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Salesforce Summer '22 Release Highlights | Salesforce Partner Encaptechno

Salesforce Summer 22 Release Highlights | Explore What’s New!

Rabia Bajaj / salesforce, Salesforce Einstien, Salesforce New Features, Salesforce Summer 22 Release Highlights / Salesforce

The most excellent CRM cloud solution is Salesforce, but maintaining that position over time is difficult. Consistent innovation, development, and actions are needed to keep up with the right market trends. Salesforce CRM cloud has always ranged above and beyond to stand out from the competition and provide the best, whether by acquiring firms with specialized tools linked with Salesforce or by developing new automation solutions for enterprises. As a result, Salesforce releases new features and advancements and adopts user suggestions. Every year, three releases are made.

It is an opportunity for everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem to benefit from the platform’s real-time innovation. Because upgrades are sent automatically in real-time, all Salesforce clients may benefit from new features and enhancements right away. However, some features may require setting, and others may influence how your company uses the platform, so it is critical to stay informed.

Salesforce continually updates its services so that customers can take advantage of the advantages and align with them, as it is all about improvements and the addition of new technology.

Let’s discover more about the highlights of Summer Release’22 that Salesforce has created.

On May 6 and 7, the most recent release updated the new and existing sandboxes. The sandboxes of your company must have already seen the modifications, but there are too many for one person to register them at once.

Let’s review the features, improvements, and additions we have received in this update for improved usability and convenience.

1. Address Fields Customized for You

Indeed, Salesforce developed custom address fields similar to regular address fields. The beta phase of this improvement is expected to result in enhanced address data accuracy and user experience.

In Salesforce, there is no option to construct a composite Address field. Hence we must establish various areas for address-related data (Country, State, City, Street, PostalCode).

You can add and get addresses using Custom Address Field (Beta) using custom Address compound fields on Salesforce standard and custom objects.

To enable Custom Address fields, we must follow the steps listed below (Beta)

Activate the custom address field (Beta)
Establish a Custom Address field
Put the State and Country Picklists into practice (Optional if you want to use the default picklist)

2. No More Uncertainty About Appointments and Scheduling

We frequently find ourselves perplexed as to why certain service appointments are not occurring or what users and candidates might do to secure more time for appointments.

Since scheduling suggestions and appointment insights have come to your aid and given you the reasons and answers for your confusion, all of that confusion has now been put to rest.

This function is currently in preview mode.

3. OCR Simplifies Data Extraction

We all know how tough it can be to extract data from physical forms of data, such as insurance and mortgage papers, official documents, and so on; however, Einstein’s OCCR model now makes it possible to extract data extremely quickly by analyzing the document’s layout and content by scanning over its image and obtaining structured data as a result. As a result, we can swiftly convert data from custom forms into Salesforce records, such as insurance, mortgage, and healthcare forms.

The OCR model evaluates the layout and content of the document before extracting the necessary values from the user-defined fields in your custom form. This function is in beta testing.

4. Scheduler for Salesforce

Also receiving a much-needed makeover was the Salesforce Scheduler. Service Resources and Managers may now easily manage their daily activities with the help of colour-coded groupings within the Calendar, thanks to the addition of the ability to examine shift vacations, schedules and absences in a calendar view.

Customers can now book open time slots in real-time using the shared URL by sharing calendar availability, which has also been added to the release. Additionally, freshly made appointments can be immediately distributed to designated Service Resources, ensuring that only the right team members can access the information they require.

5. Picklists

Picklists now include several time-saving capabilities that will benefit users greatly. This applies to Salesforce Classics and Lightning Experience in all editions.

Manage Picklist Values in Bulk (Beta)

Increased efficiency by adding new functionality that allows you to delete, activate, deactivate, or alter many custom picklist field values at once.

Remove Inactive Picklist Values (Beta)

Users can use this bulk delete tool to remove inactive picklist values from custom picklist fields.

Inactive Picklist Values in Custom Picklist Fields

Users can now receive an email indicating which custom picklist fields have 4,000 inactive values and are eligible for bulk deletion.

6. Person Accounts Enabling

Salesforce makes it simple for clients to enable Person Accounts with a few clicks, eliminating the need to contact the support team. However, any organization that has explored Person Accounts is aware that you must contact Salesforce Support for them to enable Person Accounts in your Salesforce environment.

Organizations can now enable Person Accounts on their own using Salesforce Setup with the Summer ’22 release.

Like the prior phase, Enabling Person Accounts in your Salesforce environment cannot be reversed.

7. Using Triggered Campaign Messages, You Can Personalize Your Experiences

This upcoming Salesforce update will be handy for B2C shops and anyone with an eCommerce presence. Marketing Cloud Personalization users will be capable of triggering personalized customer experiences based on catalogue updates, cart abandonment, and other behavioural indications using new Triggered Campaign Messages.

You may now more successfully re-engage customers who couldn’t buy or be put off by the cost by setting catalogue triggers when a product is replenished, or the price is dropped.

In the event of cart abandonment, you can also set the product price range, the number of times a consumer revisits abandoned products, and the frequency of alerts they will get. Then, based on parameters such as the number of revisits, you may send a customized campaign with a personalized price, offering stepwise discounts to less engaged prospects. Salesforce’s Summer Release 2022 has undoubtedly made eCommerce marketing smarter.

8. Use the Migrate to Flow Tool to Convert Workflow Rules to Flows (GA)

Salesforce will continue to push clients to use Flow as Process Builder and Workflow Rules are phased out.

Fortunately, we are supplied with tools to make the migration process easier than simply constructing flows ourselves.

The Migrate to Flow Tool was already available in the previous edition for specific Workflow Rules, but it now supports a broader range of workflow rules. The following features will now be supported by the tool:

Equal to null
Not equal to null
Rule criteria formula

9. Integrations with Amazon are Now More Straightforward

We can now natively link the AWS data we need with Salesforce using the new Salesforce Connect adaptor for Amazon Athena. This will enable us to analyze structured data in various ways and take advantage of the faster-querying results even on massive datasets.

10. Recipes are Now Included in Salesforce

Since Salesforce has developed data and data flow recipes, the word “recipe” is no longer just used in the kitchen. With only one click, dataflows may now be converted into recipes.

The “Convert to Recipe” button enables us to work on recipes with data features like joins, sentiment recognition, and many more without altering the current dataflows.

11. Staged Data Features Facilitate Work

It isn’t easy to deal with a lot of data using CRM Analytics.

Even yet, we may significantly reduce the processing time by using staged data that precursor recipes have already generated as input nodes for later recipes. As a result, it only merges once, gathers the staging data, and then applies it to all the additional recipes the user wants to work on. At their discretion, customers may test this beta capability, which exclusively applies to CRM Analytics in Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

12. Sets of Permissions Have Now Expired

We frequently assign permission sets without remembering to modify them for the user. Perhaps temporary access is required, so we manually share, but sharing for multiple identities is time-consuming. However, permission sets now have an option of the expiry date, enabling them to be assigned even in transitory situations.

13. Salesforce Flow Test Framework for Debugging The Record

Triggered Flow is always an irritating aspect of its evolution.

You may now quickly test it to ensure that it produces the intended results. Flow Builder allows you to develop, save, and perform flow tests. Because the test evaluates whether the Flow runs as predicted, automated flow testing saves us time and enhances flow reliability.

14. Solving Cases is Now Simpler

Thanks to Einstein Search Responses, you won’t need to confront situations head-on anymore, which will now offer more accurate answers to users concerning cases.

Type the word into the global search box.

15. Existing Schemas Can Be Updated

Before, developers could not modify or update a schema using a flow. With the new features, developers can still upgrade registered schemas because any version of a registered schema that is incompatible will trigger a workflow message. Therefore, that can be taken out before turning on the upgraded work.

16. Improvement Using Slack

Thanks to this summer’s release, developers can now communicate screenshots to Slack using an invocable action. Sending a message to Slack that includes a button for the user to click and launch can create the desired Flow.

17. In the Lightning App Builder, You Can customize and Filter Related Lists

Until Summer ’22, related listings could only be changed by changing the page layout. So if you wanted to change the look of a linked list while still in the Lightning App Builder, you had to switch to the page layout. The new Dynamic Linked List – Single component in this release allows you to alter related lists in Lightning App Builder. We can customize the list’s fields and sort order, apply filters and give it a meaningful name.

18. Improved Report Type Selector

With this update, finding the optimal report type is now easy. Salesforce users may rapidly access their recently-used report types and inspect the fields and objects with the enhanced report type selection. The report type, whether standard or custom, is immediately visible at a glance. It is also possible to hide unnecessary report types, making your reporting easier to handle.

Salesforce Summer 22 Release Highlights – The Bottom Line

B2B marketers who come to Salesforce try to scale and grow strategically. These latest Salesforce Summer ’22 Release features help marketers get closer to their goals by saving them time and resources.

Contact the Salesforce Consultants at Encaptechno for assistance deploying these capabilities in your Salesforce org. We can conclude that there have been numerous improvements and new additions to the Salesforce Ecosystem in every field, be it administration, business and automation, or development, based on the highlights already discussed and the notes for the Salesforce Summer Release 2022. Numerous improvements undoubtedly save the lives of their intended users.

We can state that the Summer Release 2022 has provided everyone with many features to play around with, discover, and use.

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Salesforcesalesforce, Salesforce Einstien, Salesforce New Features, Salesforce Summer 22 Release Highlights

A Guide to Improve Sales Leadership and Salesforce Admin Skills

Rabia Bajaj / customer experience, data insights, sales management, salesforce admin, Salesforce administrator skills / Salesforce, Sales Automation, Salesforce Consultation

If you are a sales leader then your prime job is to offer your staff the information, tools, and support that is needed to close deals and improve revenue. You would also want to help your representatives develop decent professional careers in sales management. However, this is something that cannot be done alone and neither can you.

In case you have recently been promoted to the role of a Salesforce admin or if you are also looking to improve your leadership skills then there are some skills that will help you create a successful team. When you develop these skills, the sales team will be able to understand how to develop tangible customer relationships and insights.

By developing sales leadership skills, the team will be able to understand how to build strong customer relationships and close deals. Every sales leader needs to hire and retain the sales team, focus on the overall performance, learn ways to coach effectively, understand numbers, and rethink the overall approach to leadership.

Working of a Salesforce Admin

Salesforce is essentially a CRM system that enables businesses of all kinds to automate the sales process. A salesforce admin can manage the business sales and marketing process easily by monitoring leads and driving sales.

The work and job roles of a Salesforce professional are mostly multi-faceted. It includes customizing a business to optimize the overall processes and workflows used by a team. Being a Salesforce admin, you can be in charge of setting up a platform specification, managing data and enabling a team to organize and manage workload on a platform.

There are professionals who have a Salesforce certification but that is not always necessary. So many organisations offer detailed training material on unique processes for professionals to gain Salesforce admin skills.

Top Ways to Improve Sales Leadership and Salesforce Admin Skills

Top 10 Ways to Improve Sales Leadership and Salesforce Admin Skills - Infographic

If you have been thinking of becoming a Salesforce admin and wondering if you have the right skills then some of them are mentioned below.

1. Organizational Relationships

User management and validation are some of the important tasks for any Salesforce admin. In this role, you are likely to assign user profiles, set user accounts, set user validation rules, assign roles to new users, and allow for different degrees of data access so that the teams can work efficiently and access the right objects.

All organizations access user management in different ways. However, it is important to understand an organizational structure well while also knowing how teams are separated from one another. This helps in figuring out if there are teams that must have limited access to important information.

2. Data Management

Other than managing different users in a Salesforce team, you should also be able to manage data that is stored on a platform. This helps in precise sales management. Good management of data that gets saved determines how a team proceeds with future goals.

A capable Salesforce admin must be able to manage the platform for ensuring clean and accurate data storage. There should also be accurate knowledge of importing data into the Salesforce platform.

3. Translating Ideas Into Processes

Getting a detailed knowledge of the way in which business processes work is one of the advantageous Salesforce administrator skills. The platform includes many workflows needed for speeding up the sales team with their work.

Being an admin, you must know Salesforce works. However, that does not mean that your internal customers do too. Rather, they might give you ideas and tell you all that they want to be done so that you can translate the goals into a good end product. The Salesforce admin must be able to process mapping for understanding the need and creating the best solution.

Many times, you can use different methods for building an end product for the teams. If you use a process map then you can communicate effectively with the implications of a solution while pushing back to ensure that your colleagues get an end product that meets your needs.

Knowing all about the Salesforce process builder is one of the best ways to acquire one of the important Salesforce admin skills. The process builder works as in platform tool that most admins can use to create a customized workflow and process.

4. Flexible Communication

Gaining and nurturing leadership skills are very important for a Salesforce admin. It does not matter whether or not you are managing a team, you must work with integrity, solve more problems creatively and make quick decisions.

Salesforce has great capability to function as a good machine but if things go wrong, an admin must be able to solve problems and even communicate them effectively with a team. In the role of an admin, the customers are like internal users.

Many times you work with execution teams and dig into Salesforce even more. At other times though, you may also be required to explain a detailed process so that the higher management understands things better. A capable Salesforce admin should be able to communicate effectively at different levels of an organization.

5. Sales Process

Although a Salesforce admin is not so likely to do a lot of selling, it is important that you support the sales team with their work. You must have a fundamental understanding of how the sales processes function.

You should always remember that a sales team is one of the biggest customers that you can have. It is necessary that you put yourself into their role and get in the habit of creating solutions that can serve the big picture.

It is important for people to approach you and request solutions without telling you about their problems. The main problem is that many times the solutions presented by people do not make sense.

Finally, it is your task to build the best possible solution so that you can ask why a solution is being requested while understanding what must be done to achieve the results. You can also use your expertise to evaluate your options and look for the best way to solve a problem.

6. Resourcefulness

Salesforce comes with new releases of the CRM often. Hence, many times the solutions that you have used before might not work now. Understanding where to find the updated information and even holding yourself responsible for expanding your knowledge are skills that set you apart as a Salesforce admin.

Being a Salesforce admin, you will be required to answer important questions while also teaching members the steps needed for using the software. You must know which tools are available in Salesforce so that you can use them to solve different problems.

It is important to always remember that Salesforce is a big platform and you may not always have the right answers with you. However, you must know where to look for answers so that it becomes easy to follow up with the present information.

Being an active member of the Salesforce community helps with resourcefulness and various admins can also serve as experts while turning to you for advice. Hence, it is important to know things.

7. Project Organization and Management

One of the important Salesforce administrator skills is that you can organize the overall flow of a project. In fact, the overall is pretty similar to that of a project manager.

With prior knowledge of developing end-user training and building custom dashboards, you can make a versatile and useful addition to the team members. A good Salesforce admin will always have a tangible experience with important components of project organization and management.

Things such as a detailed understanding of the project charter, consistent communication with key stakeholders, planning and establishing quality controls, and communicating with other members of the execution team are important.

8. Organizational Optimization

The simple ability to effectively plan and strategize is very important for a Salesforce admin. It helps in creating optimal automation and user settings without any foresight afforded by a strategic approach.

A salesforce administrator must be able to understand potential problems, get inspired by solutions to the team management problems, and even imagine a time frame for an upcoming project.

As a skilled Salesforce admin, a proactive mindset at work as opposed to simply reacting to requests from team members can be helpful. It is possible for you to bring a lot more to your team in case you look ahead and suggest ideas rather than waiting around for a problem to get solved itself.

9. Development Mindset

Although coding experience is not an essential requirement for a Salesforce admin, understanding developer logic is one of the best skills. A good part of your job involves administering permissions.

In different words, you need to set up rules that make the job role of everyone pretty clear when it comes to operating a CRM. You should also be able to write logic and use tools including validation rules and process builders.

In addition, you must be able to think logically while understanding the possible limitations that come with software. Anytime you are able to make a change, you must understand the implications of all the changes that you make.

10. Knowing Numbers

Being a sales manager, numbers can be your new best friend. Analytics and data insights on how a business is performing can make a lot of difference. Data will improve all areas that require more attention so that you can pass advice to representatives.

In case you are a newly promoted salesforce admin or manager then it is best to think about things as a shift from sales execution to being a number-driven coach. You must look for the story behind the numbers by studying the financial reports.

Other than this, you can also try to look beyond sales-specific numbers. You must know how the marketing is performing and what it is about customer service that you should know.

Detailed knowledge of company performance all across the customer lifecycle matters. This gives you a better understanding of where sales management comes in. You can also guide your team in a better way.

Conclusion

Coming into the world of Salesforce administration is the best case if you are interested in sales and have a penchant for organizational management. This is irrespective of whether or not you have gained certification. The above-mentioned Salesforce admin skills can be helpful to find your way and use the platform easily.

You can have professionals manage your platform with the expert assistance of a Salesforce consultant like Encaptechno. The professionals can help you automate the administration process and even monitor the inboxes for transferring and syncing sales data into the Salesforce platform easily. You can start a free trial today and try it for yourself.

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Salesforce, Sales Automation, Salesforce Consultationcustomer experience, data insights, sales management, salesforce admin, Salesforce administrator skills

8 Common Salesforce Implementation Mistakes

Rabia Bajaj / salesforce consultant, salesforce consulting services, salesforce crm, Salesforce implementation mistakes, salesforce integration / Salesforce

Salesforce is one of the most effective tools that comes with the potential to revamp and clarify a business process. However, this does not mean just ending up purchasing the software because one has to implement the software correctly as well. Salesforce integration requires the support of experienced consultants.

By bringing Salesforce into your business, you can easily avoid common mistakes that otherwise cost you more time, money, and sanity. Hence, salesforce implementation must be done strategically. To make sure that you avoid the Salesforce implementation mistakes, you must take guidance at each step so that you can get a clean and accessible interface that extends across industries and companies of different sizes.

With so many companies using Salesforce, it is not amusing to know that some organizations fight constantly to achieve the results that they need in a fixed time frame. The difficulty of implementation is dependent on the company size, business needs, and industry types. Salesforce implementation is a delicate process and must be handled by someone who is an experienced Salesforce consultant.

Hiring Salesforce consulting services helps to avoid common mistakes that can happen otherwise while the Salesforce implementation goes on.

1. Not Assessing Cost of Implementation

It is not a big deal for a company to get ahead of itself when it comes to implementing new technology. Most companies commit to a solution and are excited to get going for achieving game-changing business outcomes with the new Salesforce integration.

The anticipation to have an old system changed with a new functionality adds support efficiency and accuracy that can get everyone’s hopes high. That said, a mistake that many teams make is that they experience high levels of stress when it comes to assessing the cost of a solution or functionality while breezing over the process.

The costs come in many different ways when it comes to Salesforce implementations and they include budget, time, and complexity. When organizations do not seek outside support, they lack clarity around the real costs of an implementation that can affect a project’s success.

The timelines and processes must be developed way ahead of time when the implementation takes place so that stress and unforeseen costs can be avoided. Whether they are in your budget, timeline, or project success, all costs must be avoided.

2. Not Choosing the Right Implementation Partner

Often, organizations realize that Salesforce implementation cannot be done internally. This is even when the company has been using an old version of it and wishes to install an upgrade. When a company decides to make a purchase or even add something to the Salesforce CRM, it is important that the work is done by experts for getting the desired results.

The bidding process for finding the right partner and mostly a Salesforce consulting service can often be lengthy and does not even always result in the right choice in case the details are not focused on or the sales pitch is not accepted.

Major problems can play out when it comes to Salesforce implementation. Hence choosing the wrong partner can add to the trouble. Make sure that the consultant that you choose is capable of assisting and leading. The developers must be highly skilled and familiar with the SDFC or they should be learning it.

As important contributors to a successful implementation, it is important the developers and consultants are immensely skilled in the implementation process and have the skills needed to guide a Salesforce initiative. Make sure that you conduct a detailed RFP process that is a lot more of a negotiation than just a presentation.

In addition, also ensure that innovation is led internally and created by the partner while not seeking any input or guidance. While choosing the right partner, you should know that the price is not a good reflection of skill while also collecting references and success stories from organizations that have worked with your partner.

You can also test the Salesforce consultant on their ability to commit to the timelines. Build a relationship of trust and respect for maintaining open communication. Also, focus on proposing contractual guarantees for work that is completed to a standard.

3. Complicating the Requirements

Jumping into Salesforce integration can be a very interesting process but it is important to remember that it is also full of demands. Salesforce offers immense benefits but it still has its limitations. There are so many times when companies require customizations or even extend complicated requests that Salesforce cannot deliver.

Customizations and requests can often lead to serious problems during implementation and user adoption. One of the major complaints during the implementation process is the need for necessary customizations. Since customizations need expert knowledge, one must be able to communicate the amended costs.

The bugs that do not get fixed as a result of customizations can impact user buy-in as most users struggle to use the system just as intended. Migrating the customizations from a previous CRM can generate limited functionalities. This is something that must be communicated during the planning phase and reflected on the scope and timeline of Salesforce implementation.

Often, complicated requirements and customizations are not so simple to avoid but this is not something that always indicates Salesforce implementation as a disaster. However, it definitely indicates the need for a strong business liaison or analyst who can advise appropriately.

4. Ignoring Integration and Data Migration

In Salesforce implementations, many new features come to the forefront of a team’s focus while leaving data migration and integrations on one side. The truth is that if data integration and migration are not prioritized from the beginning then they can get left behind while causing delays.

Integration with different running systems or platforms can be tricky and must be approached with knowledge, experience, and foresight. The integration specialists are necessary and they should be considered during early assessments only.

In addition, data migration must also be considered in the earlier stages when it comes to Salesforce implementation. Without any doubt, there will be a varied quality of data and the duplication of data should be addressed way before implementation for achieving the best results. To make this process a success, one person or a team must be responsible for data maintenance.

5. No Internal Buy-In

At the time you are getting into the Salesforce integration, it is often easy to overlook an important element and that is users. Many companies make the Salesforce implementation mistake of keeping the users at the end and lacking in substance to generate the internal buy-in to the new or upgraded platform.

User adoption is really important for the success of Salesforce implementation and must be taken seriously from the very beginning. A dedicated effort should be made to promote internal buy-ins by identifying the internal leaders who can easily promote Salesforce and drive the go-live results.

You must also seek user motivations, needs, and other struggles needed for incorporating core features into the project plan. It is also important to measure adoption among the user’s past implementation while conducting key user training. A big concern with Salesforce implementation is the usage of the platform among company users.

In case the system fails to work as it was intended or is full of errors then it can be a real problem for user adoption. You must ensure that users are a core consideration all through implementation so that the best results can be closed out.

Given the challenges of Salesforce implementation, the work must be planned well. With the rising demand for different Salesforce specializations, there are many end-users who seek the support of experts. Companies offering experienced Salesforce consulting services are able to assist organizations, avoid mistakes, and drive successful implementations while finding exciting work at leading organizations.

6. Data Clean-Up

Another one of the Salesforce implementation mistakes is forgetting the data clean-up. Many times, the only focus is on new features while leaving integration and data clean-up as a low-priority activity. In reality, this may have the potential of causing delays in the implementation process.

Including corrupt data can often lead to incorrect insights and even wrong forecasts. This has the potential of creating inefficiencies in the process of sales and eventually lead to the underperformance of the sales team.

That said, working with a Salesforce expert can always ensure data clean-up and data auditing right before Salesforce implementation is achieved at par.

7. Lack of Training

A successful Salesforce implementation process is dependent on user adoption. Salesforce is a powerful platform but the users cannot capitalize on features if they do not know how to use the system efficiently. Users must gain a good understanding of all features.

Insufficient Salesforce knowledge is like no knowledge. It results in the underutilization of the platform while learning the successful techniques leads to satisfaction and rewards. Salesforce CRM may look like an easy platform to many but the truth is that there are some features that are challenging for the team members to operate.

Hence, it is necessary that adequate arrangements are made to train the employees so that make the best use of the Salesforce CRM. In case you make the mistake of ignoring the training aspect and assuming that the employees will get familiar with the platform once the implementation is done then you are making a mistake.

The truth is that the team members need their own time when it comes to getting comfortable with the features of the platform. This is common when you are migrating from one version of Salesforce to another one. Make sure that you offer accurate theoretical and practical training to the sales team while handling the Salesforce CRM.

8. Lack of Focus

You must know the answer to why you wish to implement Salesforce because if you are unclear about that then your ability to pick the right implementation partner will be clouded. You will not even have the right answers to the questions about the main factors or what you want from your CRM in the future.

If you want to have an easy time convincing your executive team to give you the budget for a tool then you must be sure about why you want to use it in the first place. The clearer you are about “Why?”, the easier it will be to gain maximum benefits out of Salesforce.

Conclusion

Taking the decision to invest in Salesforce is a big step for a business. You must ensure that you have proper knowledge along with the right support, data, and training needed to benefit from the usage of a tool.

At Encaptechno, we offer expert Salesforce implementation services that enable our customers to use CRM well. These implementation services can help you in making sure that there are no mistakes made and that you get the maximum benefits out of the implementation process.

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Salesforcesalesforce consultant, salesforce consulting services, salesforce crm, Salesforce implementation mistakes, salesforce integration

What is the Salesforce Net Zero Strategy and Why Your Business Needs One?

Rabia Bajaj / net zero strategy, salesforce consulting, strategies to obtain Net zero, sustainability strategy / Salesforce

Nature is a blessing to mankind but unfortunately, we have collectively disturbed the way it functions in many ways. Climate change has become an emergency that all of us must work together to deal with as soon as possible.

Regardless of whether it is a moment of preparation for an oncoming storm, a forest fire, losing the last year’s harvest, or something more serious than that, all of us are responsible for taking steps for solving the climate emergency. Just the simple fact that the future generations deserve a healthier and happier future should make us step up and act by implementing strategies to obtain Net Zero.

Business leaders, particularly the CEOs are responsible for leading from the front at this moment. After all, the potential of a business depends on this. It is necessary to understand that a productive and resilient economy can function only within a healthy society and this society needs a healthy and stable environment as its base.

Business leaders must listen to all stakeholders who are calling for climate action in greater numbers. Salesforce is one of the leading CRM organizations where the climate strategy started with the recognition that there is just one, mutual, and global goal which is transitioning into a climate happy future. Salesforce is a company that has been committed to reaching this goal with its net zero strategies.

Salesforce Expanding Net Zero to Its Entire Value Chain

Salesforce is consistently driving towards a 1.5 degree Celsius future by focusing more and more on six sustainability priorities including emissions, reduction, carbon removal, restoration, education & mobilization, innovation, and regulation & policy.

The company released its Climate Action Plan last year to offer a blueprint for others for accelerating their journey to Net Zero. The strategies to obtain Net Zero included the following things:

Committing to the shared and global goal of achieving a just and equitable transition to Net Zero in line with a 1.5 degree Celsius future.
Salesforce has also prioritized the reduction of emissions as quickly as possible while aligning its own value chain emissions to the global trajectory of 50% emissions reduction by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2040. The Sustainability Cloud of Salesforce has identified the most impactful opportunities to decrease its carbon footprint.
Salesforce is also focused on compensating for the remaining emissions by purchasing renewable energy and carbon credits of high credibility, co-benefits and impact. In the long haul, the removal of credits only and in the near term using a combination of removal credits and avoidance is important.

Salesforce achieved 100% renewable energy in 2021 by purchasing enough renewable energy for matching all the electricity globally. Ever since its first commitment, Salesforce has worked constantly to accelerate the global transition to clean and renewable sources of electricity. This is done with an aim for a future where renewable energy is powering the world.

Salesforce has been asking businesses to decrease emissions and increase carbon removals from the atmosphere for addressing climate change. It is focused on deploying natural carbon removal tools such as trees and oceans while also scaling technology-based carbon removal solutions. All businesses are needed to expedite the path to decarbonisation.

Climate Action Plan at Salesforce

Salesforce is on its way to decarbonize all its operations and align the full value chain to this goal while also compensating for all emissions that cannot be avoided or reduced every year from now on. The company is aiming much higher because the planet needs a lot more.

Salesforce’s net zero strategy has made it use a strong voice and technology for making changes and mobilizing others for accelerating the net-zero goal. It has developed a climate action plan that can help other businesses take steps that can save the plane, starting today.

Top Priorities of Climate Action

The climate action plan of Salesforce is based on how the company’s business can help in contributing to a meaningful environmental change. It focuses on using products, services, and its mission to amplify the climate action; operating model that aligns to full value chain; the company’s influence; and which stakeholders can be influenced?

Focusing on some of these factors has led Salesforce to make a framework that speaks to unique core competencies, customer success and digital transformation. The approach for this plan is universal and the company offers it as a blueprint for others to take action for accelerating their sustainability strategy.

There are six parts involved in this climate action plan. They are mentioned below:

1. Reducing Emissions

Most businesses generate greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing to travelling and maintaining digital infrastructures. To make sure that these emissions are reduced in a purposeful way, a sustainability strategy can be embedded into operational decisions using a practical approach.

Even more importantly, one can take all emissions reduction activities with system changes as the end goal. Salesforce is a company that monitors, avoids, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions across its operations and value chains. The aim behind this is to spur systemic changes that can achieve emissions reduction at a relevant scale.

For doing this, there has been a shared goal for internalizing everything. Salesforce is working on integrating sustainability into its environment program for reducing the carbon intensity of infrastructure, reducing business travel emissions and enabling sustainable travel along with engaging the suppliers to set science-based targets.

Salesforce has made it clear that it does not plan to meet all the goals on its own and it has also asked for cooperation from all stakeholders across its value chain. The best thing is that Salesforce is willing to do all it takes. It is believed that the next wave of climate action will come from innovations that span across customer-supplier relationships. As a global leader in customer relationship management, Salesforce is prepared to plan an important role.

2. Removing Carbon

For accelerating strategies to obtain NetZero, reducing the emissions and drawing down the carbon in the atmosphere is important. These are important solutions that are needed for delivering a good impact and progress towards an empowered future.

There is also a rising stakeholder pressure from governments, investors, individuals, and other businesses to take action while wasting no time. Some kinds of emissions cannot be avoided or even reduced in the near term and that is why Salesforce compensates for all emissions across Scope 1, 2, and 3 that cannot be avoided or reduced.

Salesforce takes a portfolio approach investing in impactful projects that aim to improve everyone’s lives so that an environmental impact can be delivered and carbon emissions can be reduced. With time, the transition to removal credits will happen with the same focus on quality and impact.

3. Restoring the Ecosystem

Salesforce advocates for finding methods that can enable an organization to make a big impact on climate restoring natural resources. For instance, trees remove atmosphere warming carbon from the air.

Salesforce is a proud founding member of 1t.org where the company supports and mobilizes the conversation, growth of 100 million trees, and restoration by 2030. Oceans have emerged as another important aspect for removing carbon from the atmosphere along with creating over half of the world’s oxygen supply.

Salesforce also has a Salesforce Ocean Sustainability Program that promotes sound ocean stewardship as a mitigation strategy in fighting against climate change.

4. Educating and Mobilizing

Salesforce suggests that the companies must give their employment opportunities and resources for taking action on the important climate issues. There has been considerable research that shows individuals feeling powerless when it comes to stopping climate change.

Hence, all companies should take leverage on connecting with experts in the climate community on the best practices and new strategies. This can be done by coming together with like-minded peers or by partnering on a company-wide scale with industry groups that take positive action.

5. Innovating

Salesforce advises to innovate by supporting all purpose-driven entrepreneurs who are scaling meaningful climate action. The path to decarbonisation can be accelerated by increasing investment in sustainability research, development, and infrastructure.

It is easy to partner with the players along the value chain for multiplying the force of investment. Businesses that are large scale can make an effort to invest in ecopreneurs. Other methods for making an impact include grantmaking, philanthropy and buying carbon credits.

6. Advocating Regulation and Policies

Business leaders can put science first by using their influence. Across the world, business leaders have a seat at the table with political leaders who set policies.

Salesforce encourages the business leaders to advocate for consistent science-based climate policies that facilitate a transition to a net zero strategy. The formalization of climate policy as a public priority and building a global presence on the issue in areas where employees live and work has emerged as an important factor.

Sustainability Cloud 2.0 and Net Zero

A large number of people are of the opinion that emission reduction must factor into business operations while tracking a company’s full value chain emissions is complex and time-consuming. With the use of Sustainability Cloud, Salesforce was able to reduce its carbon accounting process from over six months to just somewhere around six weeks.

Sustainability Cloud by Salesforce is essentially designed to assist all customers in tracking and reducing their emissions while taking prompt action. This action must be in line with a comprehensive view of environmental footprint with investor grade data for customizable ESG reporting. This data is highly important for third party audits, financial filings, corporate reputation and building trust for all stakeholders.

The entire point of introducing Sustainability was to help customers implement a useful sustainability strategy. There are many customers that are already using and making the most out of the benefits that Sustainability Cloud is capable of offering. These customers of Salesforce are able to track their carbon emissions and take suitable action as well.

In addition, these customers have also been able to accelerate to Net Zero by making tangible progress on six sustainability priorities while turning commitments into action. The future of Sustainability Cloud will see the following things as well:

Suppliers are an important part of the whole carbon reduction equation. Organizations will get investor grade scope 3 reporting with the Slack First Sustainability. This will allow them to effectively connect and securely collaborate at scale with suppliers around the science-based emission reduction targets through Slack Connect.
All industries have different needs. For this reason, it is important for businesses to visualize their fastest path to Net Zero with Climate Action Planning. This includes scenario planning, forecasting, and a built-in decarbonisation plan.
Climate action needs almost everyone to mobilize and collaborate. Hence, Salesforce is investing in building an Open Exchange Ecosystem in which the customers can purchase and manage high-quality carbon credits from ecopreneurs. In addition, Salesforce is also advocating for science-based climate policies and democratizing sustainability by educating teams.

It is important to understand that climate change impacts almost everyone and everything. The poorest and the most vulnerable people are the first ones to get impacted while amplifying global inequality. The implementation of Sustainability Cloud to Net Zero empowers the customers with the transformational tools and trusted the data needed to reduce carbon emissions while taking suitable climate action.

Basically, sustainability is important for becoming a trusted enterprise. The customers of today are willing to do business with companies that are entirely committed to climate change. In fact, most people are willing to spend more with businesses that are willing to fight climate change.

Conclusion

Creating a more sustainable future is everyone’s responsibility. We are in the greatest crisis when it comes to climate change but with all the bad news, we should now be looking at what can be done to overcome this problem.

Salesforce’s Net Zero strategy works to ensure that the companies are able to focus on a sustainable future. If you run a company then make sure that you have implemented a sustainable strategy that promotes Net Zero living. For more information, get in touch with a Salesforce consultant at the earliest.

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Salesforcenet zero strategy, salesforce consulting, strategies to obtain Net zero, sustainability strategy

Salesforce Spring 22 Release Highlights

Rabia Bajaj / Salesforce

Salesforce is here with its new Spring 22 Release that is packed with a bunch of new features and functionality to play around with. It also releases excitement both to the Admins and Developers in the backend along with the users who get to enjoy UI improvements on the frontend.

In the new release of Salesforce, multiple highly anticipated enhancements are slated to allow users so that efficiency can be improved, automation can be increasingly powerful, and a lot more value can be extracted eventually. All in all, the new features come with many new benefits for the users.

Salesforce Sprint 22 Release – An Overview

Salesforce is also infusing world-class analytics from Tableau and Einstein directly into the flow of work. The revenue intelligence equips sales leaders with actionable intelligence all through customer touchpoints from setting forecasts, closing deals, and building pipelines.

Another important feature that is found in the Spring 22 Release in the Slack Huddles is an always available and audio first way of connecting with colleagues, customers, and other partners in real-time. The huddles recreate spontaneous conversations from the office while also reducing any fatigue from back to back video calls.

In the new release, an orchestrator will be available to customers which is meant to allow the customers to automate and optimize complex and multi-user business processes. This involves both the internal and external users with minimal to no code.

Another newly released powerful tool for automation is the Business Rules Engine for Public Sector empowers anyone including the program managers. It helps in building, testing, and executing rules with a drag and drop and no-code interface.

Let’s see some exciting highlights from the Salesforce Spring 22 Release:

1. Knowledge Search Filters

Anytime when a user applies knowledge filters from the global search box and the knowledge sidebar, the filters persist until the user stays in the same browser tab and session. These filters also get synchronized between the search box and the sidebar.

In case the user refreshes the browser, opens a new browser tab, or even ends the session, the search resets the filters to the default settings. For trying the Einstein Search for Knowledge Pilot, you can enter “Einstein Search” in the Quick Find Box and then choose Settings. In the pilot features box, you can then choose Einstein Search for Knowledge Enhancements.

2. Revenue Intelligence

The tools can definitely help in generating a lot more revenue and building a stronger pipeline. One of the best examples of this can be Revenue Insight which is also useful in improving the forecast accuracy.

This way, three new kinds of dashboards can become available easily including “Overview”, “Team Performance”, and “Sales Performance.” Other than this, Tableau CRM dashboards and analytics were also tied together with Pipeline Inspection for allowing users to see the changes in the pipeline from the Flow tab.

The revenue intelligence includes Einstein Forecasting, Einstein Activity, and more. There are AI, customer engagement, and forecasting features too. The best thing is that all these features are available at a reasonable cost.

3. Platform Flow Orchestrator

Coming out of the beta and getting empowered with an added functionality, the flow orchestrator gives admins an improved ability to build and even coordinate difficult processes that include many people over stages with multiple flows.

Some of the prominent functions that this tool is capable of offering include orchestrating multi user processes. Without the use of any code, you can easily combine new and present processes in just a single interface. The steps allow you to define the flows to add and where including the assignment of users for each step and where the flow appears for them. The stage also allows you to group steps together while using decision elements for more complex logic.

You can customize entry and exit conditions with evaluation flows. This helps in defining custom criteria for stage exit conditions and step entry and exit conditions as well. Interactive steps can be assigned to the groups or queues. Rather than assigning an interactive step to a person, you can assign it to some users and avoid process problems.

The background steps allow the users to call auto launched flows and run without any user interaction. When an auto-launched flow is called in the background and contains external callouts, one can mark the step that must be processed asynchronously to prevent orchestration errors.

4. Collaborative Forecast Enhancements

Collaborative forecasts do the job of allowing users to plan an end to end sales cycle while achieving realistic sales expectations in an organization.

In the latest release, there is a more efficient collaborative forecasts setup which has never been easier with an improved user interface. The new release includes a new look and configuration items brought together on just one page.

New columns can be added to the forecasting grid for calculating Gap to Quota and Pipeline Coverage to avoid time eating metric calculations. There is also an ability to see a week over week forecast change so that you can become more aware of when to adjust the forecasting strategies.

5. Workforce Engagement

The new offering for call centres features a suite of tools aimed at improving scheduling forecasts and agent happiness. Some of the key takeaways workforce analysts have been using intelligent forecasts for planning staffing needs around anticipated workload volumes on a horizon.

The budget and hiring capacity plans allow call centres to meet the customers’ SLAs through predictions made by Omni Channel plans. Similar to the forecast update, this can extend the capacity plan horizon from 12 to as many as 52 weeks.

Better schedules can be built by comparing the anticipated schedule adherence versus the actual adherence. The planners can now have access to a historical adherence dashboard and see statistics for schedule adherence, conformance, omnichannel status, and scheduled versus presence time.

The mass shift update tool enables planners to update shifts in bulk, defining the criteria to choose a batch of shifts and assign agents, updating the status and both. The agent’s work-life balance is necessary and not all the shifts are desirable. The scheduling rules that limit inconvenient shifts assigned to every agent allow planners to employ equitable shift scheduling.

6. DataWeave

The DataWeave in Apex improves native Apex data transformation support with the integration of Mulesoft’s DataWeave library into the Apex runtime. This makes data transformation easy to code, scalable, and a lot more efficient.

Using this feature, the Apex developers can focus a lot more on solving business problems and less on addressing the specifics of the file formats. There is less Apex specialization, deserialization, and format transformation code to be written and maintained. There is also lesser use of transaction heap and CPU limits and compatibility with a wide range of data formats.

7. Improved Landing Page Experience

The new release brings more options for configuring your landing page. You can customize Pardot form styles by dialing in the look of your pardot forms with the added ability to apply colours, fonts, margins, and much more.

The users now have the ability to define a custom redirect URL when a Pardot landing page gets removed from the internet. Improved landing pages now support script code in the header or footer of an individual landing page using tags such as <link>, <script>, and <style>.

There are new page layouts and breadcrumbs as well. The new prebuilt layouts and breadcrumbs for row editing create an enhanced landing page that can be lightning fast in the long run.

8. Archive Experience Cloud Sites and Maintenance

Retiring a website’s performance can be a challenging experience. You can be happy with the look of your new website but you may also want to keep the old one around for further reference. In this case, the option was to archive it unless it is a Salesforce Cloud Site.

In the new release, Salesforce has added a new button to the detail page of the site which makes the URL available to all users and rather displays a site under the maintenance page. In case you wish to bring it back, you can easily unarchive it. The users can easily archive over 100 sites and this does not count against the 100 active site limit.

9. B2B Promotions

There are many new types of commerce promotions that have been created for B2B stores allowing you to offer customer coupons, promotions per cart, and fixed discounts.

Any additional updates include the creation of various product discounts for the same promotion, the ability to see all promotions, and the Commerce Promotions API access through Apex.

10. Editing Multiple Fields

For everybody who has ever wanted to make inline edits to various fields and clean data from a Salesforce report without returning it each time your wish has been answered.

This is an enhancement to the inline edits on reports from the Summer release with an added functionality that enables you to make edits to a field with related fields on the same record.

When anyone does this, the related fields get marked as pending and are also updated with the new value on saving the edits. Various field inline editing for reports have also been entered and will be available to many users in the Salesforce Spring 22 release.

11. Bundle Service Appointments

An important enhancement is the ability to bundle short appointments at close locations which enables you to assign a service tech to the bundle for completing them in succession.

In addition, you can easily automate the creation of bundles and also save time on assigning many service appointments.

12. Browser Performance Improvements

Almost anyone who has dealt with a complex CPQ implementation understands how to run important operations.

The use of Web Components V1 tech allows Salesforce to become a lot less browser oriented. This is an update that was made available in the Summer release and is now being enforced in the Spring release as well.

13. Net Zero Cloud

The sustainability cloud is now Net Zero Cloud and it has now become a core Salesforce Application. It promises to help in collecting, categorizing, and analyzing energy usage.

Other than this, it also helps in collecting and categorizing greenhouse gas emissions data in the organization’s business activities. This further helps in gaining precise insights when it comes to carbon footprints while identifying areas of improvement.

Conclusion

With the enhancements and new features of the Salesforce Spring 22 release, the users can be promised continuous improvements. In case you wish to learn more about the updates you can also refer to the Salesforce release notes for improved clarity.

In case you need more support in the implementation and use of Salesforce then feel free to reach out to our Salesforce consultants who have a wide experience of helping users maximize the potential of Salesforce.

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Everything to Know About Salesforce Experience Cloud

Rabia Bajaj / customer360 platform, digital platform, Salesforce communities, salesforce consultant, Salesforce Experience Cloud features / Salesforce

Salesforce Experience Cloud is an effective digital experience platform that is capable of efficiently building websites, mobile applications, portals, and other digital touchpoints for engaging with customers. It comes with the ability to digitize business processes at a quick speed.

Many organizations use Salesforce Experience Cloud for streamlining systems, aligning teams, and accelerating digital adoption when it comes to crushing over a year of data in just one quarter. In many cases, completely new digital properties are created in just two weeks.

The Salesforce Experience Cloud comes with the ability to power the customer journey with the data from the customer relationship management system. Below, we will explain the capabilities of Salesforce Experience Cloud in complete detail.

What is Experience Cloud Digital Experience?

Digital experiences are important for any business to survive, and customers expect to easily and intuitively interact with the companies online. The digital experience that a company provides assists with the customers to engage well and take action. Salesforce effectively worked with its partners for developing a digital platform such as Experience Cloud and securing websites, portals, and applications with connected data at each point in the customer journey.

Something that is helpful in taking the leap towards digital transformation is some of the few factors mentioned below:

Experiences must be able to go to the market quickly. After this, an update is required quickly so that the changing business and market trends can be quickly adapted.
The customer interactions must be personalized and actionable. This is something that is only possible when connected to CRM data and business processes that can help a customer to take action.
Consistent touchpoints must be made across the multichannel customer journey. Right when a customer feels like they have left the ecosystem, they are unlikely to come back again.

These are the requirements that drive the Salesforce Experience Cloud mission and roadmap. The customers build a wide range of digital experiences that are both mission-critical and built in a matter of record time.

What is Digital 360?

Digital 360 was announced last month along with Experience Cloud. This is the latest innovation of Salesforce that helps leaders accelerate growth in the work from homeworld. Digital 360 is an important part of the Salesforce Customer360 platform which also includes applications, service, marketing and commerce all across every customer touchpoint. Digital 360 includes:

Customer 360 Audiences: The customer data platform for marketers that helps in unifying, segmenting, and activating all the customer data.
Commerce Cloud Payments: This is an out of the box payment solution that is powered by Stripe.
Experience Cloud: This is a Salesforce solution that builds CRM powered digital experiences quickly.

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a digital platform integrated into Salesforce that enables you to build online communities and establish a point of contact with customers, partners, and other employees. In different words, the Experience Cloud can allow your company to establish a personalized corporate virtual space according to the company style.

It also comes with the possibility of digitizing business processes in line with today’s contactless alternatives. This comes with a combination of features such as Experience Builder, Mobile Publisher, Salesforce CMS, and Salesforce suite of web applications. With this, companies can create and deliver personalized content, portals, websites, mobile applications, and storefronts.

The individual understanding and control over digital experience have evolved and matured consistently. With systems and organizations moved to the cloud, the complete focus is on improving and standardizing processes for cutting down on expensive and manual edge cases. This standardization makes business processes simple and also contributes to information overload as knowledge bases and support forums become flooded with great content.

The customers can leverage the many benefits of a standardized process while tailoring their experiences. You can enter a complete suite of features that are purpose-built for treating digital persons like people while speaking directly to them. Personalization capabilities can seem at the attributes of a user persona and help surface content relevant to them. The journey mapping understands where a person is in their experience and also guides them in their next steps.

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a customer 360 platform that is made for individual digital experience. It comes with an ability to merge complex platform processes with a powered understanding of the user that drives the next generation of digital experiences.

Below mentioned is an overview of benefits offered by Salesforce Experience Cloud:

It is built for optimal search engine optimization.
It comes with an ability to evolve, you can start with a plug and play Salesforce tools and evolve your portal with time.
Salesforce includes an inbuilt notification functionality with a customizable individual alert preference.
It serves a dynamic user experience, security and features that are based on personas and profiles.
Salesforce Experience Cloud comes with hierarchical visibility and access to data which further enables you to use a partner portal as a CRM.
You can maximize the budget because an Experience Cloud license is a lot more affordable than a full CRM license.

Why Do We Need Salesforce Experience Cloud?

The experience cloud websites and applications are essential tools that help in collaborating and communicating with Experience Cloud.

1. Reducing Churning

Using the customer360 platform of Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can decrease the loss rate of existing customers is important to any business using a recurring revenue model. A certain way to reduce this churn is to engage with the customers on a regular basis. Salesforce Experience Cloud offers you a portal with which you can do that effectively. You can allow your customers to interact with real-time data, expose actions, records, objects, and fields that you wish to see.

2. Advocacy and Support Cases

Salesforce Experience Cloud can play the role of a self-help customer support tool. The users can search the portal for solutions to problems and use it as a knowledge base as the source of answers from other community users. You will also be able to see significant improvements in service metrics such as increased first contact resolutions, lower calls, decreased average handle time, and chat volumes.

3. Engaging Remote Work Employees

It is a lot more significant than ever when it comes to engaging employees in a post-pandemic workplace. One of the Salesforce Experience Cloud features as a portal is that the employees can connect with HR and collaborate on workflows that do not require traditional CRM functionality.

4. Improved Manage Partners

Salesforce Experience Cloud enables the easy lead generation and sales process management. Steps such as onboarding, recruiting, training, and supporting your partners with user-friendly features and tools that are built into the Salesforce portal.

5. Simplifying Application Development

The Salesforce platform enables you to not just build websites, but your own application. You can easily develop an internal application for any purposes you need and open up custom functionality to other groups for making it external facing.

6. Creating Commerce Channels

For all retail businesses, Salesforce Experience Cloud benefits can be an alternative to other commerce channels. The customers can use their commerce portals for selling and transacting with customers online.

7. Extending CRM Data

With the use of the Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can present all information in the Salesforce CRM to different users. The customers, employees, and partners can guarantee security and scalability. In addition, you can also decide what kind of information for presenting each type of user in the community. This does not require any Salesforce license, but a community license which is way cheaper.

8. Improved User Experience

Experience Cloud offers users a more fluid experience. On the other hand, it also ranks among the new trends in customer relationship management by offering a connected digital experience.

Difference Between Salesforce Community Cloud and Salesforce Experience Cloud

One of the most pertinent questions is if there is a difference between Community Cloud and Experience Cloud or are they similar? According to Salesforce, the name change is just a result of the name community not precisely reflecting the capability of connected digital experiences but creating cloud solutions.

The Salesforce Experience Cloud features allow building more communities and building portals, forums, centres, sites, and mobile applications for managing your organization’s content. The Experience Cloud can be looked at as an evolution of Community Cloud responding to the growing need for developing a more connected digital experience.

Even though the transition from Community Cloud to Experience Cloud happened last year, the users of Salesforce Experience Cloud must be ensured that should be a framework for understanding differences between Salesforce Community Cloud and Salesforce Experience Cloud.

One of the most significant differences that the users will see beyond the name is the terminology used within the platform. Rather than referring to the forum where people can interact with each other as a community, Salesforce Experience Cloud is now called a site.

How can Experience Cloud Be Used?

If you are new to Salesforce Experience Cloud then you must know how it can be used. The digital platform helps companies in building connected CRM powered digital experiences enabling them to build content in one place and deliver it anywhere.

Experience Cloud templates let you build responsive sites for delivering rich and branded spaces for the customers and partners. You can accelerate your digital experience by using the Customer, Customer Account Portal, Partner Central and building your own templates.

Irrespective of which industry you may be in, Salesforce Experience Cloud features can change your organization. Experience Cloud customers can gain a competitive edge because they have launched fast, connected each experience to data and tied everything together across a seamless customer journey.

Traction Gather and Experience Cloud

Traction Gather is traction on demand’s virtual engagement hub and is built on the Salesforce Experience Cloud platform. Using Traction Gather, all organizations can effectively bring their virtual events, classes, live streams, programs, tours, and on-demand content in just one digital hub.

Using the Salesforce Experience Cloud, organizations can easily use strong data insights for driving more engagement with customers and constituents alike, whatever they may be.

Data Security On Salesforce Experience Cloud

There are different kinds of Experience Cloud license types and all of the licenses configure data differently. In addition, once a Salesforce portal has been created, there are complex permutations of user access levels as well.

Something that is important to remember is that you can increase your risk surface each time you provide a doorway into the Salesforce instance. This is particularly when there is sensitive information in your system such as personal identifying information. For instance, in case you have a partner portal that you are led through, you are likely to see another partner lead or data so that the communication is secured.

It is important to understand where the line exists between a company and Salesforce when it comes to data security. This is essentially a shared responsibility for the security model. This is not to say that launching Experience Cloud is not worth the risk. There are many significant rewards to collaborate in this manner such as increased flow with partners, decreased load on customer support and better employee satisfaction.

One of the biggest benefits of Salesforce Experience Cloud is that it is a lot more secure as compared to other portal implementations due to tight integration. While you think about balancing the risks and rewards and managing the data security shift, a Salesforce consultant can help. A certified consultant can offer the ability to know in real-time who will see what. A Salesforce consultant will have authority on both Salesforce and securing data while helping clients to accomplish their business goals and ensuring data sensitivity.

Conclusion

In case you are looking for new and improved ways to connect with your community, build an online presence, and engage with your customers like no other than getting in touch with a certified Salesforce Experience Cloud consultant.

Encaptechno has consultants who come with thousands of completed Salesforce projects and a dedicated Experience Cloud team. We can help you change your digital experience with optimal use of Salesforce and Experience Cloud.

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Salesforcecustomer360 platform, digital platform, Salesforce communities, salesforce consultant, Salesforce Experience Cloud features

Step by Step Guide on Salesforce Sales Cloud Certification

Rabia Bajaj / sales cloud by salesforce, Sales Cloud consultant certification, sales cloud consulting, salesforce sales cloud consultant / Salesforce

Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of the leading CRM systems on the market which keeps growing in its popularity and customer base. Subsequently, there is a need for certified Salesforce Sales Cloud consultants who can easily address the business issues of customers that come with CRM functionality.

In this blog, we will see a step-by-step guide on the Salesforce Sales Cloud certification in order to get a detailed understanding of how the Salesforce administrators and developers can get certified as Sales Cloud professionals. However, first, we will understand what Salesforce Sales Cloud is.

What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?

The Salesforce Sales Cloud is a Salesforce product designed for the management, analysis, and management of sales processes. Many times, both the sales representatives and sales managers use the functionality of Salesforce Sales Cloud for completing the tasks scheduled for different priorities and better efficiency.

As for the sales representatives, the Salesforce Sales Cloud offers efficient and rather comfortable customer communication with numerous channels right within the Sales Cloud UI. With an advanced integration on a customer’s website and social media sync, you can collect precise information about contacts, accounts, and targets. There are extensive automation capabilities that help the sales representatives with numerous routine tasks while freeing up their time for nurturing leads and closing multiple deals.

With the sales cloud implementation, you can construct a sales strategy and manage it within a single system only. Sales Cloud helps sales managers control and assess sales representatives. By using the performance data, the sales manager can easily identify the strengths and weaknesses needed to improve skills which then allow increasing the overall performance of the sales department.

By using the Sales Cloud, sales managers can also deal with challenges such as disjointed sales processes and the process alignment needed with marketing.

What is a Salesforce Certified Sales Consultant?

A Salesforce Certified Sales Consultant designs and deploys solutions that support the customer business processes and requirements using the Salesforce applications. The consultant has relevant experience in designing solutions that can optimize the Sales Cloud functionality and can lead the implementation of these solutions within an organization.

A Salesforce Sales Cloud consultant has both the industry knowledge and expertise in operating Salesforce applications including the knowledge needed to implement in multiple applications in the common customer scenarios. Most sales cloud consultants are interested in demonstrating their expertise as cloud computing implementation consultants. Ideally, the consultant should have one or more years of experience in using Salesforce and working with sales processes while developing business solutions.

The experience of Salesforce Sales Cloud consultant should include:

A good understanding of all consulting processes.
Having a good experience of full project life cycles of Sales Cloud implementations.
Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
Detailed knowledge of sales cloud features and functions.
Solid understanding of data management and database concepts.
A detailed experience of scoping projects.
Having a good understanding of the discovery process including the gathering and documenting requirements.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities of a Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant

Knowledge

A successful candidate of the Salesforce Sales Cloud certification should have detailed knowledge about all the sales processes and roles. The candidate should be familiar with the solution and the deployment lifecycle. The applicant should also be knowledgeable in sales cloud features and functions such as opportunities, leads, activities, campaigns, forecasting, territory management, telephony, reports and dashboards, email integration, einstein activity capture, high-velocity sales, salesforce meetings, sales console, and experience cloud sites.

The application should also be well versed in best practices for leveraging standard functionality, configuration, and customization of the Salesforce platform for meeting customer requirements. The person should know all about data migration tools, how and when to use AppExchange products in sales processes, changer management, end-user training, rollout strategies, proficiency with core Salesforce features and functions such as AppBuilder Flow and Process Builder.

Skills

The Salesforce Sales Cloud consultant must be skilled in project management principles and methodologies so that it is easy to create Statements of Work and scope projects accurately. The consultant should translate business requirements into effective solutions considering efficiency, productivity, and working from anywhere to help the sales team. The consultant should regularly work on the project lifecycle. He/She should have remarkable presentation skills for addressing all levels of the organization.

Abilities

Finally, it is the responsibility of the Salesforce Sales consultant to guide a consulting project from inception to completion. He/She should be able to manage the development and delivery process while also defining and interpreting the key performance indicators so that the clients can be instilled with confidence. Any unexpected system behaviour and technical issues should be raised timely so that the risks can be anticipated and mitigated.

In addition, the customer issues should be prioritized and escalated for identifying viable use cases to configure the system. The consultant must build scalable and maintainable solutions so that they can be implemented for delivering effective business value. The consultant should set up change management practices for making sure that there is long-term solution success. Documenting project milestones for knowledge transfer is also important.

What is a Salesforce Sales Cloud Certification?

The Salesforce Sales Cloud certification is basically an examination that is designed for consultants who have experience in implementing the Sales Cloud solutions in a customer-facing role. A certified Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant is able to successfully design and implement effective solutions that can meet the customer business requirements.

This is a credential that allows the consultant to introduce solutions that are maintainable, scalable, and the ones that contribute to long-term customer success. Some examples of these solutions can be design sales and marketing solutions for meeting business requirements, design applications and integrations that can maximize user productivity, and data and design analytics solutions that can help in tracking key Sales Cloud metrics.

This is a certification that is primarily designed for customer-facing consultants who have experience in implementing Salesforce solutions from the beginning. That said, it is still applicable to Salesforce Admins who want to prove their advanced knowledge on the platform and are dealing with complex Salesforce plans. It is recommended to take this certification in case you are looking for a promotion, a move over from administration to consulting, or a change in jobs.

Outline of Exam For Salesforce Sales Cloud Certification

The Salesforce Certified Sales Consultant examination is taken to see the knowledge of a candidate and his/her skills related to all the objectives mentioned below. The candidate must have hands-on experience in implementing the Sales Cloud solutions and should also be able to demonstrate the applications of all the features mentioned below.

Sales Practice – 11%
Implementation Strategies – 13%
Application of Product Knowledge – 18%
Lead Management – 7%
Account and Contact Management – 11%
Opportunity Management – 10%
Sales Productivity and Integration – 8%
Consulting Practices – 7%
Sales Metrics, Reports, and Dashboards – 7%
Data Management – 8%

Exam Preparation Guide

Below, we will introduce an overview of exam preparation that will keep you in the right direction. Keep in mind that the below-mentioned steps are streamlined to offer you just what you need to qualify for the Salesforce Sales Cloud certification. The tips are to help you evaluate your readiness so that you can successfully complete the Salesforce Certified Sales Consultant exam.

These steps will present information about all the recommended training and documentation processes. It will help you in gaining hands-on experience, completing the examination properly, and self-study with the intent to take the examination successfully. The steps to keep in mind while preparing for this exam are mentioned below.

Download the outline of the exam to create a review schedule. It is important to ensure that you are updated with the exam information. Hence, you must review all the exam objectives and download the PDF file for the exam outline. Remember that this is the first part and you must not skip it.
Trailhead is like the one-stop destination while you prepare for the Salesforce Certified Sales Consultant examination. You can review the online documentation on Trailhead, see the Tip Sheets, and user guides so that it becomes easy to search for the topics listed in the Exam Outline section of the guide while studying the information related to the topics.
The next step is to get started with the training courses and getting hands-on experience is an important requisite for it. The training courses are highly recommended because they enable a person to view the problems from all angles.
Join the trailblazer community which is a one-stop destination for all your questions. It is the easiest way to get an answer to your problems. After joining this community, you can exchange ideas, ask and answer questions, and join featured groups.
You can also attempt solving some practice tests which can be easily found on the internet. It is recommended to go through as many practice tests as possible for the best result.

The Benefit of Salesforce Sales Cloud Certification

For all the companies that offer IT services, becoming a certified Sales Cloud consultant means serving the needs of customers in a better way. After getting the certification, the consultants can deliver the services following the business and industry specifics taken into account.

A certified Salesforce Sales Cloud consultant is a person who brings exceptional value to the customers, ensures efficient CRM use, and also provides timely guidance on CRM’s ongoing evolution. In today’s time, becoming a certified consultant in the Salesforce Sales Cloud is important for gaining a Partnership Value Score and being assigned one of the partner tiers.

For instance, an organization must have at least two certified consultant-level employees for getting a Registered Salesforce Partner tier. The benefits that an IT company gets from the Registered partner tier include free online training from Salesforce, a discount on instructor-led training, a certification exam voucher, and much more. As for the employees, the Sales Cloud consultant brings many more job offers, accelerates career growth, and also guarantees a substantial pay rise.

The Process to Get Salesforce Sales Cloud Credential

If someone is interested in getting certified as a Sales Cloud consultant then the first step is to file an application for completing the Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant practice exam. This is a test that consists of 60 multiple choice questions and five unscored exam questions for answering in over 105 minutes. You can choose whether you want to take the exam in a testing center or in an online protected environment.

The passing score needed to become a consultant is 65%. Basically, the exam is taken to verify the applicant’s ability to plan a Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation set up with a view of KPIs. Other tested skills commonly included in this are a suitable solution design according to a customer’s requirements and identifying key features for better sales productivity, etc.

The registration fee for this exam is USD 200 plus applicable taxes as required by the local law and the retake fee for this exam is USD 100 plus applicable taxes required by the local law. No hard copy or even online materials can be used for reference during the examination.

Validity of Salesforce Sales Cloud Certification

Since the Salesforce release system gets updates three times a year, the Salesforce Sales Cloud consultant certification is valid up to the next release. For keeping the certification valid, the owner should update it by passing the Trailhead maintenance modules. According to Salesforce, the release module corresponding to the Sales Cloud consultant’s job role is the Administrator Certification Maintenance module.

The Sales Cloud consultant certification can get outdated in case the owner has not completed maintenance modules on Trailhead by the required date. Mostly, the certification owners have some months after the release date for completing the maintenance modules. In case the certification owner fails to complete the maintenance modules at the right time, they are likely to lose their Sales Cloud consultant credentials while having to retake all the necessary exams again.

Conclusion

Getting the Salesforce certification is one of the best options if you are looking for a more advanced CRM qualification. The best part is that Salesforce is not just creating jobs for the products but the professionals with Salesforce are in high demand.

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Benefits of Integrating Salesforce with your Ecommerce Business

Rabia Bajaj / retail ecommerce platform, salesforce cloud consultant, salesforce commerce cloud online ecommerce business, salesforce integration / Salesforce

Ecommerce customers across B2B and B2C industries demand a connected and unified shopping experience. This also means that they want seamless handoffs between different channels and websites, along with personalized engagements based on previous interactions that happen with a brand.

Most customers feel that these connected processes are important when it comes to choosing a business in the competitive eCommerce landscape. Therefore, all businesses that are hoping to attract the present connected shoppers must unify experiences across all the touchpoints. With Salesforce integration, customers can get a truly cohesive retail experience along their journeys from discovery to delivery and what lies beyond.

A unified customer experience can also provide brands with a clear understanding of customer activity and how it may relate to retail inventory, products, and promotions. Any e-commerce platform that supports excellent user experience design can make the online store of a brand easy to navigate and explore.

The product recommendations and smart search powered by artificial intelligence can inspire millions of shoppers to purchase. Brands can also maximize their conversion rates with e-commerce optimizations such as checkouts without the need for an account sign-up requirement and automated price adjustments for sales and promotions which eliminates sticker shock at checkout.

Salesforce Makes E-commerce Integration Simple

Things are changing quickly in the retail world and the way in which a brand embraces this evolving landscape and connects with today’s customers starts with e-commerce integration. Modern shoppers expect to buy anywhere and fulfill anywhere experience along with an ability to interact with a brand on any channel.

Businesses should look for a way that enables the customers to engage seamlessly as they move across their preferred channels including, social, mobile, and in person. For delivering this kind of customer experience, an online e-commerce business should be integrated with marketing, fulfillment, inventory management, and back-end accounting systems. Most of the legacy commerce platforms cannot handle this kind of e-commerce integration.

The traditional systems were not really designed for a retail online integration nor can they keep up with the pace of innovation that is needed to stay competitive. This is why omnichannel solutions such as e-commerce integration are making innovation easy and many retailers are turning to Salesforce.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides both B2B and B2C businesses a world-class platform for e-commerce integration. It has a cloud-based and multi-tenant architecture that delivers scalable, reliable, and security-based systems that merchants need for competing in a quickly changing retail environment. The Commerce Cloud enables to unify buying experiences all across channels while streamlining all operations from discovery and purchase to fulfillment and beyond. Using the Commerce Cloud, it becomes easy to integrate e-commerce behind the scenes with unified information across stores, interactions, customers, orders, products, inventory, pricing, etc. This easy e-commerce integration also connects in-store mobile channels and enables them to leverage core e-commerce capabilities and services such as transaction management and merchandising.

With true e-commerce integration, retailers can stay connected to customers anywhere they shop and innovate across the entire customer experience quickly without any problems. The capability of Salesforce for e-commerce integration combines digital commerce, store operations, order management, and AI-powered personalization into a single and unified commerce platform. With Salesforce, e-commerce businesses can do the following things.

They can deliver a strategic and personalized shopping experience at each step and on any device.
Businesses can roll out continuous innovations with any kind of dependencies, disruptions, and delays.
Businesses can launch new websites in weeks and new promotions within minutes.
Salesforce makes it possible to unify digital commerce with store operations, order management, and more.
It becomes possible to offload IT operations for a unified cloud that is scalable, robust, and stable.
Salesforce helps in maximizing productivity with centralized site management and automated tasks.
It is possible to explore new regions easily and go global in record time.

Retail Operation Standards

A business must run its retail e-commerce platform with the care and attention that is demanded by a flagship retail location. Online stores have become the primary way in which customers interact with a brand while becoming the new storefront window display. Just as it is with a storefront window display, e-commerce businesses must showcase new products regularly.

Most customers expect to see new merchandise anytime they visit a site of a store. Everyday inventory updates are a must as today’s customers crave fresh product offerings more frequently than ever before. With an intelligent e-commerce platform, businesses can aggregate average customer visit frequency and stagger product launches for meeting the pace of high-value shoppers.

Business owners have to understand that e-commerce is essentially a competition between businesses and it is important for brands to understand what the competition offers and charges. Using automation to run reports on the competition helps businesses to develop compelling deals, counteroffers, and bundles for their customers with state-of-the-art website experiences that stand out and do not just blend in.

Businesses should always remember that great online customer service is equally important as a perfectly presented product inventory or an online e-commerce business website. Just as in physical retail stores when customers run into issues such as shopping online, businesses should be there for kindness and support. Real-time messaging built into an e-commerce website is an indispensable tool that brands can use for engaging with customers and solving their problems including bounce rates, shopping cart abandonment, and shopper dissatisfaction.

Omni Channel Marketing

Most modern customers are comfortable with receiving relevant and personalized advertising messages from digital channels. This is valid on the web, email, and social media. Businesses can help deliver an easy shopping experience to these customers by integrating e-commerce with digital marketing.

Offering connected experiences to the customers is considered important across every channel and brands must take care while integrating shopping links into personalized web ads, emails, and social content used in digital marketing campaigns. Micro-targeted omnichannel marketing enables brands to choose the highest value e-commerce customers and other desired niche markets that deliver content to those who are most likely to click and convert.

The Shop sections can also be added to brand profiles on important social media websites such as Facebook. From here, it becomes easy to tag products from the brand’s shop in image and video posts. The content of Stories on Instagram and Snapchat can also be linked to a brand’s retail e-commerce platform leading to the seamless customer journey and omnichannel conversions.

Driving Sales

The Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that is powered by innovative technology that helps in connecting businesses and customers in a way that is never done before. It is immensely scalable and it can adapt to suit the needs of B2C and B2B sellers of any shape, size, and scope.

Commerce Cloud features Einstein Artificial Intelligence which helps the brands to inspire and convert e-commerce customers with highly personalized journeys while seamlessly connecting all channels. For ensuring mobile e-commerce success, a responsive mobile design, optimized micropayments, and one-touch payments are all built into the platform.

Artificial Intelligence

The use of Salesforce Commerce Cloud enables the customers to get personal recommendations in a way that they can tailor the shopping experience to each use with Einstein product recommendations that deliver highly personalized product suggestions with all clicks. Businesses can drive revenue using the customer insights using the internet purchasing behavior and optimizing the product bundles, sets, and deals with Einstein Commerce insights which is an AI-powered shopping basket analysis dashboard.

You can use customer data to power personalization across any channel including mobile applications with Einstein Recommendations API. In addition, the conversions can be boosted with intelligent search results by helping the shoppers find what they are looking for and more with Einstein Predictive Sort which automatically tailors category pages and search results to each shopper. The Salesforce Commerce Cloud improves searches with type-ahead guidance. The abandoned searches can be reduced with Einstein Search Recommendations which offers type-ahead suggestions personalized to every shopper in real-time.

Innovative Customer Experiences

The Salesforce integration enables the creation of unified customer journeys across all core functions with the Salesforce platform that connects Commerce Cloud with sales, service, marketing, and more. The API first commerce helps in building and extending shopping experiences using the Open Commerce APIs that surface core B2C e-commerce functionality for developers and third-party applications.

New revenue channels can be unlocked with scalable APIs because headless commerce allows you to mix and match composable capabilities for meeting the business needs. The operations can be launched quickly and the total cost of ownership while delivering agile and innovative customer experiences can also be reduced.

Salesforce helps in extending, customizing, and innovating the sites in a way that the shopping experience can be enhanced with an extensive library with certified integrations, ratings and reviews, payment accelerators, and loyalty programs. There are developer-friendly tools that help in coding as well by responding to business requests and delivering innovation quickly using a dev environment that provides industry standard and JavaScript-based tools.

Salesforce also helps in developing mobile commerce applications using scalable APIs, technology patterns, full development framework, etc. Lastly, the time to market can be accelerated with industry-specific solutions and apps prebuilt for common use cases.

Scalability in Business

Scalable Business

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a great deal of scalability in business. You can go global in record time while minimizing the risk, cost, and technical complexity of entering new international markets with borderless infrastructure, and safe interactions. It is easy to quickly customize websites for accounting customs, cultures, languages, and currencies. You can give localized reference architecture for English, Japanese, French, Japanese, etc.

Salesforce also helps in the easy execution of global content strategies. It is easy to build great digital commerce experiences with targeted content, offers, and relevant products that are organized by language, region, city, or country. In addition, it is also possible to manage multiple sites and regions easily because you are able to launch and manage all the B2C e-commerce properties include brands, sites, devices, and geographies from a single and unified framework.

Seamless Customer Experience

The Salesforce integration enables optimization of conversion funnel while reducing abandoned carts with proven best practices including save carts, payment accelerators, and optimized checkout flows. You can also go mobile with the Master mobile commerce and a full suite of mobile-first capabilities including responsive design, one-touch payment, and a data-driven mobile UX.

Salesforce helps in leveraging social extensions by extending your reach and merging digital commerce with social channels and online communities such as Facebook and Instagram. It is possible to empower customer service teams by helping service agents accelerate over-the-phone orders and check out on behalf of customers with real-time access to digital storefronts and order history. You can connect digital commerce in the store and enable mobile access to digital inventory that store associates can offer to sell and ship in real-time anywhere in the store with a flexible add-on called Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud manages the complete order lifecycle while connecting commerce and service experiences, unifying customer profiles, and unlocking order history with an add-on called Salesforce Order Management. It becomes makes orders and payments so that customer value and loyalty can be increased with seamless interactions with the customer journey. The integrations can be simplified and commerce payments can be embedded quickly and easily for a better shopping experience.

Conclusion

Salesforce assists the entire customer journeys across commerce including sales, marketing, customer service, communities, and more. It is one of the top-ranking customer relationship management systems in the globe that is home to trailblazing customers, expert partners, and software platforms including Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Sales Cloud all of which integrates with Commerce Cloud to power the entire customer lifecycle from awareness to purchase and retention.

Hence, e-commerce businesses must unify their customer journey with agility, authenticity, and scalability. With the integration of Salesforce, businesses can unlock revenue across channels with customizable commerce experiences.

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Salesforceretail ecommerce platform, salesforce cloud consultant, salesforce commerce cloud online ecommerce business, salesforce integration

Ways to Unify Data for Connected Client Experiences with Salesforce

Rabia Bajaj / client centric approach, customer centric experience, sales process management, salesforce partner, salesforce sales cloud, targeted sales process / Salesforce

Unified data is an important tool for a marketer that further helps in personalization at scale. In the present digital world, customer-centric experience is centered around engaging brands and consuming media at the time and place of choice across multiple channels.

Building a one on one relationship with customers has become the way to delight them. Personalization has an amazing ability to unlock a substantial amount of money for companies. Yet, many organizations find it challenging to change to meet the challenges that preside today. The biggest problem behind this is getting a single source of truth for customer data.

Connected Customer Experience Leads to Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction

Let’s go back to some time ago from a time when it was normal for you to travel without worrying about the pandemic. If you took a flight in the pre-pandemic times, you must have booked your flight, checked in online, and registered at the airport on an application only.

In case you notice, you will be able to clearly observe that some of the best airlines enable you to move through this experience seamlessly. It is a connected and personalized journey right from the time of booking to the post-flight customer survey sent on an email. If the airline follows a client-centric approach, you will naturally want to fly with that airline again.

The thing is that it is not so easy to connect over five or six different systems that contain customer data while making them work together. This is the true power of unified data and the fact is that you rarely get this kind of seamless experience from a brand.

Think of a time when you got the wrong product from an online brand and had to return it while going from the website to call-center to an app, repeating your name, order number, and addressing it again and again. This is an experience that leaves most customers frustrated and decreases the chance of buying another product from that brand again. The company must have a vertically integrated disconnected system that is responsible for offering a subpar experience.

Ways to Unify Data for Connected Client Experience

The business leaders of most companies agree that organizational silos are the reason behind the negative quality of customer and prospect experiences. It is constantly seen that the greatest roadblock to a unified digital strategy is that of organizational silos. The departmental silos give rise to an unsynced channel strategy that pushes connected customer experience out of reach.

There are some key considerations for the companies to follow that help in breaking free from silos and creating a connected experience that customers expect. These considerations include:

1. Forming a Unified Roadmap

The first and most important step in any new effort is to always clearly define the strategy. Here it means bringing together the previously siloed channels for designing a single objective centred around marketing, commerce, advertising, service, etc.

It is important to find the small wins and organize them into a strategic timeline. The use case-driven approach is mostly about driving the most impact as quickly as possible. With the use of the Salesforce Sales Cloud, you can define the roadmap, account for things such as team reorganizations, product launches, and other milestones such as replacing order management and master data management systems.

After this, you can organize the roadmap by considering factors such as customer pain points, technology and data to be used, and areas where you have shared goals around improving customer experiences. For instance, the Amazon application offers live updates with the location of delivery trucks so that people know when to expect delivery. The updates are helpful for consumers and deflect the service call-ins that support efficiency.

Make sure that you focus on the use cases that affect the customer directly and then expand the roadmap from there. The strategy should not become a cause of delaying the progress. You can start small, test very often and optimize timely so that an efficient flow of innovation is established across the various business and technical teams.

2. Mapping Out the Customer Journey

There is absolutely no doubt in the fact that all customers are important for a business. However, there is also no denying the fact that not all are the same and some are capable of generating more business as compared to others.

One must find the customer segments that bring the most value to an organization as per the prioritization process and quantify why the segment is important so that the customer journey can be built around that. The most common segment splits are seen as high spending, frequent shopper, or high influence, but eventually, these segments are different to a business.

To stimulate the targeted sales approach, it is important to understand the journey of segments with a brand. This is an exercise that reveals gaps in the customer journey and shows where organizational improvement can be made so that all departments have a comprehensive view of the customer.

Businesses can map out the critical points in a journey and develop a framework that identifies the corresponding employee touchpoints that enable a good customer experience. The employees can depend on insights to deliver the right customer experience so it can be a good practice to ask them about what is working and what is not. This will help in understanding the common factors that employees deal with while engaging with customer segments.

3. Aligning Team Around Goals

For executing a strategy and campaigns, it is important to create an agile team across various departments and channels. You can start with the teams that require synergy based on priority use cases.

Let’s say an important use case for your business is to streamline the email marketing messages with an authentic website experience. In order to achieve this, you will probably ask the marketing team to collaborate with the engineering department.

The marketing team may feel that they are getting into an entirely different world but this can give marketing an easier way to collaborate with the technical team so that a better customer-centric experience can be created across mobile and web. Together these teams can implement an effective customer experience strategy.

You can resist the urge to organize and collaborate teams by platform and start group resources by the goals. This will end up creating a collaborative environment, increase market speed, and save costs when the team silos are broken down.

4. Defining Omni Channel Measurement Model

The process of providing better customer experiences may require many resources. Hence, it is important to show quick returns on the investment by measuring factors such as impact and performance. You can align on the top key performance indicators across various channels and audit the critical touchpoints in a customer journey framework to uncover measurement gaps.

The standard naming conventions for data collection like defining a unified data layer use the same name and data types for ensuring that everyone understands the new marketing data model. Everyone in an organization must have the same understanding of KPIs being tracked and where to go for a single source of truth.

You can start by collecting relevant data at the earliest to make sure that you use measurements that determine the impact of a roadmap. As this is done, your ability to identify and socialize results can be quickly evaluated and internal processes can be optimized for better customer experiences.

One must be able to find the return on investment for all customer experiences. You may also use another key metric such as improvements in net scores and customer engagement. You can use the data you have collected for measuring how simple it is for customers to do what they want while proving impact.

5. Getting Data At One Place

A team must come together to serve the customers together when the data is in dozens. Data unification can be an overwhelming process so it is important that the data is consolidated on a use case driven approach and then established in a customer data platform.

The goal is to build a golden record, a single source of truth for all customer data that can be achieved with the help of tools such as Salesforce Cloud. As you go ahead, you can audit all data sources for finding potential gaps that can cause any mistrust in teams.

For instance, you may discover that a team is keeping important information because it wants to go ahead of other teams. In this case, the tool that is used to collect data is cut off from the rest of the system.

No matter what the reason may be, isolated data can lead to missed opportunities for tracking customer journeys. Hence, you can resolve and even optimize the data collection for ensuring that it meets the unified measurement model requirements and offers the information needed to prioritize use cases.

Conclusion

If you are looking for more insights to unify data for a connected client experience then you can get in touch with an experienced and certified Salesforce partner. This way, you will get more assistance in connecting silos and transforming the way in which you offer customer experience. Get in touch today!

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Salesforceclient centric approach, customer centric experience, sales process management, salesforce partner, salesforce sales cloud, targeted sales process

Business Opportunities with Salesforce in 2022

Rabia Bajaj / salesforce cloud ecosystem, salesforce for business, salesforce integration, salesforce partner, seamless workflow automation / Salesforce

Salesforce has been able to lead from the front when it comes to various CRM features that it can offer. It has expanded the capability of businesses to discover, win over, and keep customers. With the digitalization spreading, there are many businesses that keep turning into digital selling to stay competitive. This has in turn resulted in many businesses making the most out of salesforce for business.

If you are from one of the organizations that are still getting comfortable with remote working then you must be aware of the challenges that come with managing systems and partnering outside the office. These challenges are solved by Salesforce easily to the point that it is impossible to deny the power and comfort offered by the Salesforce integration. It has become valuable for businesses to grow and meet the changing demands of customers.

As we move into 2022, Salesforce has brought in many new features. The tradition of coming up with new features for companies continues strong with Salesforce. It is this innovation that keeps the Salesforce subscribers at the top. This year, Salesforce has stressed more on collaboration, automation, and orchestration. It has already released many new tools designed to help teams work efficiently.

We can easily say that Salesforce has become more robust in 2022. In this blog, we will be talking about the business opportunities that come with Salesforce in 2022 and the different ways in which innovations can help us in moving ahead. Let’s begin.

1. Platform Connecting Customers, Partners, Employees

Platform Connecting Customers, Partners, Employees

Salesforce and Slack have an appreciated history of working with one another. Way before the acquisition of Slack by Salesforce, the two enterprises worked together for many years integrating the services they offered and helping sales teams access important account information.

With the shared customer base of Salesforce growing to tens of thousands of team installs, the customer requests for integrations across the Salesforce platform grew too. Ever since its launch, the Slack-First Customer 360 has been ensuring the way people work improves considerably. The platform is such that it connects the customers, employees, partners with each other easily.

The applications that these customers are using already can also be connected with the current Salesforce records that come within Slack. The platform includes the Salesforce for Slack app and many other integrations such as Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud.

Using the Slack-First Customer 360, the teams can quickly respond to new opportunities and work easily with each other across companies. This enables cross-company swarming to resolve quick challenges quickly, plan and act on insights instantly and make partners a part of the team.

The platform is capable of offering a rich user experience in the digital world. The applications and workflows have the ability to boost team productivity and collaboration and also support the continued success of all the customers. Slack and Salesforce together give businesses a single platform for connecting employees, partners, and customers with each other and the applications that are being used every day.

2. Value-Based Healthcare With Health Cloud 2.0

In September 2021, Salesforce became the global leader in CRM to announce Health Cloud 2.0, a technology that is designed to empower businesses to deliver much better health and safety for their own employees, communities, and customers.

With the whole world going into a hybrid of digital, on-site, and in-person mode, the focus was shifted completely on ensuring the health, business operations, and safety in the new normal. These things became important factors for ensuring trust and business continuity.

Salesforce realized that things such as vaccination, contact tracing, wellness assessment, testing, and vaccination have become critical in all industries as companies look for ways to keep their customers and employees safe. Hence, Salesforce came up with Dreampass which allows robust and scalable safety protocols for all in-person attendees.

Dreampass was made to offer safe in-person events for all employees, communities, and customers. The capabilities include attendee registration management, testing vendor integration, COVID-19 vaccine, testing verification for issuing testing kits.

Dreampass enables admission after the integrated test results with a personalized QR code are checked properly. If the protocol changes or there is an exposure then the notifications and messaging are also sent to the attendee directly.

3. Lightning Page Performance

If you have worked as an end-user in a Salesforce org, you would know that the lightning pages are neither optimized nor inconsistent. The Salesforce Lightning Page Performance has been created to solve this problem. When working with the Salesforce org, the feature helps in managing inconsistent pages or the ones that are not optimized.

The Lightning page performance tool is created with the lightning app builder for doing all the analysis. The end users can execute their tasks much more quickly and efficiently by leveraging the Lightning Page Performance and optimizing the location of the lightning component. This can be done while avoiding distractions that pop up in opening pages to complete the daily activities.

4. Flow Orchestrator

The workflow requirements of all admins tend to become increasingly complex. The processes that were considered simple span across multiple users and departments. People may even have to wait for days, weeks, and months between every stage of a workflow. Each handoff between users and the waiting period between steps is a costly gap for all businesses. This gap can reduce customer satisfaction, productivity, and revenue.

With the teams becoming more distributed, the gaps have only increased as the users are becoming comfortable with remote meetings and digital channels. People are frazzled and struggling to keep up. They depend on Salesforce for quick configuration and maintenance of business workflows. As a result, Salesforce created Flow Orchestrator so that the admins can quickly create multi-user and multi-step automated business processes with clicks and not code.

An experienced Salesforce admin can tell you easily that Flow can maximize your impact and create the best user experience. Flow Orchestrator helps to amplify the impact of new and existing flows by introducing new features, steps, and stages. Steps define which flow you want to execute, the number of individuals assigned, the information they receive and where the flow is supposed to appear. Steps can be assigned sequentially and in parallel for flexibility.

The stages are for grouping the steps together and executing things sequentially. The stages can be separated by a decision element for supporting complex logic. The stage consists of one or more steps. Organizing different flows into steps and multiple steps into stages enables the Flow Orchestrator to bridge the gap in the workflow. This amounts to better productivity, happy customers, and better revenue.

5. Public Cloud

Salesforce Hyperforce offers companies all over the world the ability to make the most out of the power that the public cloud is capable of. This is a new and next-generation infrastructure architecture that uses public cloud Salesforce partners to help businesses expand quickly and meet local data storage requirements.

This can be done with the use of common tools, security practices, deployment patterns, and software development processes. The organizations can store important data in a region for supporting regulations and compliances that are specific to the businesses or industries. The regional cloud infrastructure facilities work quickly in the country’s performance and short routes between end-users and data centers that help in improving user experience.

Salesforce comes with an ability to scale quickly because of the flexibility and additional efficiency of the public cloud. Hyperforce reduces implementation time and also allows the resources to be deployed in the public cloud quickly and easily. Something that took months in the past only takes a couple of days now.

6. In-App Guidance for Engagements

The maintenance of employee engagement is something that includes processes that can prove beneficial. Right from onboarding new employees to user adoption for the systematic enhancements, the employees who work in sales and support cycles can find it difficult to remember the steps needed to complete the jobs.

The in-app guidance features help the employees to navigate the systems by offering reminders, tips, and gradual walk-throughs as well. One can find this feature to display a floating message in the utility bar for tracking the effectiveness of implementations. In addition, this feature also offers resources to users even before they begin to notice that they have a requirement which further helps in increasing the company’s revenue.

7. Marketing Cloud

Many businesses face troubles in finding customers which is one of the many competing priorities. In case you are more focused on developing a service or product that people are bound to love then often there is not much left for identifying leads. This is where the solutions like Marketing Cloud prove useful as they help businesses to create meaningful connections with customers, capture leads, and achieve more conversions.

There are many ways in which Marketing Cloud can help in finding more customers. It allows automating processes while improving efficiency and freeing resources. It works easily with Salesforce and allows businesses to use data that has been gathered already. The Data Studio in Marketing Cloud helps in improved marketing analysis.

The Marketing Cloud and Pardot help in building personalized and data-driven email campaigns. It is easy to reach customers on preferred channels which also helps in speeding the return on investment. The Pardot also helps in generating reporting so that you can understand all the elements of strategies. These are the features that offer real results. Using Pardot, many customers have witnessed an increase in sales revenue and marketing effectiveness.

8. Sales Cloud

With more customers looking for businesses that can understand, the businesses react by improving their investment in sales technology platforms. Salesforce workflow automation that comes with Sales Cloud offers companies the tools needed to modernize the selling process in a digital and remote world.

A rich customer activity timeline, advanced automation, and a mobile app are some of the powerful features. Sales Cloud continues empowering each aspect of the sales process with a wide view of customers. All the customer data is in one place and the sales team can contribute to each sale.

There are no more spreadsheets and it becomes easy to look through emails or sticky notes. The users can even take the benefit of AI-powered sales tools that can automate everyday processes. This helps the sales teams to close more deals. Just as other Salesforce products, the Sales Cloud comes with an intuitive interface that makes winning hassle-free. There are real-time dashboards as well to empower and improve decision-making.

9. Service Cloud

In the Salesforce Cloud ecosystem, Service Cloud helps in retaining customers after the sale is done. Salesforce understands that the customers are becoming selective and it is far from certain that one sale will lead to another. Rather, most businesses around the world are moving to customer service software.

Many customers make a decision based on the customer service that is offered to them and there is a rise in customer expectations as well since the past two years. The Salesforce Service Cloud solution is ideal for businesses that are hoping to establish and maintain higher levels of personalized customer service.

It allows businesses to engage with customers on channels, serve them faster and deploy AI-powered chatbots. The Service Cloud also makes it simple to set up self-service options for customers. It is easy for customers to access articles, account information, and community support.

Conclusion

Businesses must be able to make the most out of using Salesforce and the many features that it offers for boosting business revenue. Salesforce presents many business opportunities that are focused on two areas including growing revenue and a reduced investment cost. It can be beneficial if companies ensure that the employees are doing everything to fulfill both these goals.

The Salesforce consultant at Encaptechno can assist in customizing the Salesforce infrastructure to meet specific business needs. If you want to maximize the business opportunities with Salesforce in 2022 and beyond, get in touch with us.

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Salesforcesalesforce cloud ecosystem, salesforce for business, salesforce integration, salesforce partner, seamless workflow automation

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Zoho Implementation

Zoho Support

Zoho Consulting

Zoho Integration

Zoho ChatGPT Integration

SOLUTIONS

Salesforce

AWS Cloud

Cyber Security

Vryno

Azure

Digital Marketing

Salesforce

1. Address Fields Customized for You

2. No More Uncertainty About Appointments and Scheduling

3. OCR Simplifies Data Extraction

4. Scheduler for Salesforce

5. Picklists

6. Person Accounts Enabling

7. Using Triggered Campaign Messages, You Can Personalize Your Experiences

8. Use the Migrate to Flow Tool to Convert Workflow Rules to Flows (GA)

9. Integrations with Amazon are Now More Straightforward

10. Recipes are Now Included in Salesforce

11. Staged Data Features Facilitate Work

12. Sets of Permissions Have Now Expired

13. Salesforce Flow Test Framework for Debugging The Record

14. Solving Cases is Now Simpler

15. Existing Schemas Can Be Updated

16. Improvement Using Slack

17. In the Lightning App Builder, You Can customize and Filter Related Lists

18. Improved Report Type Selector

Salesforce Summer 22 Release Highlights – The Bottom Line

Working of a Salesforce Admin

Top Ways to Improve Sales Leadership and Salesforce Admin Skills

1. Organizational Relationships

2. Data Management

3. Translating Ideas Into Processes

4. Flexible Communication

5. Sales Process

6. Resourcefulness

7. Project Organization and Management

8. Organizational Optimization

9. Development Mindset

10. Knowing Numbers

Conclusion

1. Not Assessing Cost of Implementation

2. Not Choosing the Right Implementation Partner

3. Complicating the Requirements

4. Ignoring Integration and Data Migration

5. No Internal Buy-In

6. Data Clean-Up

7. Lack of Training

8. Lack of Focus

Conclusion

Salesforce Expanding Net Zero to Its Entire Value Chain

Climate Action Plan at Salesforce

Top Priorities of Climate Action

1. Reducing Emissions

2. Removing Carbon

3. Restoring the Ecosystem

4. Educating and Mobilizing

5. Innovating

6. Advocating Regulation and Policies

Sustainability Cloud 2.0 and Net Zero

Conclusion

Salesforce Sprint 22 Release – An Overview

1. Knowledge Search Filters

2. Revenue Intelligence

3. Platform Flow Orchestrator

4. Collaborative Forecast Enhancements

5. Workforce Engagement