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It’s nearly that time again! We’ve all seen and heard the exciting new products and features that came out of Dreamforce. Now, it’s time to experience them in our orgs.
As always, Salesforce releases come with much detailed documentation, videos, and guides on critical updates, which is why we did our homework and distilled the release notes all into this helpful guide. Whether you are a Salesforce admin, a developer, a Sales or Service user, or even in Operations, you are going to love everything that we’ve compiled.
User Experience Enhancement Highlights (Lightning vs. Classic in Salesforce Release Notes)
Salesforce Lightning has been around for five years. And wow, has it changed! Many of us who began as non-believers have turned into disciples today. Sales and Service love its modern interface built for productivity. Developers and administrators are building more apps and complex configurations, thanks to more effective app developments, integrations, and smooth workflows such as process builder.
Read more about how to transition to lightning here
Salesforce Is Moving More and More Customers to the Lightning Experience
Salesforce Lightning is the future of the product, and Salesforce is nudging companies in that direction. Over the past couple of releases, Salesforce has been working to win administrators over by hiding the option to switch back to Salesforce Classic and keep them on Lightning Experience.
In fact, on January 7th, 2020, Salesforce Lightning was auto-activated with a critical update for all organizations that hadn’t transitioned from Classic yet. Users saw Lightning Experience when they logged on, meaning they would have to manually switch back to Classic on a weekly basis.
What if I Am Still on Classic and Thinking of Making the Change to the Lightning Experience?
The good news is that you have a few options.
The Salesforce spring release has a Lightning Experience Transition Readiness Check. You can run a quick evaluation to ensure you’ll have a smooth transition to Lightning. This is a great upgrade, as previous Salesforce readiness checks sent evaluation reports to a designated administrator via email.
With the Spring 2020 release, the readiness check makes this report available in your Salesforce files. Once the readiness check test is complete, a report is sent via email or can be accessed from the same file repository, detailing any changes to be made before the transition.
Or you can try our guides as well.
Some More of Our Favorite Lightning Experience Tune-Ups
- Lightning Experience Configuration Converter to enable administrators and users to automate or accelerate tasks
- Dark Mode to ease eye strain and for night usage
- The ability to turn components on or off on your home and records screens to customize your experience to the role and usability needs
What Should Sales Get Excited About With the Salesforce Spring ’20 Release?
When it comes to releases that don’t require purchasing an additional add-on, there is one major functionality improvement that is really cool.
Task-Queue Assignment lets sales reps work with cross-functional teams to manage opportunities. Users can assign tasks to a queue where members can help tackle the sales team’s workload that requires additional expertise. (Link to Release Notes)
Some Features We Are Most Excited About
- Unauthenticated Scheduling allows you to embed Lightning Scheduler onto any website to set up a meeting without authenticating. Imagine new prospects that are self-serving themselves to set up appointments.
- Trailhead GO puts Trailhead in your reps’ pocket. Trailhead is available to every Salesforce user and teaches them how to use Salesforce to the best of its ability. Deploy Trailhead GO so reps can learn Salesforce on the GO! Here are the FAQ.
What Should Service Get Excited About With the Salesforce Spring ’20 Release?
Multichannel contact centers have evolved a long way from the call centers of years ago. Customers want to connect to companies on their own terms. Spring ’20 really raised the bar on the number of ways customer or field service agents can communicate with customers, diagnose issues, and document activities.
- Omni-Channel Improvements With Integration Into WhatsApp: When it comes to support, customers want to connect with companies from anywhere. Salesforce already offers support integrations into phone, Facebook Messenger, website live chat, and email, but now it is integrating with WhatsApp. (Link to Release Notes)
- Case Merge: If you’ve ever worked in Support before, you will know that cases (like leads and accounts) can fill up with duplicates. With the Spring ’20 Release, service agents can merge related cases to reduce clutter. In addition, developers can create macros to alert agents about escalations and spikes in cases about the same issue. (Link to Release Notes)
- Einstein Article Recommendations: This gives service reps the power of AI and Einstein to recommend knowledgebase articles based on data from a particular case. (Link to Release Notes)
Whether your service agents are working in a contact center, in customer homes, or businesses, the latest Spring ’20 enhancements level the playing field for new and experienced reps.
Introducing Sustainability Cloud
You may have heard recently about major sustainability commitments by corporate giants like Microsoft and BlackRock. Not only that, environmental regulations have increased in response to climate change, with many companies increasingly being audited for their carbon emissions. Companies that can’t provide evidence they are meeting their pollution targets often need to buy carbon credits.
Co-CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, has always been a huge proponent of sustainability and reducing carbon footprint. Now, with Sustainability Cloud, he is giving companies the tools and Salesforce environment to easily track their carbon output. Here is a quote from the Release Notes:
Gain critical insights about your carbon footprint. Using global emission factors to calculate greenhouse gas emissions, Sustainability Cloud helps you collect, categorize, and analyze energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions data throughout your organization’s business activities.
Here are some of the major highlights of the new Sustainability Cloud:
- A greenhouse emissions calculator
- Carbon footprint data capture
- Data from some of the world’s foremost environmental agencies including the EPA, EIA, BEIS, and the GHG
Take a look at the Release Notes to learn more.
Salesforce Spring ’20 Release Notes Summary
We hope you have enjoyed our list of some of our favorite Spring ’20 release functionalities and enhancements. We’ve described only some of the compelling new functions included in the release. There are many other enhancements for e-commerce, marketing, the Force.com platform, industry-specific editions, and beyond.
