It’s that time of year again – the Salesforce® Summer Release is almost here. The Summer ‘22 Release will be made generally available on June 12 and, at the time of writing, is currently in preview. Meanwhile, the Salesforce Summer 2022 release notes have been unveiled.
What’s coming up in the latest set of Salesforce updates? Which features have the potential to deliver the most value for your organisation? We’ll be revealing all this and more, so read on:
We’ll start off with what may be the biggest new arrival. Although the name sounds perhaps a little alarming (wasps, anyone?), Salesforce’s new Swarming capabilities will be great news for your customers. It’s a collaboration-based approach to service, instead of the traditional escalation-based model. When a more difficult/severe issue is raised, you’ll now be able to bring together “swarms” of cross-functional experts (“swarm members”) in a tracked Slack channel. They can provide real-time support and resolve cases in a faster and more effective way.
With Swarming, agile teams now have new abilities to synchronise their work and create resolutions more efficiently. They can share context and insights in one place which brings together all the people, information and expertise needed. We’re excited to see how our clients use this functionality to transform service and we look forward to helping them do it. This could be a game-changer for organisations dealing with complex, lengthy customer issues.
This next Salesforce update will be of particular interest to B2C retailers and anyone with an eCommerce presence. New Triggered Campaign Messages will allow Marketing Cloud Personalization users to trigger tailored experiences for customers, according to catalog changes or cart abandonment and other behavioral signals.
What does this mean in practice? By setting catalog triggers when a product is restocked or the price reduced, you can now more effectively re-engage customers who either couldn’t buy or were put off by the cost. Or, in the case of cart abandonment, you can specify product price range and how many times a customer revisits abandoned items, then the frequency of messages customers will receive. Then you can send a customised campaign with a tailored price, based on factors such as the number of revisits, so you offer stepper discounts for less engaged prospects. Salesforce has definitely made eCommerce marketing even smarter with the Summer Release 2022.
This is a big one for SaaS companies and others that deal with subscription-based billing models. Salesforce has developed new Subscription Management capabilities for Revenue Cloud to help B2B businesses to manage and monetise their subscription businesses across any self-service channels.
Using “headless” API functionality, Subscription Management enables omnichannel selling by allowing you to add products to customer-facing channels with very little effort. Customers can then browse the available products, select the subscription they’d prefer and add it to their shopping cart. They can then review the cart, select payment type and “buy now”. Subscription Management will then show their most recent order, provisioning status (e.g., pending) and allow them to check the invoice and payment status. Meanwhile, on your side, you can see that the order was created, as well as details of the invoice, payment and more – all on Salesforce, giving you a 360-degree view of the customer.
There’s more good news for organisations that use eCommerce. New connectors in this Salesforce update bring marketing and eCommerce teams closer together, and harness all their disparate data. They also can now use pre-built data models to optimise orders, sales and products.
Now they can combine these new insights, across both eCommerce and marketing, to collaborate for greater personalisation across the customer experience. Organisations can now easily analyze sales alongside their marketing campaigns to see which marketing tactics are working best to drive sales and which aren’t. When this valuable data is integrated alongside your marketing performance data, it’s even possible to identify which campaign tactics lead to the sales of which products – a far more intricate level of insight that many organisations may have thought possible.
Lastly, a development with the potential to make a massive difference to field service operations. This new field service scheduling and optimisation engine simplifies appointment booking and gathering candidates to perform field service by suggesting the best scheduling options, but it goes much further. It can help businesses select the best travel routes for service personnel to take, according to the type of vehicle and road. For instance, it can recognise if a particular route isn’t right for a heavy vehicle due to low bridges or tunnels that it may not fit through.
This smart new feature can also take vehicle type into account when providing estimated travel times, as well as predicted travel conditions, and use factors like these to ensure the fastest route possible for a particular vehicle. What’s more, the new Holiday Management feature also helps dispatchers to schedule field service personnel’s absences. All of this adds up to a Salesforce update that could do great things for ensuring customer satisfaction and keeping everything moving smoothly.
That about wraps it up. A great selection of new Salesforce updates, I think you’ll agree. Although they didn’t make the big five, honorable mentions go out to the following:
One overall trend stands out above the rest. In the Salesforce Summer Release 2022, we can see Salesforce and Slack coming together to create a whole that’s far greater than the sum of its parts. Whether it’s bringing together teams and the data they need in Slack, or keeping everyone in the loop via Salesforce-informed alerts, there are now possibilities for more connected ways of working than ever.
Which of the updates that we’ve covered (or any we didn’t) are you most excited about? If you’d like to know more about anything, or discuss how you can best implement any new features at your own organisation, reach out to VRP Consulting. We’ll be glad to explore the possibilities together.
Mark Hartnady
Head of Architecture
VRP Consulting UKI
Mark Hartnady is one of our global architecture leaders, based in our London office. Mark has been working with CRM solutions, with a particular focus on the Salesforce platform since 2012 and has been instrumental in transforming enterprises with scalable, extensible solutions in the manufacturing, automotive, hi-tech and media sectors.
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