Almost 12 months from the beginning of the ‘new normal’ and the world has changed beyond recognition. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is Salesforce innovation. The latest round of updates to the platform can all be found in the Spring ’21 Release notes. From flows, to Salesforce meetings to Einstein, this release promises to cement Salesforce’s position as the world’s #1 CRM for another year!

As always, we dove into the full release notes and have consolidated them into the biggest highlights.

Salesforce Flows

Flows are quickly becoming the most important feature on Salesforce. Release after release, Salesforce has been improving their prime automation tool and this quarter’s release is no different. 

First things first, Lightning Flows have now been rebranded Salesforce Flow. With this rebranding comes a range of new features to help all of you automation experts out there. You can now refer to the records that have triggered your flow. This will allow you to check for changes as the process is underway and then use the changes as part of the flow. This was a key reason for many administrators to drop flows and go to Apex but now it can all be done through clicks.

You can now also schedule parts of a flow after you’ve triggered it. This will be great for pushing notifications of a flow after a flow has already been triggered.

Another big new feature of flows is the ability to now send Rich Text emails directly from flows. This was a highly sought after feature of flows and will enable you to deliver high quality emails without any further automation.

Finally, screen flows have gotten a serious upgrade with the introduction of multi-column screen flows. This will give you greater versatility when building screen flows that look good for your brand

Manual Sharing

One of the most sought after features of Salesforce Classic has finally arrived in Lightning. Manual sharing was one of the biggest reasons many administrators used classic. Now you can use the sharing action to manage who the record has been shared with or manually share records with others. This will make it much easier to collaborate with the people around you

Salesforce Meetings

In our previous blog we discussed Marc Benioff’s focus on the digital imperative. With so many people now working from home it was inevitable that Salesforce would start investing in video calling software, and here it is. Salesforce Meetings has risen to compete with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meets but will have all of the powerful Salesforce functionality that we have come to expect.

Although Salesforce Meetings was announced last year, 2 new features have been introduced as previews; Meetings Digest and Meeting Studio. Meeting Digest will be a single page for users to get access on all the information they need before the meeting. This includes who’s attending a meeting, reminders about meeting invitation responses and any relevant related records.

Meeting Studio on the other hand will make it easier for reps to present information during a meeting. They will be able to show their camera and presentation in the same window to keep meetings flowing.

Lightning Page Performance

The need to measure page performance is crucial to the healthy function of a Salesforce Org. The platform now provides greater detail when it comes to measuring how well your Salesforce is performing. A new speedometer will give you insight into Experienced Page Time and page load time.

On top of this, it is now possible to get insight into how your mobile lightning pages are performing. As the world of mobile continues to evolve, this update will become more crucial than ever for businesses to succeed.

Sales

As usual, Salesforce continues to improve on its Sales cloud with a range of different features. The most interesting feature in this release is greater flexibility with opportunity products. You can now add relationships to opportunity products. For example, now you can add 2 locations to one opportunity products so you can track how they fare in both places.

Another interesting improvement to Sales Cloud is the ability to convert leads to a person account and a business account at the same time using an API. This gives greater flexibility when converting leads and helps blur the lines of business and person account for companies who have both.

Experience Cloud

Community Cloud has now been renamed Experience Cloud. With this evolution comes a range of new features to create the ideal experience for your customers, employees and partners. The most exciting of these features is the Build Your Own (LWR) template. This gives extra flexibility when creating your Experience Cloud and allows for increases in developer productivity with bare pages as the basis for your very own template.

Einstein

Last but very much not least, Einstein continues to come on leaps and bounds. Personally, this is my favourite aspect of these releases and this is no exception!

Service Cloud

The biggest Einstein evolution in this release happened in Service Cloud. Bots will now greet your customers and help guide them to one of your agents for help. This will provide improved customer experience at every step of their interaction with your customer. Articles have also been enhanced with Einstein Bots. In a pilot, bots will send your customers useful information when they ask a question. This will limit the need for your customers to engage time from your agents. These bots will also capture customer feedback so your business can continually iterate and improve.

Sales Cloud

In Einstein for Sales, Opportunity scoring has been augmented. It now relies on a global scoring model. This means you need less data for Einstein to predict the quality of your opportunities. All of this leads to more accurate and viable forecasting.

In Conclusion

All in all, this quarter’s release followed the trends expected for the year 2021. From Salesforce meetings to mobile improvements, Salesforce is hoping to capitalise on the digital imperative. Similarly, improvements in Einstein and Flows reflect the need for technology to become faster and smarter as the world continues to change at a rapid pace.

Find out more about the Salesforce Spring ’21 release here