The biggest VRP reveals in the Salesforce Winter ‘23 Release

The fourth quarter of the year has some of the biggest dates in the Salesforce^® calendar. September brings with it the Dreamforce conference and, hot on its heels, the Salesforce Winter ‘23 release date: October 17th. VRP Consulting gave you our picks for Dreamforce 2022 sessions not to miss, and now it’s time to turn our attention to the Salesforce Winter ‘23 Release Notes.

An exciting selection of new functionality is coming to the Salesforce platform. You may not have been aware that a new release was on its way, or maybe you’ve just not had time to look into it — after all, there’s a lot to cover. Perhaps you’ve done some investigation but you’re still not sure what’s relevant to you or exactly how it’s useful. If you answered ‘yes’ to any of those, this article is for you.

I’ll give you a quick summary of some of the biggest new developments in the Salesforce Winter 2023 Release, and explore what they could mean for your organisation. We’ll start with an important addition for Marketing Cloud customers:

New External Actions for Marketing Cloud

With new External Actions, organisations that use Marketing Cloud can now tighten up their  technology stack even further by integrating third-party MarTech apps to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot). What kind of possibilities does that create? Directly within an Engagement Studio program, you can now trigger actions in these apps, such as sending SMS messages to prospects, offering them surveys or registering them to webinars. A more joined-up, multi-channel kind of experience can now be more easily achieved. 

Fully customisable, External Actions are built on top of Salesforce Invocable Actions, which means you can use no-code, low-code and full-code methods to build your own. What’s more, they can also be packaged and listed on the Salesforce AppExchange, which means that organisations will be able to find a growing collection of pre-made External Actions there for a range of purposes. 

Carbon Credit Allocation (Net Zero Cloud)

Sustainability is an increasingly important consideration for organisations everywhere. So, this new functionality for Net Zero Cloud is a welcome addition. Carbon Credit Allocation allows for streamlined tracking and management of carbon credits within Net Zero Cloud. It provides you with a centralised and comprehensive view of important details such as your carbon credit purchase history, utilisation and scope-wise allocations. 

The ultimate benefit of these capabilities is that they allow organisations to more easily offset unavoidable carbon emissions by demonstrating the funding of environmental projects to customers, shareholders and others. You can manage the carbon credits your organisation has purchased, review the impact of projects you’re investing in, and also use your emissions inventory to find the best way to allocate credits as you move forward. Because Carbon Credit Allocation makes auditing simple, that means as a result so is creating a report for internal or external purposes. Great for businesses that want to show they’re making every effort to make a positive difference.  

Customer Service Incident Management: Broadcast Communication

When outages and other incidents occur, customers are likely to be more understanding if organisations keep them in the loop and updated about the situation. Salesforce understands this well — and that’s why they’ve developed new functionality for Service Cloud which has the potential to make a big difference to customer service. 

The new Broadcast Communication feature helps organisations to provide external stakeholders (such as customers and partners), as well as internal stakeholders, with up-to-the-minute status updates. You can broadcast them across a range of digital channels, such as email, as well as self-service websites. The functionality doesn’t only streamline how each update is delivered, making life easier for customer support and others. It also helps organisations achieve new levels of proactive, consistent, omni-channel support — which their customers will surely appreciate. 

TikTok integration for Commerce Cloud 

TikTok is a force to be reckoned with. This video-centred social media platform has a huge user-base — especially with Generation Z — and organisations everywhere are eager to harness its potential for social commerce. This new integration is designed to help them do just that — directly within Salesforce Commerce Cloud. 

Using the TikTok integration for Commerce Cloud, merchants can include TikTok as a sales channel within Commerce Cloud. You can publish products quickly on TikTok using catalogue-focused advertising solutions, including new dynamic video or collection ads and automated smart product feeds. With these capabilities, it’s much easier for businesses to advertise on this platform and reach its audience, full of potential customers. 

That’s not all… 

Those were some of the major highlights in the Salesforce Winter ‘23 Release Notes, but there’s a lot more coming, including:

• Dynamic Forms enhancement to allow more object record pages to use Dynamic Forms
• Cloning Lightning apps quickly in the Lightning App Builder — a time-saver for admins 
• Sales Cloud for Slack app is moving from being a Beta Service to general availability 
• Custom address fields can now be created, functioning similarly to the standard address field
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) will be automatically enabled for direct logins (e.g. via a mobile app) 
• Lightning Web Security will now be used by default for any Lightning Web Component (LWC) 
• CRM Analytics (previously Tableau CRM) has a new Input widget for real-time outcome and impact assessment 
• …and much more! 

You can learn about other new developments in Salesforce’s Winter ‘23 Release, as well as watch demo videos showing these features in action. You can also read the full Salesforce Winter ‘23 Release Notes, which provides detailed information on everything that’s coming. 

Any questions about the Salesforce Winter ‘23 Release Notes?

We’re looking forward to helping our clients make the most of all the great new functionality revealed in the Salesforce Winter ‘23 Release Notes. Assisting them in preparing for new Salesforce releases and harnessing new functionality is a very important part of our role — particularly for our Managed Services practice.  

In anticipation of a forthcoming release, our Managed Services team performs a number of important tasks. These include hammer testing, in which we test your Salesforce solution in a testing environment called a “sandbox”, to see how changes would affect it — for instance, if it would break any custom code that’s been used. With this knowledge, we can then work to mitigate any potentially negative side-effects. 

Our team will also review release notes against your Salesforce solution and your business processes and needs. If there’s new functionality that’s particularly relevant to your industry or your work, we’ll identify it, and how it can best be implemented, in order to enhance your solution and maximise the benefit it delivers for you. It’s all part of our commitment to continuously, proactively improving and enhancing the technology our clients rely on.  

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your own organisation make the most of the Salesforce Winter 2023 Release, or find out more about our Managed Services, we’ll be happy to talk to you — just get in touch. 

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About the Author

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.