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You may think that most companies ditched the classic Salesforce UI and jumped onto the new Salesforce Lightning Experience when it was announced in Winter16? From what I hear the Lightning Experience was, in all it’s premature greatness, a tad too premature for most companies, especially those who utilise more than just the Sales functionality.
Wait right there. Spring 16 is around the corner and as you may well know it’s jam packed with new Lightning enhancements that benefit sales, service and marketing professionals alike. These new enhancements could certainly have you running (albeit with caution) to the Lightning enable button.
I’m a little late to the game when it comes to the Spring 16 release, but let’s take a look at some of my top features making their way to Lightning this Spring. Hopefully, they will help you decide whether the time to migrate across to lightning is now (well in February when it is actually released).
Ok so there are a lot of Sales core/productivity features being released with Spring 16 from; Person Accounts, which enable you to capture information about individual people you do business with (business-to-consumer); global actions and composer window – enabling sale agents to multi-task without having to leave their view to log calls, create tasks etc; Collaborative Forecasting; and the knew Kanban board, which if you are familiar with Agile, allows reps to optimise work, increase continuous production and balance workloads.
However, it’s the new Lightning features that benefit the rest of your organisations teams that get me really excited! Here are a few:
Yes! A hot topic in the office last year and a much requested feature from our clients, I am excited to be welcoming the ability to edit list views and to create on-the-fly filters. Not just a feature worthy of your Sales reps, but service professionals can take advantage of the filters to present relevant data faster. List views can also display charts enabling your users to view a graphical representation of your list view data. Check out how to create filters here.
Thisnew Email Lightning Experience feature enables you to, compose an email from Campaigns and Cases, use/create templates, automatically BCC sent emails, bounce notifications and opt-out indicators all in one pop-out composer window! So if like me you send many emails then this little beauty is going to be a productivity enhancing little treat for you. Like the sound of this new feature then click here to find out more.
Spring 16 and Lightning brings you a whole new way to connect with your customers. Excited? Yes? You should be. Apart from being able to send templated emails view case feed and operate a real time live agent service your support process also just got much simpler thanks to Assets (and the Assets Tab is default ON in this release), and Work Orders. Let’s take a closer look.
Work orders area great new feature this Spring as they enable your support reps and field technicians to keep track of the work that needs to be performed for your customer. Basically they provide tasks that need to be performed for a customer. For example, there is a problem with a product that a customer purchased from you, a work order could be created internally to attend and resolve the problem. A great thing about this feature is that it is also available in the Classic UI as well as Lightning – perfect if you are not ready to migrate to lightning just yet. Want to get your work order in? Click here for more information.
For more information on all the goodies coming to your Service cloud this Spring click here.
Marketeers, now you have the option to generate and track outbound campaigns with Lightning! Not only does your marketing team get a swanky new layout that shows campaign members detail and progress, and customer engagements with campaign member status tracking, but you can also add campaigns members or update campaign member status using the Data Import Wizard! Neat huh? You now have no excuse for missing the impact important campaigns have on related deals in the pipeline 🙂
Marketers, to see all the Lightning goodies on Campaigns this Spring 16 click here!
So these are just a FEW of the updates that are coming your way this Spring 16. You can find a whole lot more here.
If you are still not convinced Lightning is ready for all your users then don’t forget (depending on your edition), you can deploy Lightning Experience to a set of users using profiles or permission sets. Another great thing about Lightning is that if you find that there is a particular feature that isn’t Lightning ready, then you can always switch back to Salesforce Classic.
Need help with migrating over to Lightning? Then check out the Lightning experience migration tracks on Trailhead. Or Migrate to Lighting like a ‘boss’ with Migration Assistant which can be found by searching for Migration Assistant in Setup.
Have fun and see you on the light(ning) side.
Jenny
Our independent tech team has been servicing enterprise clients for over 15 years from our HQ in Bristol, UK. Let’s see how we can work together and get the most out of your Salesforce implementation.
