The Salesforce Spring ‘20 release is here! Once again, it is packed full of new features, usability improvements, and a host of under-the-hood enhancements. The Salesforce team has fully embraced the Lightning User Experience and is improving all aspects of the new user interface at a rapid pace. We are happy to share with you some important updates and improvements that caught our eye. 

Assign Activities to a Queue

You can now improve sales reps’ productivity and allow them to share their workload by setting up queues for tasks! With this new feature, reps can assign tasks to a team to do follow-ups, send emails or set up demos and meetings. Now, nothing will fall through the cracks anymore, improving the customer’s overall experience. 

View Related Account when searching for Contact or Opportunities

Say you are searching for a contact or a hot opportunity, but cannot remember which account it belongs to. With the new search enhancement, you can see the related account in your search results!

Supercharge your List Views with time-related Conditions (Beta)

If you create lots of views, then you will love the ability to use conversational search terms, such as modified, created, viewed, or closed followed by a relative time period.

As seen below, we set up a view that shows all contacts modified this year.

This is a beta feature, and available for Enterprise Edition and higher. 

Enhanced Related Lists will make your day!

If you were ever frustrated by the limitation to show only three fields on a related list, then fret no more! With this update for all editions, you can now show up to 10(!) columns, and even resize and sort them to your liking!

Here’s an example of an enhanced related list”

Clone Opportunities or Campaigns with Related Records

Do you find yourself cloning opportunities frequently, and are frustrated that all related records (like Products, Quotes, Contacts, etc..) do not get cloned with the Opportunity? Well your day just improved. No longer do you have to manually re-create all related records for a cloned opportunity. Salesforce just saved you tons of time!

Also new for Opportunities, you can now use Einstein Opportunity Scoring at no extra cost! As an eligible SalesCloud user, scoring will help prioritize opportunities and can highlight high-risk opportunities automatically. Please speak with your admin about this feature. This feature is available in Enterprise and higher editions.

Lightning Extension for Google Chrome Browser

Do you feel eye strain when working in Salesforce all day? With this new browser extension, you will now be able to turn on a “Dark Mode” and make your eyes happy! 

Speaking of Chrome Browser, you can also now resize images that are part of a rich text field. Just grab the edges of an image and have at it!

Reporting & Analytics

The Reporting engine in Salesforce has also received some fantastic upgrades. Behold:

1. You can now filter reports by comparing fields with a field-to-field filter. This allows you to compare the values of two fields, and then return records that match the comparison criteria. This feature is available for all editions.
2. You can also now count unique values in your reports. For example, by adding a unique count to the Account Name column, you will be able to ‘count’ up the number of opportunities that belong to each Account. This feature is available for all editions.

Here’s more reporting goodness. The report builder is now also available to customers that run Lightning Communities! Your community users will need to have either Partner Community or Customer Community Plus license to take advantage of this feature.

Log in with your Apple ID!

Are you an iPhone or Mac user and would like to reduce the number of accounts/passwords in your life? Well, great news! Users are now able to log in to Communities with their Apple ID. Make sure you talk to your admin and ask for the Apple Authentication Provider feature to be enabled.

Einstein Voice Assistant (Beta)

Okay, this one is BIG. With the new Salesforce mobile app, you will now be able to use your voice to update Salesforce records! Actions like logging events, creating contacts and updating opportunities become effortless with the use of your voice! Please speak with your admin to enable these voice skills. You will need the “new” Salesforce mobile app for IOS or Android. This feature is supported in all editions but may require additional licensing. 

Let’s talk a bit about Customer Service and related ServiceCloud features. 

Case Merge

If you have already enjoyed the duplicate case merge feature that’s been in Beta, you will be happy to know that it is now out of Beta and fully available. No more duplicate case madness!

Knowledge

Moar Data Categories available now

You can now link your knowledge articles to up to 50 data categories, up from the previous 25. This will allow knowledge managers to catalog articles more accurately. Speak to your admin to get this limit increased.

Setting default file access for Articles

Previously, attaching files to an article set the default access as “Owner”, which then limited visibility of the file. For example, a customer viewing an article in your Communities may not have had the ability to see these file attachments, 

Now, article managers have the ability to make file attachments visible to everyone that can view the associated article. Snazzy!

Compare Articles to see what changed (Beta)

Another great feature for article managers will allow for comparing two versions of articles to find any changes. Talk to your admin to get this feature enabled!

Einstein Article Recommendations

This slick new feature uses information from past cases to identify Knowledge articles that could help your support agents resolve customer issues more quickly. When enabled, Einstein uses case information to identify the most important case information and then match this to relevant articles from the knowledge base. You must have 400+ articles in your knowledge base for this feature to work. This feature is available with Enterprise Edition or higher.

Menu of Conversation Channels now generally available

Allow your customers to contact your agents through a variety of channels, such as Facebook Messenger, Phone, WhatsApp or Text message, on your company website. You must have the Chat & Messaging add-on for your instance.