Spring has sprung, as they say, and what are we excited for: longer, warmer days and new releases, of course! Being one of the three new releases each year, the Salesforce Spring ’21 has plenty of new improvements to dive into — here is the summary of some of our top picks.
Sales Cloud: High Velocity Sales for Opportunities
With this release, users can now leverage sales cadences on top of sales objects at any point of the sales cycle. Send emails, or make calls to reach out to the right Opportunity Contacts with the right message, all accurately timed in your sales cycle.
How can this new feature benefit you?
Sales teams can now use Einstein Conversation Insights with video calls, create call collections, and see more information on the Conversation Insights Dashboards.
Managers and sales representatives can use sales cadences with opportunities, deactivate sales cadences, and be more specific about changing the target assignee.
▶️ Watch demo Sales: High Velocity Sales for Opportunities
Field Service Appointment Assistant
Appointment Assistant enhances customer engagement and transparency by letting customers know when help is on the way, giving real-time updates on the channel of their choice such as SMS or self-service portal.
Appointment Assistant lets customers know when their mobile worker arrives so that they have time to make COVID safety preparations or don’t miss their service appointment. Appointment expirations you set stop customers from seeing a worker’s location, contact information like name and photo provide safety and security for both workers and customers.
▶️ Watch demo Service: Field Service Appointment Assistant
Also new for Field Service in the Spring ‘21 is the functionality to create shifts faster by predefined shift patterns. Shift patterns save time by creating a pattern of regularly scheduled shifts in one quick action. Your shift managers can select a pattern, such as a week’s worth of regular hours, to create shifts in bulk for a service resource or service territory. Set the pattern to repeat or specify a date range.
Sales Cloud Forecast Adjustments
Sales Cloud Forecast Adjustments on the Salesforce mobile app allows users to view and make adjustments to forecasting from anywhere.
Previously, all mobile forecasts were read-only. Now you can adjust your own forecasts (but not your subordinates’ forecasts) right in the mobile app.
Einstein Recommendation Builder
Einstein Recommendation Builder uses AI-powered, data-driven recommendations by matching records from one Salesforce object to another. Tell Einstein which Salesforce objects to learn from, customize your settings, and put your Einstein recommendation to work in a Next Best Action strategy.
As you accept recommendations, you can trigger lightning flow. Einstein monitors the feedback using new data to adjust its recommendations, becoming more intelligent over time. No code required.
How can this new feature benefit you?
Increase revenue: Sales teams can recommend the most relevant products to existing customers or recommend the best offers to prospects.
Improve first-time fix rate: Field service teams can recommend the right parts to each work order to resolve customer issues quickly.
Streamline your employee recruitment process: Staffing firms or HR teams can improve their placement rates by matching jobs to the best candidates.
▶️ Watch the demo Service: Einstein Recommendation Builder
Experience Cloud
What used to be known as Community Cloud (or Communities) is now more appropriately named Experience Cloud. Why? The name better reflects the multiple types of digital experiences users can create, like portals, websites, help centers, forums, and mobile apps.
Other notable updates to Experience Cloud include:
- Lightning Web Runtime powers the brand new Build Your Own template. Developers can build everything from custom portals and microsites to marketing websites with incredible page speed performance and productivity.
- CMS Enhancements introduces new export functionality and a new content key that allows for copying content between orgs (like sandbox and production org) and uses the content to keep the reference intact. Users can also work in a sandbox to create their own website and easily export/import content as a ZIP file to production while keeping CMS Lightning components.
- Mobile Publisher Enhancements now enables users to easily upload files from a computer, or existing files in Salesforce, and associate them to the record from the Files related list. Additionally, ever want to see what a mobile publisher app would look like from your own lightning site? With the Mobile Publisher Playground App, everyone can download a non-branded Mobile Publisher App (free of charge, and without having the request courtesy licenses or sign an NDA!) and see how the Mobile Publisher mobile experience looks like.
First-Party Tracking Enhancement in Pardot
Pardot is moving away from supporting third-party cookies to protect users’ privacy better.
Both first and third-party cookies track user behavior on websites, but how they collect information and how it is used is different. As the name suggests, third-party cookies are created by a website other than the one the user is visiting directly. They are used for cross-site tracking, ads, and retargeting. First-party cookies are created on the website the user is directly visiting. Pardot has first-party cookie tracking to record prospect activity, give you more flexibility with campaign attribution, and block traffic that doesn’t come from your domains.
Switching to first-party tracking in Pardot must be done before the end of 2021. For more information:
When will these features take effect? Some features in the Spring’21 release apply to all users and immediately took effect with the release went live. Other features require direct action by an administrator before users can benefit from the new functionality. Talk to your administrator – and we’ll help you out.
Learn more with additional resources for the Salesforce Spring’21 Release:
- Visit salesforce.com/releases
- Watch demo videos on the Salesforce Releases YouTube playlist
- Take the Release Highlights Trail in Trailhead
- Read details in the Salesforce Spring’21 Release Notes