The Salesforce Summer ‘15 Release has dropped and we can confirm that it is HUGE. With over 225 new features included in this season’s update, there are some nuggets of gold that are well worth your time.
We’ve ran our eyes over the release and hand selected the 6 new or improved features which caught our eye.
Analytics Cloud – Apple Watch
We all know that cloud-based ERP systems are the most mobile and accessible ERP systems available and we’ve long sang from the ‘anytime, anywhere’ hymn book, but Salesforce have taken mobility to the next level by making the analytics that matter to your business available on the Apple Watch.
Now you can access the latest, up-to-date key data, metrics and dashboards simply by swiping and tapping away at your watch.
The user-friendly voice search feature enables you to channel your inner Maxwell Smart at the same time as finding real-time data, ensuring that being on the move doesn’t prevent you from being in control of what makes your business tick.
Sales Cloud – SalesForce Engage
Salesforce Engage is a new solution that empowers sales reps with new tools to allow them to navigate customers through the sales process in a faster and more efficient way.
One of the key features of Salesforce Engage is giving reps access to a library of marketing-approved email templates, making their life much easier and ensuring their communication with the customer is consistently at the high level your business expects.
In addition to the marketing tools, Salesforce Engage offers Engage Alerts – a fully customizable real time feed of prospect engagement within Salesforce CRM or on the Salesforce1 mobile app, allowing your reps to understand every interaction so they can sell smarter.
Finally, Engage Reports allows reps to monitor and assess the success of their own campaigns – such as the performance of template and non-templated emails, opens and click-through rates – so they can discover what closes deals fastest, accelerating your sales and smashing those targets.
Oh, and did we mention that all this is available from your mobile device or CRM?
Service Cloud – Omni-Channel
What promises to be one of the more popular features of this season’s release is Omni-Channel, which allows you to create work items – such as cases, leads, opportunities and chats – from Salesforce records and AUTOMATICALLY route them to the right agent for the job.
Agents’ work capacity and availability can be managed to make sure that they only take on the number of assignments they are capable of handling. You can also dictate which agents can handle different types of assignments. Cool huh?
A key feature of Omni-Channel – which, by the way, integrates into the Salesforce console – is the ability to prioritize work items to ensure that the most critical assignments get actioned quickly and automatically, saving agents from having to manually pick and choose work items from a queue.
Salesforce1 Platform – Encryption
Highly regulated industries that are bound by confidentiality and regularly deal with sensitive data have been crying out for this feature, and now it’s here.
Salesforce Platform Encryption requires no additional hardware or software and allows you to encrypt files & attachments as well as standard & custom fields.
With Platform Encryption, you and your customers can rest easy knowing that contractual privacy obligations are always satisfied.
Marketing Cloud – Social Listening in Social Studio
Social Studio’s extensive feature list has become even more thorough with the Summer ’15 release offering Marketers over 30 new tools to track what people – and the market – are saying about your brand and analyze what that means to your business.
Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Chief Strategy Officer Michael Lazecrow has remained true to his word after emphasising the importance of social media in the business landscape ahead of Social Studio’s launch in November 2014.
Not only have Lazecrow’s team introduced a score of helpful new features, such as the ability to publish through YouTube and Google+, they have also made analyzing the impact your posts are having through the introduction of such features as link tracking, Google+ dashboards and Source Groups – a tool which allows you to monitor the blog, Twitter and website feeds you care about.
Community Cloud – Connect for Google Drive
It’s here! With Google Apps popularity growing so fast and so broadly, Salesforce could no longer ignore the need to integrate Google Drive into Files Connect, joining already popular integrations Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive.
Google Drive users now need not feel out in the cold, as you can now access any of your prized Google Drive files immediately via desktop or the Salesforce1 app.
