesarry information from one place, shortening average handle time and ultimately delivering a better customer experience.
Right man in the right place with Omni Channel Capacity Planning
Another remarkable feature of Summer’21, will help companies attain utmost supremacy in customer service by assigning appropriate work to agents based on their skill sets across all channels like messages, phone, chat or social with Omni Channel Capacity Planning. Additionally, companies can close skill gaps by assigning MyTrailhead coaching (Training) to their agents, which they can take whenever they have idle time. This feature gives agents the freedom to update their status, view their shifts, and request breaks.
Clear Version Comparison
Everyone wants their work to be simpler yet efficient. This feature which is now generally available, will definitely benefit authors to achieve this. Using Article Version Comparison, authors/knowledge users can clearly see the differences in two versions of the same document.
8. General Enhancement of Summer’21
Your Account App
Using this, you can explore your account, like view details of your past and present contracts (expiry date, renewal date, credit card details, etc) and control your contracts, can add more licenses, and search available products within Salesforce that can enhance your business. Apart from this, there is Salesforce Help to facilitate new product information.
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