Salesforce enhances the platform three times a year and these releases are often packed with great new features. Staying on top of the impending changes coming to a Salesforce instance is an important function of Salesforce Administrators. Salesforce has already begun to roll out the Spring ‘20 features so let’s dive into a few of the generally available features that have impacts across all orgs.
Lightning is officially turned on for all.
If you’re still using Salesforce’s Classic UI, the subtle nudge to switch to Lightning from Salesforce is over. One of the biggest benefits of being on Lightning is the continued support and enhancement. You can hear the clock ticking louder on when Classic will be fully deprecated. Additionally, Salesforce is focusing roll out of new features for Lightning, which may be beneficial for end-users.
To support the transition, they’ve introduced the Lightning Experience Transition Assistant. Admins not on Lightning should spin up a new sandbox and run through the Lightning transition assistant to get ahead of any potential problems and begin to plan a Lightning roll out for your organization.
In App Guidance Prompts
As with any change, there will be users lost in the mix. One of the loudest concerns we hear with any hesitation to Lightning transition is user-training and Salesforce has provided another tool to support that. With In App Guidance Prompts Admins can configure helpful messages to appear on record pages throughout Salesforce to support users as they are working within their processes. These messages can be in the form of text, images, video, and even include external links.
Search Enhancements
In today’s “Google it” world, the search bar is the most used component within Salesforce. As a Consultant, I’m always excited to see enhancements in this area because it directly aids users in finding the right records to interact with. In this release, there are a few updates for Search including newly supported objects for searching and the ability to see previews of search results. Some of these features are Beta though, so expect a few hiccups here and there.
Survey Enhancements
Salesforce Surveys is a native, simple way of collecting feedback from external or internal stakeholders. We see many of our Service Cloud customers utilizing this tool for their customer satisfaction surveys. Given that this is a somewhat newer solution there are many enhancements in this release that should push this solution ahead in the available alternative solutions.
A couple of these new features include inserting responses from a previous question and the ability to create question-driven paths. The latter should really help minimize the number of questions a survey-taker sees to only relevant questions and will support the growth of survey submissions.
Ok, we’ve covered some overall platform features that Salesforce is delivering for the Spring 2020 release. This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface though. Even though your org may have already migrated to the new edition, it’s not too late to read the release notes and begin to utilize the many features/enhancements that have (or will become) available to you.
Don’t forget, this is release 1 of 3 for the year. Keep an eye on our blogs for reviews of each upcoming release.
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