Salesforce Spring '18 has sprung

Spring is on its way, which means the Salesforce Spring ’18 release has arrived, and with it, a number of key things we think our customers should be implementing. This was a big release in a lot of ways, and we will highlight a few key areas for each of the main clouds for customers to start thinking about.

Service Cloud

With the last two releases, we have seen Service Cloud make the move to be fully enabled for Lightning Experience. Now is a good time to start thinking about a migration from the classic Service Console to the Lightning Console. In this release, Quick Text and Marcos got their time in the spotlight. Quick Text is now fully supported in Lightning and can be used for more than just Live Agent Chat. You can now also leverage Quick Text within Macros. Quick Text and Marcos save agents a ton of time when performing repetitive tasks. 

Community Cloud

Have you ever wanted to share a calendar of events with your community members? With the new Spring ’18 release, you can now do just that. Community users with Customer Community Plus or Partner Community licenses can grant access for their community members to create events as well.

Sales Cloud

While Sales Cloud has been fully prepared for Lightning Experience over the past few releases, the Spring ’18 release migrates some of the final pieces of Sales Cloud to the Lightning Experience. Additionally, you can expect to find Opportunity Splits and the ability to view Enterprise Territory Management in Lightning. Einstein Readiness was also a core focus for Sales Cloud in Spring ’18 and is very similar to the Lightning Readiness check. The Einstein Readiness report lets users know if they are ready to enable Einstein by prompting them with tasks to perform, such as cleaning up Leads and Opportunities, in order to establish organizational readiness.

CPQ

Do you have a need to run quotes for large volumes of data? Do you have a sales team that needs to quickly and easily spin up quotes for multiple configurations of products? Well thanks to the Spring ’18 release, CPQ is now ready for enterprise customers. The system has become significantly more stable and is able to handle the large amounts of data many enterprise customers require.

Pardot

Gone are the days of maintaining your campaign data in two separate databases. With the new release, Pardot campaign records and Salesforce campaign records can now be merged. This feature is still a beta release, so please reach out to your account executive if you are interested in learning more about it. Once this merge of information has been enabled, any Pardot engagement history will be visible within Salesforce.

Marketing Cloud

We often hear our customers say they want to be able to target their customers on many different platforms, such as social media, email, and by phone. With Spring ’18, and the enablement of Facebook Advertising Campaigns, customers can build one journey that flow across all channels without the use of a separate digital advertising team or agency.

That wraps our overview of the Salesforce Spring ’18 release. If you have any questions about these new features, please feel free to contact us. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for the next release!