Posted on by Erik

My Favorite Things in the Salesforce Summer 20 Release

Lemonade Recipe for Kids
Nothing says Summer like mason jars containing a cool drink sweating in the heat.

How are you? Are you stir crazy right now? Quarantining with a toddler during the wettest spring on record has made me very stir crazy. Now that the weather has finally turned the corner to construction season summer, I’m trying to get outside as much as possible. When I can’t go outside, I’m trying to read more to help me unwind. I’m currently reading this tome, but I just finished reading the Salesforce Summer 20 release notes and do I have some fun stuff to share with you.

As always, this post is not a comprehensive recap of what’s in the release notes; this is more a reminder for myself and my customers about what’s new and interesting. Also, I’m not covering all the clouds, but I go through most of them.

General

Split view is no longer just contained to the console view. The optimizer app is now a dedicated app. Can someone say sayonara PDF reports?

In-app guidance has been making inroads the last few releases. I’m a big advocate that this can really help with adoption and enablement. A big improvement this release is that the builder has a new look and feel (see below).

There’s a new profile in town: minimum access user profile. This new out of the box profile provides access to activities, Chatter internal user, lightning console user, and view help. Everything can be added via permission sets.

Dynamic Forms

As someone who’s been working with Salesforce for two years, I’ve wondered why we have something great like the App Builder, but we still need to go back to Page Layouts to make edits. It’s a jarring experience for administrators and developers. To put an end to this, we now have dynamic forms which will take page layouts into the 21st century.

Add Fields to the Lightning App Buider using Dynamic Forms
Dragging fields on a page never looked so good.

Dynamic forms will allow admins/developers to place sections and fields where they want without having to touch the page layout editor. Not only is this a better UI, it means that there’s now a single assignment model for the lightning page instead of the current dual model in place.

I am convinced this will slay the monolithic record details beast.

This is in non-GA preview, so sign up now, and enable it in your org. Then open a page and upgrade an existing record detail section.

Flow

Debugging just got easier in Flow. You can now specify the input variables. This is incredibly useful and is going to make everyone’s life easier. Easier to debug = faster time to deploy to end users = more time saved by everyone.

Surveys

I must confess, I usually utilize a third-party application to manage surveys in Salesforce. If you’re in a similar boat, I think you should give Surveys a second look this release. There’s a lot here – both big and small – and this product is one to watch.

Quick summary of the updates here:

I’m really excited about the second bullet point. Now surveys with a low response score, can create a record that can be used to follow up. Customer Lifecycle Surveys sound really interesting to me. There’s a lot of potential here, and these can really be useful to make sure your customer 360 isn’t lagging in any regards.

Scheduler

You can now automatically assign a service resource, which will lead to even faster scheduling. Additionally, you can have an anonymous scheduling now. This means resources names are not shown to external users. This not only protects the tech’s privacy, but also allows flexibility if a resource is no longer available.

High Velocity Sales

HVS is like fine wine. It gets better every release. The major new element here is Einstein Call Coaching.

Instead of broadly asking sales teams how calls are going, inside sales managers can now listen to the tapes. Call Coaching shows who’s speaking when, but it’s also tracking the conversation so you can see important moments and jump to them.

For example, I’m getting back into guitar playing, and I don’t want want to watch all these YouTube guitarists talk about inverted chords forever; just show me the finger positions for the songs. HVS is similar, skip to the filler and jump to the thriller in your inside sales team’s calls. Don’t have time to listen to all the tapes? There’s a daily email digest. I’m really excited about this, and the best part is it’s not an additional license on top of HVS; it’s part of core HVS.

Some other fun stuff in HVS this release:

A listener branch step in the Sales Cadence Builder.
Look at that email listener! So stoic and patient.

Sales Cloud

In this release we say hello to an old friend, and goodbye to another.

Pardot

Lots of great things in this release for Pardot, especially if you’re a Pardot / Salesforce administrator.

Administrators can now manage users directly in the Salesforce Setup. Person account syncing is now possible without having to contact support. Pardot buttons are now standard buttons.

When I do demos, I always check if the Pardot and Salesforce connector is working, because that dictates whether or not I’m going to have a good time in my demo. Good, nay great times, are ahead because the Salesforce connector in Pardot is now instant.

I saved the best news for last here: you can now have a Pardot sandbox. Pretty awesome, and long overdue. It does require a full sandbox. Change sets are not possible here, nor is email sending. So it may not be everything you’re looking for in a sandbox, but it’s a big step in the right direction. I found the release notes to be lacking around this, so please read this blog instead.

Service

If you read every page about what’s new in Service cloud this release, it may have been quicker for you to re-binge “Tiger King”. See what I did there? I made a quarantine joke! Insert Tiger King meme here! I’m here all day folks.

With all of your chat transcripts in Salesforce, you can now leverage Einstein to give you recommended replies. I think this is really neat, but I wonder about how many more components we can put in Service console. It’s already a crowded experience, especially the chat interface.

Remember that Chapelle Show skit about wrapping it up? It’s now in Salesforce. This is interesting because to me it’s basically the next best action at the field level. It’s our first foray into this, so I’ll be curious to see how this continues to develop in coming releases.

times up wrap GIF

Chat and Bots

You can now choose your own adventure in chat.

A screenshot of a custom action button and Channel Menu for a new product page.

Bots have a few things worth noting. You can now utilize skill-based routing with bots, which will mean a smoother handoff between bots and agents. Bots can now handle multiple languages, but one language per bot por favor. You can now have 20 bots, as opposed to 10. Lastly, bot builder got a slightly updated look and feel so it’ll be easier to navigate when adjusting your bot.

Service Cloud Voice

Let us talk about Service Cloud Voice – pun not intended.

Voice is a pre-built connector for Service Cloud, which leverages Amazon Connect to provide phone call pop screens. This connector allows the capture and storage of telephony data into Salesforce in real-time, which in turn provides both real-time phone call transcriptions and next best action recommendations.

Why is Amazon involved here? Instead of paying a consultant to build out phone screens, that’s already done. Amazon Connect provides those, but also provides telephony, IVR, and more. Voice allows customers the ability to spin up a contact center in minutes and get to work with customers. No AWS footprint currently? Not a problem. Salesforce will provision an instance with voice.

You’ll soon be able to bring your own telephony solution, and those partners will be announced later, with anticipation it’ll be available with all major providers.

Voice is going to allow you to have better service data in Salesforce than you have right now, and the real-time capabilities provided will mean quicker call resolutions and better knowledge article suggestions.

Field Service Lightning

A few items of note in FSL.

Manufacturing Cloud

With the pandemic going on, forecasting for customers is more important than ever. In speaking to some the last few months, some aren’t able to forecast the rest of the year because demand is so off, both positive and negative, that they are literally in the dark about how things are going.

With the new updates in manufacturing cloud, I feel the product is better suited than ever to capture forecasting needs of manufacturers.

Account based forecasting is the bread and butter of manufacturing cloud. Now it’s enhanced with the capability for account managers to set targets.

These targets can be set by accounts, products, or time periods – which provides better account visibility monthly, quarterly, or yearly.

Why utilize account manager targets instead of forecasting? I asked my colleague Omer for clarity on this and I loved his response so much, it’s verbatim below.

Think of account manager targets as a place where you go to make New Year’s resolutions. Your resolution can be currency based (profit margin, revenue, etc.,) or it can be non-currency based (CSAT, NPS, etc.,)

Account based forecasting gives you forecasting at the account level, not just the opportunity level, which is what was possible with collaborative forecasting. Account based forecasting works with both run-rate and new-business.

Forecasting can now be done for key accounts. This allows you to tier your accounts better, but requires a permission set.

In a small win, I’m ecstatic that the core manufacturing cloud objects are now available as report types. Read more here and here.

Sales agreements can now handle revenue orders placed in a different currency than the sales agreement. For example, an order may be in Euros and the sales agreement is in US Dollars. All revenue sourced metrics would be in USD.

With these new capabilities, the data model for manufacturing cloud has added a few objects.

Einstein

Einstein has been busy cooking in the lab. Do physicists cook? I think I must be delirious from thinking about this release so much I’m confusing what scientist does what.

Sales Cloud Einstein

  • You can now only see scoring factors you have access to
  • Opportunity score is now able to be driven by products, quotes, and price books

Discovery

You can now pick the best of three models.

Voice

RIP Einstein Voice, we hardly knew thee.

Search

Einstein Search is now in Beta, and is available on your phone too. No license required, just a permission set. If you’re not familiar, check out what it can do here. We’ve had it enabled for months, and you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Analytics

Data prep gets a new look. This has been teased for a while, so I’m delighted it’s GA Beta. Other than looking great, it achieves a few other things. The new data prep does not show every transformation like dataflow. This means it’s easier for people to understand what’s going on, and brings us more in line with other analytics solutions in the market.

So nice, we gotta look twice! Here’s another screen shot.

You like screenshots? Are you sitting down? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you’ll like what’s below.

That’s right dear reader and fret not, your eyes are not failing you: you can now explore multiple data sets in a single query. Game changer.

Here’s some other new stuff:

Lastly, you can now create a watchlist for up to 20 KPIs across dashboards. This is beta, but I like how this creates a dashboard sampler for anyone in your organization.

B2B Commerce

This could be a blog of its own, but TL;DR: B2B Commerce is now on lightning, and is not a managed package. It’s similar to when we made the switch from classic to lightning a few years ago. The biggest advantage here is this allows B2B Commerce access to the common data model.

Both classic and lightning B2B commerce will exist in tandem for the foreseeable future. No action needed on your part now, but stay tuned.

Communities

Quick hitters here.

Quip

Congratulations on making it this far! Two quick items here:

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next release.