Salesforce Winter ’17 – What’s new?

‘Tis the season to be jolly! Santa has arrived early this year with another glorious Salesforce’17 winter release; having us all revved up! With over 300 new features, this new smashing release is bound to make you smarter and provide better predictability about your customers. So brace yourselves and read up some of our favorite top-notch features below.

Artificial Intelligence – Einstein

Salesforce has jumped onto the bandwagon by announcing its Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Einstein. Not just CRM, Einstein successfully taps into several sources such as social data and web clicks on commerce sites. What’s more, Einstein applies machine learning to predict outcomes, discover and recommend trends. While it doesn’t come as a surprise knowing that Salesforce has always managed to stay ahead of the curve, it would be rather enthralling to see what a game changer AI proves to be.

Sales Cloud

The winter’17 feature offers some stellar features and improvements for Sales Cloud.

Predictive Lead Scoring: Take your organization’s data and put it to work by enabling time to conversion metrics by taking historical information and lead characteristics from industries. This eliminates the possibility of guesswork and informs each sales rep where their valuable time will go.

Salesforce Engage in Lightning: Improve your reps’ productivity by allowing them to track or send marketing curated emails. It gives them the ability to get real-time alerts on the activity of prospects. It also gives them access to data visualization and customized dashboards by using Engage reports.

Quotes, Contracts & Campaign Influence: Enable your reps to sell faster than ever by managing all the stages of your company’s sales cycle in the Lightning experience.

Kanban on Campaigns, Leads & Contracts: Kanban’s drag-and-drop feature is now available for objects like campaigns, leads, and contracts so your reps can sell easier, smarter and faster than ever.

Wave for B2B Marketing: View key metrics in wave dashboards and take the necessary action from within the app itself by sharing tasks and insights.

Service Cloud

The Service Cloud is jam-packed with innovations and improvements such as:

Open CTI: Open CTI now works in Lightning experience as well, so you can not only resolve your issues in no time but also connect with customers smoothly.

Instagram Social Customer Service & Hashtag Monitoring: Lightning struck social, and how! Instagram customer support is now available, allowing you to sync up to 2000 accounts faster to service cloud so you can create cases and respond to them in no time. Activate your Instagram #hashtag listening by simply creating a rule in your social hub account, and receive posts whenever the hashtag is mentioned.

Omni-Channel Supervisor: Up for grabs with this winter update, this new feature lets you see real-time information about your Omni-channel agents, work, and queues, all at your fingertips. Supervisors can check what assignment an agent is working on, their waiting times, availability and more.

Marketing Cloud

This premier platform allows marketers to leverage their customers’ data and optimize or plan customer journeys based on business objectives. Marketers are also able to deliver personalized content.

Predictive Scoring: This prime feature helps marketers maximize engagement, target customers in a better way by leveraging machine-learning techniques and customer data in order to generate predictive scoring. It contains four scores – propensity to open an email, propensity to click an email, propensity to unsubscribe from an email, and propensity to make a purchase.

Journey Builder Lightning Enhancements: Enable marketers to guide customers 1:1 in order to make sure that the right message is delivered at the right time through the right channel. The new features include a canvas with a simple point-and-click experience, simplified dashboard, new color-coded icons and improved navigation throughout.

Facebook Advanced Match for Ads Studio: With this feature, marketers can use new attributes to increase advertising match rates along with the performance of their ads.

Marketing Cloud Mobile Apps: Approvals service is now available for users of Marketing Cloud Mobile Apps. Based on this set of approval permissions, users can submit, review and approve emails; and even check the status of each email.

Community Cloud & Chatter

It’s time to give way to an upgraded community experience which is more robust and flexible than ever. Let’s dive in to know more.

Theme Layouts: Create your own theme layouts to give a new look and feel to your community. Build custom components like header & footer, search, navigation and user profile menu.

Lightning Field Service in Communities: This extremely useful feature makes it possible to keep field service technicians and customers in a loop through your community. It has added features such as Work Order and Work Order Line, product and service appointment.

Reports and Dashboards on Community Pages: Add dashboard components or reports to any page on the community so it is easily accessible to every user of the community.

Chatter Live Feed: Chatter goes live! Lightning experience brings comments in real time without you having to refresh to load new comments. You can even play videos on feed, posts or comments.

Analytics Cloud

Reports and Dashboards have better filtering options, chart enhancements, and better access.

Wave Analytics: Wave has been taken to a next level altogether with added features, thus helping you get better business insights. The new features help you track your business over time with Wave Dashboards and create vibrant dashboards with Wave Dashboard Designer; integrate your data in one place or extend analytics to every business process.

Reports and Dashboards: The dashboard designer has been simplified and even supports screen readers and keyboard shortcuts. You can filter reports by relative dates or by role hierarchy, only in Lightning Experience.

Salesforce just continues moving the ball forward, making the platform better than ever! The above features are our favorite among many more new and improved features in the Salesforce Winter’17 release. Explore the Winter ’17 update and tell us a feature that proved to be a game changer for your business.

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