Cookie usage

We use our own and third-party cookies to improve website performance and evaluate the use you make of it. By continuing to browse this site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change settings and get more information here.

salesforce spring 2018 release

Salesforce Spring 2018 Release

Salesforce Spring 2018

With the arrival of each season, Salesforce announces a series of improvements and new functionalities for the platform. The purpose is to expand the possibilities for creating new, more complex scenarios that adapt seamlessly to our customers’ business needs. Salesforce is also again bolstering its commitment to migration from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience, incorporating new elements available only on the latter and driving an enhanced user experience which is more visual and interactive. The 8 Salesforce clouds (Sales, Service, Marketing, Community, IoT, Analytics, App, Commerce) have been updated with hundreds of new functionalities since 10 February. They are all covered in the company’s release notes.

Our S4G offices in Madrid and Barcelona have been waiting for the announcement of the new features to test them and start to apply them across all our projects.

Here we look at the ones we think are the most interesting and which can add most value to the platform.

It’s the turn of Salesforce Spring 2018 and it’s stronger than ever

SURVEYS

Natives surveys in Salesforce! The arrival of the Survey feature lets us create fully personalised user questionnaires simply and visually. Questions can be posed and different elements added to answer them. Possibilities include:

  •       Fill-in text box
  •       Clickable predefined answers (individual and multiple-answer questions)
  •       Star rating (1 to 5)
  •       Calendar

This is one of the main Salesforce Spring 2018 releases

Customisation via a builder with a friendly, easy-to-use graphic interface. Drag and drop to create surveys with a very similar look to a PowerPoint. Fully customisable: make a presentation cover, set a background image, decide on the main colours and typefaces, apply formats…you can even say whether the survey answers should be stored anonymously. Plus, the builder has a section dedicated to analysing results with a series of graphs and statistics about the responses obtained.

To make it easier for respondents to answer, the surveys can be located on the organisation’s website, in a portal or community or sent by email, sharing a link to access them. The main handicap is the need to be a Salesforce user to be able to answer. But we’re sure it will soon be able to be completed by people outside of the organisation. Who knows whether in Salesforce Summer ‘18…?

DYNAMIC PAGE EXPERIENCE

This new functionality lets us determine the circumstances under which elements of an organisation’s website should be shown or not. It entails creating a dynamic page that changes look depending on who is viewing it or on record conditions.

For example, we can indicate that a graph of opportunities won be shown only if there are such opportunities. You could also make a text message be visible only to a specific group of users, etc.

It’s a very handy functionality when you need to control what each user in the organisation can see without having to create multiple layouts. Just set the right filters for the page components and that’s it.

THEMES

This was one of the new features announced at Dream force 2017 and which is finally here. Now you can create themes that give the organisation the same look and feel as the company. Choose the background image, banner, main colour palette, user avatars…

There are 7 standard themes to which you can add up to 300 personalised ones more. Plus there is a “Preview” mode to see what the organisation will look like before deciding whether to apply the theme definitively.

It’s a very simple tool that boosts the visual experience enormously.

DUPLICATE JOBS

Until now, Matching Rules gave us a standard way of knowing whether a contact we created in Salesforce was a possible duplicate of another existing one but we couldn’t then analyse all the records in the organisation. Salesforce Spring ‘18 includes Duplicates Jobs to help process duplicates.

Duplicate Jobs lets us scan all the lead, contact and account records we have in Salesforce and notifies us with the results of those it considers duplicates. We can then share the records and decide whether to combine them or not.

This function can be a real boon for data analysis and cleansing.

LEADS FROM LINKEDIN

One of the major new features of this Salesforce Spring is the possibility of generating leads in Salesforce from LinkedIn thanks to cross-platform integration. We can join a LinkedIn account to Salesforce and use the ad form on the LinkedIn page to automatically create a lead in Salesforce with the data entered. This functionality has a limit of 500 records/day. No more will be created over this amount, but the information obtained from LinkedIn can be emailed to marketing team.

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

With the entry into force of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on 25 May, companies will have to make changes to the way they handle individuals’ personal details. Salesforce has begun to make these changes to ensure that its systems comply with the law. The core aim of the GDPR is to give people more control over the way their personal details are gathered, used and stored. It also extends the rights of people who share or delete their personal details.

Salesforce Spring 2018 features the new functionality, “Individual”, which makes it possible to establish customers’ individual preferences regarding:

  •       The attainment, storage and sharing of their personal details
  •       Monitoring geolocation and website activity
  •       Packaging personal details for their appropriation
  •       Requesting products and services
  •       Deleting records and related personal details

Salesforce has also enabled a website with recommended solutions to handle certain commonplace scenarios within companies.

For more information on the GDPR and how it can affect your company, particularly in the marketing area, see our S4G blog post which goes into the matter in more detail.

In short, Salesforce Spring 2018 is full of new features and functionalities to improve and expand the platform’s possibilities. If you have any question about what the new release can offer you, please don’t hesitate to contact us.


Juan Carlos Pascual. Consultant