Get ready for Salesforce Meetings!

It’s almost release time, with the Summer ’21 release right around the corner – and with that said, we are providing a sneak peak of one of the upcoming features.  With a large majority of teams moving their meetings to the virtual world, Salesforce meetings provides a much needed boost to help manage those engagements.  With Salesforce meetings, reps can now prepare, host, and follow up on calls that they schedule directly within their Salesforce instance.  Salesforce Meetings provides a holistic view of the contacts involved with the meeting (& see who is scheduled to attend), if there are any open service tickets/issues with the customer, and any relevant customer history information. 

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

How does it work?  Salesforce Meetings will sit atop your preferred video call provider (Zoom, Google Hangouts, etc) & provides an interface that gives the presenter all the Salesforce information they need, along with providing the attendees a view of the presentation and presenter side by side.  Once the meeting has completed,  Salesforce will provide an automated action item for the rep to enter in call notes to store.  Furthermore, with Salesforce’s integration with Outlook – it can identify an attendee who may not be a contact within Salesforce, and suggest they be added.

Let’s review some of the biggest features:

·      The Meeting Digest screen gives you a summary of any meeting you are attending. Including attendees, any opportunities you are discussing, tasks, activities, and meeting insights, powered by Einstein.

·      In addition, you have Meeting Studio. This provides a platform to help keep customers and prospects engaged virtually. Allowing smooth transitions between sharing content, as well as a place to take notes, document next steps, and collaborate with their team.

·      Integration with Outlook to prompt Post-Meeting notes

Salesforce Learning Paths – helping your employees succeed!

Over this past year, many companies have had to develop a more remote approach to how we run their business.  A key part of ensuring a smooth remote experience is giving your employees all the self-service tools to help make them successful.  With that in mind, Salesforce has recently developed and rolled out Salesforce Learning Paths.  With Salesforce Learning Paths, companies can integrate Trailhead learning modules directly into Salesforce, empowering employees with the on-the-job learning they need to connect with their customers across sales, service, marketing and commerce in the all-digital world.

Salesforce Learning Paths help give your employees learning modules in small doses throughout their day, rather than formal week-long training courses. Business leaders and managers can personalize learning according to an individual, role, team or for the entire organization, helping employees reach their development goals and organizations build workforce expertise.

Some of the key features of Salesforce Learning Paths:

·       Learn directly in Salesforce: Surface relevant learning content in the context of employees’ work, at the moment they need it most

·      Personalize learning: Tailor content for specific individuals, roles, teams or for the entire organization

·      Drive and analyze engagement: Engage employees with gamification, assignments and leaderboards that analyze learning progress in real time

Salesforce Learning Paths is a great way to provide valuable training to your employees, in small doses, from wherever they conduct their business! 

Develop new insights with Einstein Prediction Builder

Predictive insights are the future of business, and within the suite of Salesforce’s Einstein products – there is a tool called Einstein Prediction Builder that all users will want to become familiar with.  Einstein Prediction Builder lets you make predictions about almost any field in Salesforce with just a few clicks. Then you can use the predictions to power a workflow, focus your efforts, and work smarter.  Some of the most common use cases for Einstein Prediction Builder could be centered around Lead Score & whether or not your sales teams are spending time on leads that are likely never to convert.  Or perhaps your Support Team gets a particularly low CSAT score on cases of a certain priority?  Or one of the most common – predicting what customers are likely to churn?  Let’s dive in and start predicting!

-Pick your object (standard or custom): perhaps you want to focus on which customers are likely to churn?  For instance, this could be the contact or account object where you update if churned status.

-Pick your field you want to predict: in the example, if this is a the Churned field – you’ll want to just ensure that there are other records in Salesforce that show some records as churned and some as not

-Pick the contributing fields: whichever object you select, you’ll want to then select those supporting fields that help tell the story around a churned customer.  You may select every field or decide to omit certain ones that don’t contribute valuable insights.

-Save your selections & Salesforce will create a new field to populate the prediction in:  In the above example, you can create a field such as “Churn score”.

-Finally, embed the Einstein prediction component on the page layout of the object you selected.

Although the setup can be somewhat straightforward – there are some key challenges that need to be considered.  One major challenge is volume of data available to build the prediction around.  You will want to have a large data set for Einstein to review & build its predictions around.  Furthermore, the quality of that data is also key.  If there is a data problem, you will most likely have a prediction problem.  However, if you feel good about the place your data is in & know you have the volume of outcomes that be used for historical perspective – then you are perfectly setup to get started!  As of now, Salesforce does allow each Org the opportunity to build & deploy 1 free prediction….so lets get going!

Get better organization of your data with Divisions

Divisions is a Salesforce feature that has been around for awhile, but one that very few users are familiar with. Divisions let you segment your organization's data into logical sections, making searches, reports, and list views more meaningful to users. Divisions are useful for organizations with extremely large amounts of data. Divisions can be assigned to users and other kinds of records. For example, you can create a report to show the opportunities for just the North American division to get accurate sales numbers for the North American sales team.

·      Record-level division - Division is a field on individual records that marks the record as belonging to a particular division. A record can belong to a division created by the administrator or the standard “global” division. The standard global division is created automatically when your organization enables divisions. A record can belong to only one division at a time.

·      Default division - Users are assigned a default division that applies to their newly created accounts, leads, and custom objects that are enabled for divisions.

·      Working division - If you have the “Affected by Divisions” permission, you can set the division using a drop-down list in the sidebar. Then, searches show only the data for the current working division. You can change your working division at any time. If you don’t have the “Affected by Divisions” permission, you always see records in all divisions.

What are the biggest benefits of using Divisions? 

·      Organizations with extremely large amounts of data (greater than 1 million records in a single object).

·      Organizations that are effectively multiple companies all sharing one org, but operating quite separately.

·      Organizations that find their search results cluttered by data that is related to some other division that they never deal with.

·      Organizations that have relatively equal amounts of data in each proposed division.

Some of the most popular uses of Divisions, for your data, include:

·      Business Units

·      Geographic Regions

·      Product Group

·      Vertical Market

·      Anything that’s relevant to your business!

Analyze your Lightning Page Performance!

Salesforce’s Lightning experience has so much going for it – the design, the feel, the look, etc.  Unfortunately one of the most noticeable downsides, once users make the permanent switch, is the load times.  Lightning pages simply don’t load as quickly as users would like, nor as fast as they did in Classic.  Luckily, Salesforce has introduced a new feature to help Orgs to review their lightning pages & make them more efficient than ever.  That feature is the “Analyze” button which is now available on your lightning page builder.

 The Analyze button will allow you to discover ways to make your record page perform better based on analysis right inside the Lightning App Builder. Performance Analysis in App Builder evaluates the fields, instances of the Related Lists component, and metadata of a record page. With the click of a button, get best practices and suggestions for improving page performance and the end-user experience.

Additionally, the Analyze button will show load times for your layout on both your desktop and mobile.  The display will also provide links to additional information on tips to improve your lightning page performance.  Here is an example of what the display will look like:

We’ve also included some of the best tips to help improve your Lightning Page layouts:

·      Place the Details component in a secondary tab (not the default tab)

·      Reduce the number of fields displayed in the details component; if using custom objects consider using Dynamic Forms

·      Break up the page using tabs; only the default tab is loaded initially and additional tabs are rendered when selected

·      If your page has many related lists, consider placing the Related List component in a secondary tab (not the default tab)

·      If both Details and Related Lists render slowly, consider creating an initial default tab with 1 or 2 important Related List – Single components or Quick Links

·      Reducing the number of related lists to 3 per tab will improve performance

·      Move non-essential components such as News and Twitter into separate tabs

·      Remove any duplicate components

·      Use component visibility to only display components relevant to each user

·      Improve mobile performance by reducing the number of visible components to 8 or fewer; components can be hidden from the mobile from the Lightning App Builder

Time-Based Workflows in Salesforce

Workflows are one of the most important tools available to you in your Salesforce Org.  Along with immediate workflow actions, Orgs can also set time-based workflow actions to fire at a time of your choosing.  Maybe you want to set reminders for your sales teams to update/follow-up on specific Opportunities?  Perhpas you need to set reminders for your Support team to respond to specific case submissions?  Or maybe just create a simple task to follow up on a prospect based off a specific marketing action?  Whatever the need, time-based workflow actions are a great way to help ensure your users don’t allow any items to slip through the cracks.

To get a better feel for time-dependent workflow actions, let us review some of the most frequently asked questions:

·      Can I have time-based workflow on custom objects?

o   Yes, and on any object currently supported by Workflow.

·      What units of time are supported?

o   Currently, days and hours are supported.

·      Can I have my time-based workflow action count only business days?

o   Standard functionality is based on all days and cannot exclude weekends.

·      How does time-based workflow impact my existing records?

o   Workflow rules are not triggered retroactively. If you create a rule now, the rules are not applied to previously created records.

§  Example: When you create an Opportunity reminder rule, it doesn't run against existing Opportunities. The new rule only applies to records created or updated after the rule is activated.

·      What workflow actions can I use with time-based workflow?

o   All existing actions will be available: Email Alerts, Field Updates, Tasks, and Outbound Messages.

·      Can I configure multiple actions to occur at different points in time for the same rule?

o   Yes, you can create a timeline of actions by configuring multiple time triggers and defining actions for each one.

·      Are there any restrictions for time-based workflow?

o   Yes, it's not possible to configure a time-dependent workflow action that's set to evaluate criteria "Every time a record is created or edited."

·      Can I see which time-dependent actions are pending executions?

o   Yes, all pending actions to be triggered on a future date appear in the Workflow Queue.

As you can read, there are many features your team can take advantage of, today, to start putting guard rails in place to ensure your team addresses each business need – in a timely fashion.

Salesforce Entitlements to manage your service level agreements

Once a customer comes on board & all the agreements are in place to enter into a business relationship, more often than not your agreement will include some level of customer support.  To help assist organizations with managing this obligation, they have offered entitlement management.  But what is Entitlement management? Entitlement management is just a blanket term for a neat little group of Salesforce features that help you enforce service level agreements (SLAs), which are contracts that spell out the level of service you’ve promised to your customers. 

Here are some example business cases that would be a good fit for Salesforce Entitlements:

“Our Apps have both Basic and Primary Support options for purchase.”

“Our customers get free video chat support for the first 12 months of their contract.”

“Our Premier Product Line comes with 24/hr support.”

Let’s take a look at some of the key features of Entitlement management:

·      Entitlements, which let support agents determine whether a customer is eligible for support.

·      Entitlement processes, which let you design timelines that include all the steps that your support

team must complete to resolve support records like cases or work orders.

·      Service contracts, which let you represent different kinds of customer support agreements like

warranties, subscriptions, or maintenance agreements. You can restrict service contracts to

cover specific products.

·      Experience access to entitlements, which lets Experience users view entitlements and service

contracts and create support records from them.

·      Reporting on entitlement management, which lets you track the way entitlements are used in your Salesforce org and whether service

contract terms are being met.

Here is a breakdown on how the entitlement process could look.

One thing we know for sure, is that customer service is rarely straightforward.  Case resolution can go many different ways & involve a lot of back and forth with the customer.  The entitlement process will give your support teams to start managing that process & the key milestones you will need to meet along the way!

Route Work items with Omni-Channel in Salesforce

As companies start to grow & bring on more and more customers – your service team will inevitably start fielding more requests through multiple service channels.  Service channels are ways that customers can contact your company. Service channels include, for example, phone, email, web forms, web chat, text messaging, and social media posts to your company. Multichannel support means offering your customers multiple ways to get in touch, so they can connect when and how they want.  To help your service teams handle these requests through these multiple channels, Salesforce created the Omni-channel feature for support teams.

So what is Omni-Channel?

Omni-Channel is a Customer Service and Console based Salesforce feature that helps automatic routing of different kinds of work items (such as Leads and Cases) to agents. Omni Channel routes all the work items to the agents automatically based on the agent’s capacity, priority, skillset, and etc. No custom development is required, but everything is handled through configuration. The end result is now agents can assist their customers more efficiently, leading to improved operational efficiency.  Without Omni-Channel, agents often rely on list views to find new cases to work. From the list view, the agent selects a case, reassigns ownership, and then gets going. This leaves much room for improvement as lower priority cases may be grabbed before those with higher priority, and agents can cherry pick their work.

Here is a look at the different routing features:

·      Queue-Based Routing

In queue-based routing, you organize your agents into different queues, which generally represent a single skill. A queue can support a particular product or a particular part of the business. For example, you can have a Billing Queue and a Technical Support Queue.

In queue-based routing, Omni-Channel assigns work to a queue. Agents are members of a queue, and Omni-Channel assigns work to agents based on the priority of the queue.

Smaller companies that operate in limited geographies and have fewer product offerings and agents often prefer queue-based routing because it’s simpler to set up.

·      Skills-Based Routing

If you have agents with different skill sets and abilities and your customers have different needs, skills-based routing can be the best option. In skills-based routing, the contact center routes work to the best agent for the job.

Say a customer case requires an agent who speaks Spanish and is knowledgeable about your company’s billing and returns processes. With skills-based routing, Omni-Channel can assign skills that you create, such as Spanish and Billing, as required skills on the case, and then match the case to an agent with those skills.

Companies that are expanding into different geographies and larger companies with multiple product offerings and services usually prefer skills-based routing because it makes it easier to route work items to agents based on a more sophisticated set of criteria.

·      External Routing

Perhaps you already have a routing implementation that you like, and you’re adding Salesforce to the mix. You can integrate third-party routing using a partner application with Omni-Channel.

Developers can use Salesforce’s standard APIs (application programming interfaces) and streaming APIs to write code that lets third-party routing systems work with Salesforce. External routing lets your company route work to the Service Console, so that you can keep the routing system that you prefer.

Our Favorite Salesforce productivity tips your Users!

We are quickly approaching the 6 year anniversary of Salesforce’s release of the “Lightning Experience”, an interface that was promoted as the flexible and dynamic version of the traditional classic version.  By all accounts, the Lightning experience has far surpassed what the Classic version was capable of.  With that said, we wanted to list out some of our favorite productivity tips to help your end users work more efficiently within Lightning.  All of the features that we list here today are out of the box, and can be put to use immediately!  Salesforce is a major investment for your Org, and its important to expose and equip your Users with every tool that they have available to them. Take a look!

·      Favorites – one of our favorite & simple features available is “Favorites”.  By clicking the star button in the top right hand corner, your users can easily save a specific record, list view, custom report, dashboard, etc – to a quick list that can be referenced at any time.  This can especially be handy for users who are active on the desktop and mobile app – as your favorites can be accessed from both versions.

·      Pinned List Views – in the past, users used to have to navigate away from the “Recently Viewed” list view, to get to the list view they really wanted to see.  Now, with a simple click, you can have each object report tab default to the list view of your preference!

·      In-Line Editing - You can edit records directly in a list view, which can make you much more productive since you don’t have to open each record individually.  One item to keep in mind, objects where you have identified multiple record types – you will need to filter on a specific record type to enable the in-line editing.

·      Report Subscriptions with Attachments – some users may not want to log directly into Salesforce to access data that meets certain criteria.  However with subscriptions, you can set up report notifications when certain criteria are met.  Along with this email, you can opt to have an excel or csv file of the data to be included as well.

·      Global Actions – featured next to the favorites icon, you’ll find a quick actions drop down that allows users to quickly create records of their choosing.  Furthermore, admins or consultants can create pre-defined actions with defaulted values that users to create very specific records in little to no time.

Access Security changes coming to Lightning Platform Components

 Many of you have recently received email alerts from Salesforce mentioning upcoming changes being enforced with the release of the Summer ’21 features.  With more and more data being stored on the cloud & data security becoming a focus for many cloud-based companies – it’s not a surprise to see Salesforce continue to make efforts to increase security.  Many of these new requirements will only be a good thing, as it relates to your Org and your data.  But what does it all mean?  What exactly is Salesforce enforcing now, that it wasn’t previously?  Let’s take a look at these recent updates.

·      Disable Access to Non-global Apex Controller Methods in Managed Packages

o   This update corrects access controls on Apex controller methods in managed packages. When this update is enabled, only methods marked with the global access modifier are accessible by Aura components from outside the package namespace. These access controls prevent you from using unsupported API methods that the package author didn’t intend for global access.

Prior to this update, Aura components outside of the package namespace could access non-global methods (Apex controller methods not marked with the global access modifier).

When this update is enabled, if your code incorrectly depends on non-global Apex methods in a managed package, server actions that call those methods fail. Update your code to use only the supported API methods provided by the package as global methods.

·      Enforce Access Modifiers on Apex Properties in Lightning Component Makeup

o   This update makes Lightning components consistent with the use of Apex properties in other contexts. For example, a markup expression can no longer access an Apex property with a private Apex getter. 

Although some of these changes can appear quite technical, they are intended to help enhance your Org’s security, as it relates to managed packages & prevent you from unintentionally exposing private information.  Our team at DLH is well-versed in updating & modifying components to help your Org meet these upcoming requirements.  Should your org experience some apex/server errors, as a result of these security updates – reach out to us today!