Salesforce Summer ’16 Release: Top New Features for Lightning Experience

Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69 was cool, but Benioff’s Summer of ’16 promises to be a whole lot cooler!

With the summer sun shining brightly upon us, the CRM behemoth Salesforce has come out with their Summer ’16 release. The Sandbox preview window, which began on May 6th has provided select customers an opportunity to experience the new and improved customer success platform. Over 200+ new features have been added in this release, making the platform faster and allowing businesses to customize their needs in a flash.

Let’s take a look at the top new features for Lightning experience:

Sales Cloud

With the Summer ’16 release, Salesforce has added some new and unique features to their Sales Cloud. Now sales reps can get more leads, keep deals moving along the pipeline, and get instant insights.

Lightning Voice: Native to the Lightning Experience, sales reps will now be able to click to dial and receive inbound calls, along with taking notes during the conversation and logging calls automatically to the appropriate records.Lightning CPQ: The all new product search helps reps add and find products in opportunities with ease. With a familiar and streamlined user experience, configuring quotes and proposals has become easy.

Pardot Engagement Studio: Leveraging the power of Pardot, marketers will now be able to visualize their marketing efforts and easily compose personalized campaigns for prospects.

Contacts to Multiple Accounts: This new feature will allow reps to link a single contact to multiple accounts along with letting them capture all the information about a contact without duplication.

Company Info for Leads: Data.com Clean’s new feature automatically enriches and supplements lead records with valuable company information including revenue, industry, number of employees etc.

Community Cloud

The new release promises to provide community cloud users with enhanced security and customizations, new community templates, improved search, and greater control so that users can ride the lightning with ease.

Pre-Moderation and Moderation Controls: Community managers will now be able to arm themselves against spammers and malicious members by taking advantage of moderation and approval controls.

Profile-Based Page Visibility: Admins have been granted the power to customize and personalize the user experience and limit content for different members based on specific roles, jobs, functions etc.

Global Search: Community users have been given access to configure and sort search results by discussion, articles, topics etc. Admins and managers will now be able to customize top search results to ensure that users find the most relevant content for their query.

Improved Compact Feed: The improved feed will enable users to easily find top posts with the help of a prominent label. A filter has also been added which will allow users to sort their feed by latest posts or by most recent activity.

Service Cloud

Streamlining customer service, the Summer ’16 release has a whole lot in store including time trackers, social customer service, knowledge articles, entitlement management, and so much more allowing reps to deliver a smarter and faster customer experience.

Field Service Lightning: Agents can close cases faster than before by delivering smarter and more personalized service. Field Service gives agents instant access to knowledge articles and service levels, and allows them to keep track of SLAs with the help of a Milestone Clock.Active Time Tracker: Measure performance and improve operational efficiencies with Active Time Tracker which monitors the total time an agent spends on work.

Twitter Customer Feedback & DM Prompts: Social customer service just got better with two new Twitter customer service features- Customer Surveys and Direct Messages. Now get real time updates on NPS/CSAT scores and easily switch from public conversations to DMs.

Launch Pad: All new launch pad templates – Standard Console, Branded Console, and Service Reports and Dashboards will allow you to set up Service Cloud lightning console in a jiffy. Admins will also have a safe environment to test and deploy new features.

Desk360: An out-of-the-box helpdesk for small businesses, Desk360 provides agents with all the contextual information they need to provide a stellar customer experience and allows them to view important service data by case, customer, company, and opportunity.

Analytics Cloud

This summer, make better strategic decisions and drive business by gaining actionable insights with all these amazing new features that have been added in the Analytics Cloud.

Service Wave: An out-of-the-box analytics app for service cloud customers, Service Wave enables managers to gain visibility into KPIs and deliver proactive customer service.

Wave Collaboration: Now users can collaborate and share insights from any device. Wave dashboards and reports have been integrated with Chatter. Users can also export any lens to Excel and share their explorations.

Wave App Packaging: The new release allows users to customize and deploy Wave apps in just a few clicks. ISVs also have the ability to create and sell Wave apps on the App exchange.

Wave Thematic Maps: Users will now be able to represent geographical data visually with out-of-the-box country maps. The release has also made it easier to spot trends across business metrics.

Enhanced Lightning Charts in Salesforce1: Optimized for both mobile and tablet layout, Lightning Charts in Salesforce1 will let users experience the same beautiful charts across all devices and easily explore data and gain insights.

Marketing Cloud

Marketers will now be able to deliver personalized content, optimize unique customer journeys, and realize their marketing goals this summer with the new release.

Email Studio: The all new email studio will allow users to quickly create, target, and send emails. With a new CMS integrated into the content creation process, users will now be able to create highly personalized emails and also preview and test them.Content Builder: Users can now create, edit, and manage great content and will also be able to search, sort, and manage all their content with filters, tags, and global search.

Marketing Cloud Mobile App: Marketers will now be able to run their marketing campaigns from their phone or tablet and also track performance and emails along with pausing, rescheduling, resuming, or cancelling an email send.

Marketing Cloud Command Center: Salesforce has come out with a new command center, which will not only let your company see what the social web says about your brands/products, but will also display email campaign data and social care SLAs.

Want to make the most of the latest Salesforce update?

Disclaimer: Salesforce, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Wave, Chatter, SFDC, Salesforce Communities, etc. are all trademarks of Salesforce.com Inc.