The future of CRM – Salesforce Lightning

The Lightning experience offers out of the box tools and services to automate the business processes integrate with external applications and provide responsive layouts. It offers pro-code tools, multi-tenant architecture at the enterprise level so that business user can focus their attention to make their services more efficient and likeable. The prime concern is to give the business users a competitive advantage over their users

Salesforce has come up with Salesforce Lightning to maintain it #1 CRM platform. It is designed to work faster, smarter, and more accessible. It lights up the Salesforce ecosystem.  It offers a quantum lead in functionality, accessibility, usability for executives, admins, business users, and developers. Hundreds of features are innovated to give a lightning experience to the users. These innovations are making the service more personalized and selling easier.

How is Salesforce Lightning the cutting edge of CRM? Why do so many global enterprises hail this platform as an innovative breakthrough? Given below is the edge that this platform has over its competitors, and the detailed functions that make it the technology of tomorrow.

Cloud technology is the key to the success of many organizations providing Software-As-A-Service products. Many experts predict that SAAS CRM solutions will reach a deployment rate of 80% to 85% by 2025. According to Investopedia, the CRM software market is growing at a CAGR of 14%.  The cloud-based CRM systems are expanding at a rate of 22% CAGR. The future belongs to cloud-based CRM. A survey found that 91% of the companies using Salesforce have posting results. It helps them to maintain good relations between customers and clients. Salesforce is the world #1 CRM platform. It has a market share of more than 15% and consistently performing better than its competitor.

Before we move further, let’s understand how the platform is much better in Lightning.

Many businesses are small enterprises. They do not have the expertise in coding nor have the desire to hire professional coders. They want things simple.  The lightning experience enables them to create apps by using low code tools to solve business problems. They could do this using drop and drag functionality without writing a single line of code.

There are pro-code tools that offer them to tackle the most challenging development initiatives using familiar languages and frameworks. It also gives them the chance to create beauty in the coding style they like to write. It is designed to make the enterprise business to the next heights by reducing paperwork, juggling between various sales algorithms. It offers all data at one place related to the customer and the overall company sales. The enterprise can boost their productivity by 10x level by switching from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning.

Some of the general enhancements in the Platform features are:

Customize home with components:

These features help to create custom Home pages that appear for different profiles in the organization. The Lightning App Builder helps to design different home pages, display, and organize useful components. The user can create and edit pages for various types of records, updating leads, and contacts.

Customize record home with components:

The Lightning App Builder helps the businesses to configure Lightning Experience home pages in the developer edition.

Keyboard Shortcuts:

The Lightning experience gives you the advantage of using keyboard shortcuts to maximize efficiency and speed while working in the Lightning experience.

Favourites:

There is an option to create favourites for frequently accessed pages, including records, list, dashboard, reports, group, etc.

Navigate to Record Directly from an Action Success Page:

There is an enhancement in the Success Message it has record name as an active link that takes the user to the record.

Lightning Console Apps:

The Lightning Console Apps help you to navigate and work more productively with optimized workflows and a three column layout. There are nested tables that allow for viewing and editing multiple records at once. You can access utilities like Lightning Dialer and Open CTI quickly.

Utility Icons for Lightning Apps:

The feature gives you the option to choose icons from utilities directly in the Lightning App Wizard.

Global Actions:

The global action helps you to create tasks, notes, and any custom action. It opens in the composer window in the bottom left corner of the screen and follows throughout the App.

App Launcher:

The users of Lightning experience have access to the App Launcher to navigate to Salesforce apps, custom apps, and connected apps from one view.

Launch Lightning Component from an Action:

Lightning Component Actions are custom actions that call Lightning Component. They support Apex and Javascript. It offers a secure way to build client-side custom functionality.

Quick View Hovers:

The Lightning Experience helps you to see record views based on the Compact Layout. The Contact and Account hovers show the related lists as well.

Utility Bars:

The utility bars appear as a fixed footer that users can access to open utilities in open docked panels. It gives users quick access to standard productivity tools like Notes and Recent times.

Page layout per apps:

There are two options whenever a custom record page is activated in the Lightning App Builder. The users can make the record page default for all users. It can assign the record page to one or more Lightning Apps to give users access to the customized page for the App they are working.

Highlights Panels:

The user can customize the required fields using Compact Layout per Object and display them at the top of the user’s record pages in the Highlights Panel. The feature is available for all entities.

User Switcher:

 The user switcher helps people to navigate easily on Salesforce from multiple users on the same or different Salesforce Org. The users do not have to open new tabs, enter their login details, and then enter their username. The users can have a single check for all Salesforce Org. Their browser is not cluttered with several tabs.

Troubleshoot Record Errors Quickly and Easily:

Whenever any users edit record inline and an error occurs, the field containing errors pops up immediately on the screen.

Help Menu and Pinnable Help Topics:

The user can click help topic to preview it directly in the Help menu. You can pin the help topic to keep it open while working.

Dynamic Report Chart Components:

The report chart components are more active and responsive as per the size of the page displayed. They resize themselves horizontally to fill more essential display regions up to a maximum of 800 pixels wide. The height is limited to 300 pixels.

There are many advanced features and innovation brought up in the Salesforce Lightning experience takes developer and admins productivity to the new territory. The above features make the Salesforce user experience incredible and help them focus on their work with more passion and dedication. The general features push the user productivity to higher levels, build App productively, and helps the user finish work more smartly. Some of the other advantages of Salesforce lightning platform include:

• Build app faster
• Create Custom Business Logic
• Customize the User Interface
• Easily integrate with the third party apps and systems
• Build with SalesforceDX

Build App Faster:

The Lightning experience offers out of the box tools and services to automate the business processes integrate with external applications and provide responsive layouts. It offers a pro-code tools, multi-tenant architecture at the enterprise level so that a business user can focus their attention to make their services more efficient and likable. The prime concern is to give the business users a competitive advantage over their users.

Create Custom Business Logic:

The business users can easily customize and create business logic in the lightning platform. The lightning platform offers easy to build apps using tools like App Builder and suggestions and feedbacks from Community Builder.  The users can supercharge their business using customizable business logic and solve hard problems with Apex. It is an object-oriented language that works in the cloud. The word has APIs for creating, compiling, and debugging code.

Customize the Interface:

The Lightning experience offers excellent tools and framework for developing digital components. It uses Apex on the server side and Javascript on the client side. There is an option of drag and drop elements in Lightning App Builder to facilitate designing of desktop and mobile apps with ease. It is based on the principle what you create is what you see. The customer gets the view of whatever is created by the user and nothing else.

Easy integration with third-pary apps and systems:

The Lightning experience is build to give you the advantage of designing apps using a variety of strategies. There is a facility of using no-code integration capabilities like Salesforce Connect. There is a new External Service Wizard to connect with multiple systems. The user can also use a comprehensive suite of REST and SOAP APIs for specialized integration needs.

Build together with Salesforce DX:

The Salesforce DX is a tool for the team working on a similar project. It enables the team to build apps together using the tools they like while delivering the work faster and adding value to the customer. It offers the advantage of continuous development and provides apps with a focus on testing services and tools.

The lightning experience is making the sales experience much better and improved. It is easier and faster to find customer, close deals, and grow accounts in the Lightning Experience. The AI tools help the business user to keep updated on the sales. They can easily track all the minute details and customer response on the individual transactions. The day-to-day activities are simplified by creating customized applications to automate any user business process, increase productivity, and drive innovation.

Some of the features that are brought up in the Lightning Experience include

Assistant:

The Assistant helps to view important update during the day.

Key Deals:

The reps can filter all the deals shown in the component to see their sales, deal closing down, and other helpful list views.

Performance Chart:

The performance chart displays the opportunities that sales reps have. It generally shows data based on the sales team’s chances.

Einstein Opportunity Insights:

They are available on the home page and display the opportunity available to the users.

Task Filter Options from the Home page:

It shows the reps different views of there to do. The sales team can filter the tasks component directly from the home page.

All Activity Report:

The tool helps sales reps to see activities for every account, opportunity, and contact. The All-Activity Report helps them to see everything that is ever done in the past.

Improved Views on the Forecast Page:

The forecast grid remains the same during the session.

Product and Schedule Date forecasts:

The sales can forecast opportunity revenue and quantity based on Schedule and product dates. The forecasting by schedule or production date can provide a more accurate view of the expected sales than the prediction by opportunity close date.

Take Actions from Activity Timeline:

The sales reps can now log in and update the tasks and meetings faster without leaving the activity timeline.

Enhanced Lead Convert:

The new features of enhanced lead convert in the Lightning matches lead with existing contacts and accounts. The reps have the chance to create an opportunity or select the one already present in the pipeline.

Convert Lead to Existing Opportunity:

The enhanced Lead Convert displayed all the leads available in the account selected by the reps. The reps can convert these leads into opportunities.

There are many similar advanced features added to increase sales productivity.

Opportunity Workspace:

It is one stop shop for sales reps trying to close deals first.

Reply to and forward emails:

The user can quickly reply, reply all or forward from the email page or the activity timeline.

Send an email through Gmail and Office 365:

The sales reps can streamline their email correspondence by letting their users connect with their Gmail or Office 365 account to the Salesforce.

List emails:

The list emails send the individual email to each recipient instead of one email to the entire group.

You may also like to read Quick guide on Pardot for Salesforce Admins.

Conclusion

There are many advanced features in Salesforce Lightning to take the business users productivity to new heights. The Lightning delivers a smarter, more personalized experience to the user. It has improved the customer experience by providing a better agent service. It helps managers to optimize their teams with AI-powered insights and dashboards. Salesforce Lightning is therefore touted to be the future of Customer Relationship Management. It is designed after taking feedback from millions of community users. It is specially made to meet the need of next level business users and great things can be expected from Salesforce Lightning in the days to come!

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