with an announcement about several major enhancements to Salesforce CRM and also proclaiming their position as the 4th largest Enterprise Software Company in the world! We aren’t surprised, especially with a company where “The Age of the Customer” is the new buzz phrase bringing forward the criticalities of developing applications that enhance the relationship between the Company and the Customer. They call it the Salesforce Lightning Platform.
So what is the Lightning platform all about? Lightning is a multi-tenant, next-generation metadata platform designed to provide a consistent, modern user experience across any device, making it easier for developers and users to build applications. With Lightning, all of Salesforce’s clouds’ run on one platform, a platform for Customer Success, standing true to the roots of Salesforce’s inception. Since its launch in Dreamforce, Lightning has seen tremendous adoption rate, adding more than 90,000 on this game-changing, innovative metadata platform, as announced by Keith Block, who has taken over as COO, paving way for greater things in the future!
The Salesforce Lightning app looks more promising than ever with innovative capabilities like customizing through clicks and not with code, and building customized components through the Lightning Component Framework.
Another major announcement has been Salesforce’s acquisition of Steel Brick, allowing Steel Brick CPQ features to merge into the Sales Cloud, powering customers to build a complete lead-to-cash solution without using third party applications. From configuring quotes to settlement of the final price, sending contracts and proposals in a PDF format to collecting the cash, Steel brick’s CPQ does it all.
If asked about personal favorites, Salesforce IQ Inbox steals the deal where CRM and Email are integrated brilliantly whereby they talk to each other, bringing proactive intelligence and related logging activities on to CRM. CRM and email are now one connected experience with Salesforce IQ!
Also notable is the enhanced Salesforce 1 Mobile and Lightning voice which are new applications and proactive features for sales representatives. Lightning Voice, which is natively embedded in Sales Cloud Lightning, enables click to call, auto-logging of calls, and call forwarding.
Salesforce1 mobile adds full offline capabilities for iOS and Android, so users can enter information anywhere, and sync it when they are reconnected to internet. Salesforce1 now also has new, enhanced Wave Charts and Dashboards for analytics.
Field Service Lightning is another major initiative brought under the Service Cloud Lightning. Workforce dispatchers can now embrace smart scheduling to provide automatic, real-time assignments based on employee skill set, availability and location. Service employees in the field are able to create and update work orders, and can also initiate change requests and check job status from any device leading the way to a connected workforce.
Salesforce’s existing Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited Editions for Sales and Service Cloud will be replaced by new Lightning Professional, Lightning Enterprise and Lightning Unlimited Edition for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud with differential pricing while existing Cloud customers will automatically receive the capabilities and features of the new Lightning Editions.
Salesforce announcements clearly give us an indication that they want to incorporate disruptive technologies into the CRM making it smarter and resulting in a more productive workforce. Interesting coming of age technologies like Predictive learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence were also mentioned in the announcements which clearly indicates a rapid revolution in the world of CRM.
If any of these announcements excite you as much as us, reach out to us at sales@appshark.com to know how your company can benefit from the many wonders of Salesforce!