A Walk through the Salesforce Spring’18 Features

From Winter to Spring, not only did the seasons’ change but also the features of Salesforce. Salesforce is a platform which is undergoing continuous upgrades every now and then. There are three releases in a year with amazing product innovation and mind-blowing ideas. The editions are named Summer, Winter and Spring. We are going to know about the latest Spring edition here.

Spring ’18 retired over 111,000 points of customer-initiated ideas from the IdeaExchange, and is packed with over 300 innovations that can fundamentally transform the customer experience with more personalization, enhanced productivity, and expanded data privacy features across the platform. As I won’t be able to accommodate all the super cool features in here I’m going to get you through some of the important ones. Here are the highlights of this Spring release.

Personalized Navigation in Lightning Experience

Change an application’s route bar to supercharge your productivity and suit the unique way you work. This new Lightning Experience feature allows you to reorder items, and rename or remove items that you’ve added. You can add granular items, like a dashboard, list, or record.

Lightning Experience

Salesforce release of a Surveys application seems to be a huge surprise! Create beautiful, easy-to-use forms for collecting feedback and data from your users or customers. All survey data is stored in your org, so you can easily create reports, dashboards and share insights within your organization. Surveys are available by default if you have Health Cloud and is available for an additional fee if you aren’t a Health Cloud user.

Duplicate Jobs (Reactive Dupe Management)

With the relatively recent release of duplicate and matching rules in Salesforce, it is becoming incredibly easy to block or alert users of potential duplicates. You can now leverage standard or custom re-duplication rules and schedule them up to run in batches. When these rules run and they find matches, they will automatically merge your records for you. This will work on Leads, Contacts, Accounts or Person Accounts. Can’t overstate how powerful this can be to keep your data clean!

Einstein Forecasting

For those of you utilizing Collaborative Forecasting, you’re going to get a treat. Spring’18 rolls out the beta of Einstein Forecasting. This is a really cool concept that predicts your Best Case & Committed Forecast based not just on your forecasting trends, but also based on algorithms and Opportunity itself. Trade guesswork for accurate forecasts at the rep, team, and company level, enabling your teams to work smarter and faster in Sales Cloud!

Linkedin Integration for Leads

Salesforce has brought out a “Web2Lead” style integration with LinkedIn to further automate your Leads coming into your Org. Available in Lightning & Classic, you can now enable the ability for LinkedIn Lead Gen advertisements to create Leads inside of Salesforce. With this new feature, if you advertise on LinkedIn and someone fills out your form, that information will automatically feed into Salesforce as a Lead.

Store Certain Data Privacy Preferences (GDPR)

With Spring ’18 comes a new object “Individual”. Data privacy records, based on the Individual object, let you store certain data privacy preferences for your customers. These records can help you honor and respect your customers’ wishes when they request only specific forms of contact from your company.

Paths Everywhere

One of the coolest features from Lightning Experience has been the Sales Paths. This started with Leads and Opportunities and then came out for Custom Objects after. You can now add a Path to any standard object. It comes with pre-created Paths for Accounts, Campaigns and even Cases, but you can add to other objects as needed. As part of this, you can setup these paths against any picklist fields on those objects. You build this with a pretty easy-to-create Lightning component and then add it to the page layout.

Pardot Lead to Account Matching

This feature that is available to Pardot users is an intriguing one. Pardot will now attempt to match Leads to Accounts based on a series of pre-built matching algorithms. This has a few elements to it. First, you get a “Matched Leads” component that you can add to your Account record. From this component, users can see a list of Leads that appear to be related to the Account you are looking at. From here, a user can easily convert one of those Leads without having to leave the Account. Really convenient for users for sure!

See More Relevant Objects First in Top Results

Top Results lists the most relevant results for your most frequently used objects. The improved ordering of objects means less scrolling and clicking around to the object you want and more of getting work done. This change applies to Lightning Experience only. Objects are ranked according to the frequency and search term.

Custom Themes

The ability to customise the look and feel of Salesforce has never really been available. From Spring ’18 the age of bland Orgs ends. Showcased at Dreamforce, the ability to completely customise the colours of your Lightning Application is here, you can now change brand image, brand colours, page background image and default avatar image.