The 2015 spring release of Salesforce has more than 250 new and improved features, delivers over 130 customer ideas and has 330, 000 customer vote points.
The new release allows you to connect with your customers anywhere and build meaningful relationships with your customers, partners and employees on any device (tablet, smartphone, desktop).
Here is a compilation of my top 10 features of Salesforce’s Spring ’15 release.
1)Salesforce Email Connect
Here comes the next generation of integration between salesforce and microsoft. Salesforce email connect brings salesforce into web outlook app on mac and windows computers, browser and on any mobile device. Users get to see salesforce data in sync such as contacts, accounts, opportunities and more directly.
With exchange sync, salesforce events and contacts in outlook can be managed. Both are cloud based, so there is no need for software installation.
2) Analytics Cloud
The analytics cloud allows you to easily share data across the organization through the dashboard, Chatter, and the iOS app. It native to the Salesforce cloud and built on the Wave platform. The dashboard can provide provide a graphical view of your data in reports, which also a built in feature. It is possible to design custom analytic apps and deploy them much faster than traditional business intelligence implementation. However, it is also possible and easily integrate external data sources such as SAP or Oracle database should you so desire.
3) Duplicate Alerts & Blocking
Improve quality of your CRM data with realtime alerting, reporting and blocking. A duplicate rule can be created in order to avoid duplicated records. However, you can also use duplicate management to configure when users are allowed to create duplicate records. When the allow duplicate option is selected, the alert and report options are available for you to keep track of the duplicate records.
4) File Connect
Files are essential, and are the core to many business process. As people work, many files are created and saved across different machines; It can become quite a challenge to retrieve those files again, or even impossible if the person is using a different computer. The Salesforce Connect can easily solve this problem by connecting and integrating external files repositories directly with Salesforce, which allows files to be accessed from any device. Salesforce Connect currently allows to connect popular cloud storage solutions such as Microsoft Sharepoint, OneDrive for business, and Google Drive will be included in the near future. Files will be available through a single interface and people will not need to browse across different websites to search for their files.
5) Content Builder
Content builder is a user-friendly tool to create emails which are responsive, meaning that your emails are going to come out beautifully across all devices including mobile and tablet. Using simple actions such as simple drag and drop, existing email templates, and email preview in real-time to easily create robust emails without any coding or design experience.
6) Event Monitoring
Event monitoring allows admins to view the security performance and usage of Salesforce, but it also allows customers to see performance and data usage on all their salesforce apps. All the interactions are accessible via the API so that customers can connect it to the data visualization app of their choice. Logs are available as well for people who prefer them, which will display who accessed what information, and from where.
7) Journey Builder Mobile Activities:
Marketers can now connect with customers on any device. Using journey builder, users can easily plan and optimize customer interactions with SMS messages created in the mobile connect app. Journey builder lets users to send mobile phone alerts including deals or discounts to increase in app purchases and app usage. Last but not least, user profiles can be built by capturing customer data such as zip codes or mobile device types.
8) Social Customer Service Starter Pack
The Social Customer Service Starter Pack allows you to connect your social media directly from Salesforce and deliver an easy customer service without a separate Radian6 contract. With the Social Customer Service Starter Pack, you can connect up to two social accounts such as Facebook and Twitter.
9) Sales Path (Beta)
Sales path helps sales representatives advance the process of deal stages in the sale cycle by guiding them at every sale stage. Moreover, sales path recommends sales engagement tools to sales representatives in order to push deals forward faster. Any change to a company’s sale methodology is automatically reflected in this new feature.
10) Community Builder
The community builder has a new leaderboard which allows you to see who participates in discussion and show the most active members by ranking them. A community can be easily branded thanks to the automated color palettes that are available, and all these modifications can be made by an admin without any code with the new Pages feature.
We hope that this top 10 gave you some ideas that you could integrate into your Salesforce accounts in order to optimize your workflow and performance. Stay tuned for similar blog post as many exciting new features come out every release!
