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Tip of the Week – Simplifying the Salesforce Spring ’18 Release

Tip of the Week – Simplifying the Salesforce Spring ’18 Release

Salesforce Spring 18

Spring is here! (For Salesforce)

The Spring 18 release of Salesforce is fully live! Take a look at the release notes and you will quickly see that there are a TON of updates and additions. So, to simplify things, we put together a short list of our favorite updates and upgrades. Having narrowed things down to 15 features of the Spring release, we will be cover these highlights in a three part series (one a week). Each week we will take a bit of time to go over each highlight, what they are and why you would want to know about them. So without further ado, the first part of our Spring ‘18 Highlights:

Custom Themes / Style Customizations (myLightning) 

This one has to be the most prominent (and long anticipated) changes for Salesforce Lightning. myLightning finally allows users the ability to significantly customize the look and feel of Lightning! Create custom themes and consistently brand your Salesforce content.

  • Theme and Design Styling – Brand image, colors, page background images and more. All of these features are designed to be built with a few simple clicks, not code, allowing you to get your new look interface off the ground quick. If you want something new, but don’t want to take the time to customize, Salesforce has also pre-loaded a number of stock themes to choose from.
  • Dynamic Pages – Dynamic Pages do exactly what the name says, they change depending on the user that is looking at them. Through the Lightning App Builder, you can now set filters and logic that will add or subtract any page components, such as notes, alerts and more. Create a curated experience for each page and each user.
  • Lightning Flow – Visualforce flows have been a bread and butter staple of Salesforce for some time. The new Lightning Flow allows admins to create similarly guided, visual processes for users, but now it can be done with Lightning Components. These flows can be added to apps, records and more.
  • Lightning Bolt – The Lightning Bolt feature, which are out-of-the-box solutions that contain small collections of focused components, logics and practices, was introduced last year. As part of the Spring 18 release, Salesforce is continuing to encourage the use and development of these Bolt solutions. Read more about Bolts here

Macros 

This is a big time productivity enhancement. Macros can now be used on just about any custom or standard object in Salesforce. It may take a few minutes to set up, but once you do, you can save yourself a lot of time with those annoying, everyday processes. Set up your Macros to transform your complex processes to a single click or keystroke. An overview of the Macro updates is below:

  • Macros now work on more objects than ever before. Almost any standard object or custom object.
  • Text fields can now hold up to 4,000 characters. A significant increase from the previous 1,000.
  • Macros and emails now work together. Use either Lightning or Classic email templates
  • Quick text can now be used to make Macros more efficient.

Einstein Opportunity Scoring

Artificial Intelligence is simply something that isn’t going away. Salesforce’s Einstein has been around for a little bit and is getting better all the time. See our Into to Einstein post here. For those that can take advantage, integrating AI into their Sales process makes closing deals faster and smarter.Salesforce Spring 18 Einstein

The Opportunity Scoring feature is a fantastic enhancement to Einstein. Your team now has a visual indicator of their best deal opportunities, displayed in full view on the opportunity and opportunity lists. What’s more, Opportunity Scoring is easy to set up and is now available for both Lightning and Salesforce Classic.

Lightning Knowledge Enhancements

Lightning Knowledge now has a number of additional features that were previously only available in Classic:

  • Insert Articles into Case Emails – Agents can now insert knowledge articles directly into case emails. This is a quick and easy way to answer customer questions and provide quality solutions. Best of all, it is a big efficiency enhancement for Knowledge Agents.
  • Draft Approvals – A simple but important carryover from Classic, Knowledge article authors can create drafts and submit them for approval. Custom approval processes can be easily created by admins, or even create auto-approval conditions. A great way to ensure a thorough and accurate Knowledge Base.
  • Reassign article drafts – Along with being able to create drafts is the added ability to reassign them. Whatever the reason, new hire, left the company or to lighten a workload, articles marked as draft can be reassigned instead in order to get them finished.
  • Knowledge Access for Live Agents – Another great addition for Knowledge Agents: they can now access knowledge base articles while chatting live with customers. A big time enhancement for customer support!
  • Translation File Improvements – It is now possible to directly import translated files into draft translation records. Translated files are then added to Files and displayed in the Related List of the Knowledge Article.

New to Salesforce Knowledge? Click here for a quick guide

Reply and Forward Emails 

A simple but very important addition for customer support. Lightning now enables users to forward emails in the Case Feed. Because let’s be honest email forwarding is really a lot easier than cut and paste. To round out the email type features, Salesforce has added Reply, Reply All and Forward buttons to the Case Feed, Email Message record home, and the Case Email Related List. These features will be displayed on a docked email composer, that lives outside of the Case Feed

That about does it for the first installment of our Salesforce Spring ‘18 highlights.  

See you here next week for part 2 of 3!

 

-Ryan and the CMB Team