Remove Guesswork and Improve Case Accuracy with Einstein Case Classification!

We have already seen how Salesforce’s Einstein platform can make a major impact on your Sales and Activity behavior, but now we turn our attention to Service cloud.  In this article we are going to look at Einstein Case Classification – Salesforce’s solution to help improve case accuracy and completion by removing the guesswork involved in completing case fields.

Einstein Case Classification, uses predictive intelligence to recommend, populate, or save field values on new cases based on past data. It uses machine learning—AI technology that improves prediction accuracy over time—to remove the guesswork involved in completing case fields, freeing up time for support agents. More time for support agents means more time to focus on your customers.

When a support agent has a case open in the Service Console, the agent sees an alert that Einstein recommendations are available. To view the recommendations, the agent clicks the alert. In Lightning Experience, these recommendations show up in the Einstein Field Recommendations component.

Some of the key benefits of Case Classification, are listed below:

If your team is ready to implement this feature, review the graphic below to better understand the steps involved with deploying.  Our team has helped businesses leverage the Service cloud to its fullest potential, and Case Classification is now a part of that.

Salesforce for Outlook Set to be Retired

Salesforce recently announced that it will be retiring its Salesforce for Outlook feature, which was one of its original solutions to integrating your email inbox with your crm.  The tool in its simplest form, worked quite well – but over time many organizations dealt with continued sync issues using the tool.  It’s not surprising that Salesforce has decided to discontinue this tool, and push Orgs to start using some of the other solutions they have since developed.  We will dive into the alternatives later in this article.

Here is the official communication from Salesforce:

“ Unlike most Salesforce products, users or IT admins install Salesforce for Outlook locally on users’ Microsoft Windows computers. It was built in a time when a cloud-based product was not easily feasible. Salesforce is a cloud-based product, which enables us to always have our customers utilizing the latest, best, and safest versions of our software. Salesforce for Outlook is being replaced by cloud-based functionality.”

Salesforce for Outlook will begin being phased out in December 2020.

Need an alternative?

If you meet the system requirements, consider moving to our next-generation products, Outlook Integration and Einstein Activity Capture. Moving to these products lets you take advantage of our latest email integration features. Plus, these products are cloud-based, which means that you get product updates automatically, with each Salesforce release.

Outlook or Gmail Integration - the Salesforce integration with Outlook and Gmail helps your reps manage their sales more efficiently. Your reps can view, edit, and add Salesforce records directly from their email, and relate emails and events to Salesforce records. The integration between Salesforce and Microsoft® Outlook® requires both server-side setup and a short client-side setup procedure.  Once enabled, you can have a lighting-esque experience set in your email inbox.

Einstein Activity Capture - emails and events that you send and receive are automatically added to the activity timeline of related account, contact, contract, lead, opportunity, and quote records. Plus, contacts and events are synced between the connected accounts and Salesforce.  You can read a more in-depth summary of Einstein Activity Capture’s capabilities in one of our older posts.

Salesforce Anywhere App – the new way to collaborate!

2020 has become the year where companies and business teams have had to learn to adapt and thrive in a virtual environment.  With many of us unable to connect in-person, the ability to connect & collaborate with our teams within our CRM is more vital than ever.  With this in mind, Salesforce is rolling out its new Salesforce Anywhere app.  In this post, we will highlight some of the key features included with this app & how you can sign up to be a part of their Beta program.

What is the Salesforce Anywhere App?  Salesforce describes it as an “app that helps every Salesforce user collaborate with teams, stay productive in their workflow, and keep up to date on their customers from anywhere with chat, alerts, comments and video embedded directly into the Salesforce experience.”

With Salesforce Anywhere​ organizations can:

·      ​S​ell, service and market from anywhere​– powered by ​Salesforce Customer 360 and includes new industry-specific technology from Vlocity;

·      Collaborate from anywhere – with the new Salesforce Anywhere app, which embeds chat, alerts, comments and video directly into the Salesforce experience;

·      Work from anywhere – with a new employee service solution and new employee data model ​to enable organizations to build, manage and scale ​​employee apps and services quickly and securely;

·      ​Data from anywhere – with MuleSoft to integrate all data sources and Tableau to see and understand that data – unlocking insights to make better decisions, fast; and

·      Skill up from anywhere – with new Einstein Recommendations for Trailhead and new learning content ​empowering anyone to help drive their company’s digital transformation.

Along with having your tools readily available, collaboration becomes a breeze too with the Salesforce Anywhere:

·       Stay up to speed from anywhere: Users can subscribe to real-time alerts for any changes and updates made within Salesforce – whether it's accounts, records, opportunities or fields – and see these alerts across mobile and desktop. If a deal advances to a new stage, a service case gets revolved or escalated, or any field that matters gets updated, the entire team can get notified instantly.

·       Collaborate in context: Teammates can start chatting, via instant message or video, while looking at the same page together within Salesforce. Salesforce will offer a new native real-time chat and video experience powered by Amazon Chime. Zoom will also be offered as an out-of-the-box integration so that organizations can leverage their video conference of choice. No screen sharing is necessary because users can always see which teammates are working on the same Salesforce page, and can even follow teammates to other parts of Salesforce, so teams can instantly move from discussing one sales opportunity to another and truly work side-by-side.

·      Take action in the moment: Use in-line comments to add your feedback to any part of a record that needs discussion, and get personalized suggested actions powered by Einstein to update the things you care about quickly.

To get signed up and start trialing the new Salesforce Anywhere app, click here!

Summer 20 Release is here! (Pt. 2)

As a continuation of our last post, we are outlining some additional features included with the Summer ’20 Salesforce release – with our Part 2.

·       Org Maintenance is simplified with Optimizer App

The Optimizer App is a new interactive way to review and act on expert recommendations for maintaining your Salesforce org’s implementation. No need to install a package, just enable the app, click to run, and sit back while Salesforce inspects your org. Quickly identify issues that require immediate attention by using the sortable results list view.

From the list view, it’s a click away from the full results (1) and recommendations (2) and the Setup page to make any changes (3) for over 40 features analyzed as part of the Optimizer.

In-App Guidance Builder

It’s easier and more intuitive to create prompts and walkthroughs. To make way for walkthroughs, the user interface for authoring in-app guidance is now similar to other builder tools in Salesforce.

Click Add again to place your prompt or walkthrough. The right side bar is where you specify the in-app guidance type, prompt type and position, and content (1). When you create a walkthrough, a left sidebar appears to display all the steps of the walkthrough (2). You can delete or reorder steps from the sidebar. The prompt updates as you enter information so you can preview as you work.

After saving new in-app guidance, a settings window appears to customize the action link or button, schedule, profile, and permission settings. And, you can name your prompt and decide to activate it or not. You can always return to the settings by clicking the settings icon in the builder header when editing a prompt (3). The header also includes:

·       Helpful instructions (4)

·       Other in-app guidance on the page (5)

·       The status of the in-app guidance you’re editing (6)

·       Action buttons (the availability of the buttons depends on the in-app guidance type and if you’re previewing or authoring) (7)

Salesforce Surveys: Deeper Org Integration and More Tools for the Builder

Create or update records based on customer responses, personalize surveys with merge fields, and gather feedback post-chat or across a customer's lifecycle. Set initial default settings for surveys. Improve response rates with more question types, a cool new way to share invitations, and improved translator experience.

Some additional features of note, courtesy of the Salesforce release general notes site:

·       Salesforce Anywhere: Streamline and Optimize Salesforce Collaboration (Beta)
Centralize the Salesforce collaboration experience and increase team productivity with Salesforce Anywhere. Your users can chat with teammates inside Salesforce and get customized alerts about Salesforce data changes. And, when your users are on the go, they can use the Salesforce Anywhere mobile app to stay up to date.

·       Salesforce Surveys: Deeper Org Integration and More Tools for the Builder
Create or update records based on customer responses, personalize surveys with merge fields, and gather feedback post-chat or across a customer's lifecycle. Set initial default settings for surveys. Improve response rates with more question types, a cool new way to share invitations, and improved translator experience.

·       Create More Records from Global Profiles
Save time and reduce errors by cutting down on manual data entry when creating records from global profile data with C360 Global Profiles search. Create records on lead and contact standard objects along with the previously supported account object in your org.

Lightning Scheduler: Automatic Resource Assignment, Anonymous Scheduling, Enhanced Scheduling Experience for Global Users, and More
Let your users breeze through appointment scheduling with automatic resource assignment. Anonymize appointments to protect your resources’ privacy and to have the flexibility to reassign different resources if initially assigned resources become unavailable. To better serve global users, Lightning Scheduler now supports kilometers in addition to miles, and users now see appropriate date and time formats on flow screens based on their locale.

Summer 20 Release is here! (Pt. 1)

It’s that time again for Salesforce to push out new features to its user base, with the Summer ’20 release.  As always, the complete catalog of release notes can be found online (click here).  However, our team has gone ahead and pulled out some of our favorite features from this latest batch of updates.  Enjoy!

Split List Views

Allows users to view their list views alongside a record they’ve selected.  It has the feel of the console app, but you can drill down on one specific object & list view.  This feature should give productivity a big boost!

Dynamic Forms

This feature allows admin team or consultant to create subsections of your field layouts – and then use Lightning record page layout features to drag and drop anywhere on your layout.  Say you want a set of fields only visible to one specific team – and sectioned off?  Now you can use dynamic forms to group those fields, then filtering rules to manage its visibility!

Einstein Search

This tool finally get its full rollout!  We’ve been hearing a lot about this feature & it is finally available for all users.  After assigning the appropriate permissions, users can experience a fully dynamic Search bar with the power of Einstein behind it.  It also uses Natural Language Processing to help deliver tailored results to each individual user.

Full View Layout

If your users are more inclined to prefer the classic style view, Salesforce has made available the Lightning “Full View”, which gives off a more classic feel to the page layout.

Organize your records in a personal way with Topics

Most of us by now have learned how Twitter uses hashtags to help categorize & group different comments and posts, by key words or phrases.  Recently Salesforce rolled out a similar feature called Topics, to help users achieve those same results.  Topics (in Salesforce) are words or phrases that you can associate with Salesforce records to organize them around common themes.

Once Topics is enabled, you can begin to start associating the “topics” to records – and in turn start organizing your data in a personalized way.  For Orgs that leverage Chatter – you can start to catalog discussions and posts with those same topic tags too – simply apply the hashtag!

The use cases are endless for how Topics can be leveraged and tagged in your Salesforce instance.  Perhaps you want to tag certain Contacts with a topic related to product interests, or maybe Service agents tag cases with a specific topic that relates to a known issue.  Using the topic feature can also help service agents find older resolved cases that referenced the same topic.  They can add the same topic to cases, contacts, or any other record where they want to include the communications standards theme. After you add the Topics component to record pages, users can easily view, add, and remove topics from records.

To gain a more complete overview of how your Org uses Topics, once enabled, you can create a custom report type with Topic Assignment as the primary object – to start viewing complete lists of your tagged records.

Add a personal touch to your Org with Themes and Branding!

One of Salesforce’s biggest calling cards is that the tool can be customized to your businesses specific needs.  Along with customizing it to fit business processes, it can also be personalized to have the look and feel of your company’s brand.

Within a few clicks, you can start to add company colors and branded images to your Org’s pages, to give that personal feel.  The Themes and Branding features in Salesforce can be accessed through the Setup feature.

Some items to keep in mind when working with Themes & Branding:

• Only one theme can be active at a time, and a theme applies to your entire org.

• By default, orgs use the built-in Lightning Blue theme.

• You can create up to 300 custom themes, but you can’t modify or clone the built-in themes provided by Salesforce.

• Themes don’t apply to Salesforce Classic or to mobile.

• Chatter External users see the built-in Lightning Blue theme only.

• Even if you haven’t selected the option to override themes in the App Manager, your app’s brand image and color always override the Lightning Lite and Lightning Blue themes.

Themes for Communities:

 Along with branding your own Org’s instance – Salesforce also provides pre-built and custom themes for your Communities.  Pre-built themes for Communities come with a lot of the same features: They let you style your site with clicks, not code. Apply color, fonts, and images to your community to match your design or brand. Match your colors precisely by uploading your own logo to generate a custom color scheme. Create branding sets to change colors, fonts, and logos quickly for different audiences and needs.

Get a Better Understanding of Campaign Influence in Salesforce

Trying to connect marketing efforts with acquired business can sometimes be a difficult task for marketing and sales teams.  One key feature that Salesforce has available to Orgs is a tool called “Campaign Influence”.  Campaign influence is a process that allows Opportunities to related to multiple campaigns.  Campaigns are essentially a many-to-many mapping between a Campaign record in Salesforce, and the Leads, Opportunities, or Contacts records that are members of the campaign.

Once Campaign Influence is enabled and setup, teams can use it to track various marketing and sales initiatives to see how they performed at the beginning of the sales funnel.  For example, you can measure the effectiveness of a trade show based of leads converted & opportunities opened.  Or maybe measure the impact of certain email marketing content that leads/contacts react to – and translates to an open opportunity!  A couple items to keep in mind, you can only have one “primary” campaign related to an opportunity.

When are the best times to use Salesforce Campaign Influence tracking?

·      Content Marketing Campaign Measurement

o   eBooks

o   Case Studies

o   Email Newsletters

·      Offline Events

o   Conference Attendee lists

o   Business Cards collected at Events

o   Attendees to an Online Event

o   Visitors to your booth at Trade Show event

·      Sales Prospecting Efforts

·      Direct Mailings

o   Content specific to a group of leads/contacts

Can you automatically create Campaign associations?

Yes.  When a contact role is added to an opportunity, automatic campaign association will add that contact’s campaigns to the campaign influence related list on the opportunity.

One final piece of the puzzle is deciding on an attribution model your Org wants to use, to give credit to the most appropriate Campaign – when there are multiple “influences” involved.  Do you give credit to the campaign that initially generated the lead? Do you give credit to the campaign the lead responded to before they became an opportunity? Or do you give credit to the campaign which influenced the lead right before the deal was won?  These are all great questions to ask your team.  Our team here at DLH has extensive experience working through different types of attribution models (First Touch, Last Touch, Weighted Multi-touch, etc) and campaign influence.  Reach out now for a free consultation!

Visualize record list and summaries in Salesforce’s Kanban View

 For Users working in Salesforce Lightning, and more specifically accessing List Views, you have probably come across the “Kanban” view option.  Although the traditional Lightning List View feature still has its place, the Kanban view can provide some users with the visual summary they crave.  It gives users a summarized, filtered list view – that also allows for you to drag & drop record (cards) from one status to another, operating as a dynamic workspace.  It’s no wonder the word “kanban” comes from a Japanese term that refers to a system of managing your workload.

Some of the most popular use cases for Kanban, include:

·      Visualizing and Managing Opportunity Pipeline (below)

·      Moving Lead records through the qualifying process

·      Managing Case records through your team’s Support process

Records can also be updated in more ways, than simply moving to a new Status/Stage column of your Kanban view.  Just click the down arrow on a Kanban card, and select Edit (1). Make whatever change you need in the record right within the Kanban view. You can also delete a record or change the opportunity’s owner.  If an opportunity doesn’t have any upcoming tasks or events, the Kanban card shows a warning symbol (2) to let you know that you might need to set an activity so your deal doesn’t stall out.

Kanban can be quickly accessed through the list view feature, and by confirming your choices for both how your records are “Grouped By” and “Summarized by”.

*Kanban View gets additions in Summer ‘20 Release

·      Users will have the ability to view a Details panel of their records – that will include key fields & “Guidance for success” to help Users navigate stages:

·       Celebrate successes with Kanban confetti!  This can create a fun way to help celebrate your teams’ wins!

Let Salesforce capture key details about who’s visiting your website!

Design teams spend their time building an attractive & interactive website, while Marketing spends their time attracting customers to visit the website – but what’s being done once those visitors hit your site?  Are you directing those visitors to a form, to capture vital information about their reason for visiting.  One key ingredient of Salesforce’s lead generation function is its Web-to-Lead form feature.  By definition, Web-to-Lead is the process of using a website form to capture visitor information and store that information as a new lead in Salesforce.

When you direct visitors to complete a form on your website, to enter information about themselves and the products that they are interested in, you can turn those one-time visitors into a potential prospect/lead.  A well thought out form can identify key demographics about that person & particular interests in your company’s offerings.

Once a Web-to-Lead form is crafted and placed on your website, Salesforce can help you:

·      Create up to 500 leads on a daily basis

·       Auto-assign their information to the appropriate member of your Sales team

·      Require reCAPTCHA Verification to reduce spam (below)

·       Create an Email AutoReply to customer, based off information provided

·      Map information captured on the form to the Lead record

·      Auto-assign a Lead to a Marketing Campaign based off details provided

·      Redirect visitors to a specified page after form is completed

Once Web-to-Lead is enabled and embedded on your site – you can start to watch the leads come pouring in.  Your sales team will have real-time actionable lead records to begin to start prospecting.  Web-to-Lead can also work in conjunction with many other Lead generation and marketing tools on the market.  Our team is ready to help your Organization help build out these customer journeys.