It’s that time of the year when Salesforce administrators and other professionals sit tight to unwrap everything that Salesforce brings to them with its new release. After some helpful updates in Spring ‘21, Salesforce is back again with its Summer ‘21 release notes, and there’s so much in it that we can’t keep calm. 

Salesforce announced the release date and Sandbox preview of Summer ‘21, and now the release notes are available too. Although there’s a lot that Salesforce brought up for its users, some features got our attention. Here are the top 10 features that will go a long way for Salesforce administrators and developers.

1. Flow Updates

Salesforce Summer ‘21 has brought many Flow features and enhancements. You can debug Record Triggered Flow with the help of Debug tools. Earlier different kinds of workarounds were required for debugging Record Triggered Flows, being a massive gap in Salesforce.

There is also an addition of a native collection sort element within Flow Builder. This feature allows Sort Collection Variables in ascending or descending order. 

2. Update Fields from the Report Run Page with Inline Editing (Beta)

Users can save time and clicks by keeping data up to date in the reports and object records. When any source data goes out of date, you no longer need to go back to the original record to update the information. The feature of inline editing allows updating the text or numeric fields without leaving the Report Run page.   

3. Download a Dashboard Image to a File

You can download any image on your dashboard embedded in a presentation to receive a PNG file. Earlier, you were only able to acquire a dashboard image with the help of an app for screen capture.    

4. Enhancements for Einstein Bots

Summer ‘21 has brought more NLP languages for Einstein Bots. This makes it easier to reach out to more customers in the language preferred by them. Einstein Bots will now support Korean, Swedish, and Danish for Natural Language Processing in beta.

Also, the Einstein Bot Builder is equipped with an upgraded intent management experience for expanding your bot. The feature of dialog cloning is added with the option to include the attached utterance. This allows you to move bulk utterances between intents or to another intent set. The intent set now contains various languages, and users can easily assign bulk utterances to a new language. Users can focus on the utterance matching with the language of the bot with bot training, ensuring that the model fits right for your target customers.

5. Salesforce Data Pipelines to Enrich Salesforce Data at Scale

The release brought us a new product, Salesforce Data Pipelines that helps to enrich the Salesforce data. When your CRM data is scattered on different services, the product can help you consolidate it for a single and accessible view that enables faster decision-making. You can also use Data Pipelines for transforming bulk Salesforce information without having to use third-party tools.

6. Dynamic Actions Bar for your App Page

You can now have a Dynamic Actions Bar for your app page that helps you handle all the information actions from a single bar. You can easily drag and configure the components of the bar on your app page by using the Lightning App Builder. You can also use standard and custom global actions for customizing your bar.

7. Save your Time dealing with Mass Actions in Split View

You don’t need to open a different list page for different details now. You can easily enable the split view to access multiple records at a single time. In a split view list, select the relevant items and choose an action for them in console or standard view. 

8. Connect with Customers Easily via LinkedIn with Native Sales Navigator Integration

The release has brought a great feature for sales representatives to connect with customers in more significant ways through LinkedIn Sales Navigator native integration. Sales representatives can use native components to easily access LinkedIn profiles on contact, leads, opportunity, and account pages. This further makes it easier for them to send connection requests and InMails using native Lightning Actions. 

9. Upgrade to Meeting Digest

To prepare for meetings in a better way and to help organizers address customer concerns, Salesforce added Meeting Digest with the feature that gives insights about the cases which are of the highest priority. It also notifies the meeting organizer about the outstanding customer requests. In addition to this, representatives also receive helpful reminders of follow-up meetings or sending emails after the meeting.

10. Record Access Reasons in Lightning Experience

Earlier when multiple users had access to a record, it was never clear why they were having the access and what their roles were. But with Summer ‘21, a user can see why they have access by finding it in the Record Sharing Hierarchy in Lightning Experience. 

Summary

Salesforce Summer ‘21 has brought some great features for administrators, developers, and users. All of it adds to the experience and simplicity of using the CRM platform. We highlighted some of the eye-catchy features that we couldn’t resist sharing. There’s more to it that makes Salesforce Summer ‘21 something you might look forward to.

For any business, its clients are the topmost assets, which is why they keep trying to attract more. But that’s not all. The hard part is maintaining those relationships once you get them through the door. Chances are, you’ll still lose a large part of those customers.

Call it leakage or churn rate, the slightest negligence means you’re losing a client. Three in four customers always change providers after just one bad experience. Your competitors are only too happy to fill in that void.         

Why is Customer Retention Important?

With every approach of customer retention made by sales teams, the revenue goes up while the costs go down. This is just the ideal scenario every business expects to maintain. Furthermore, studies depict that it costs 7 times more for a company to acquire new customers than to retain the prevailing ones. There’s a 5-20 percent chance of acquiring new leads. On the other hand, there’s a 60-70 percent chance that you’ll hold on to existing customers. But that is only going to happen with the right measures of customer retention. 

It is not easy to repeatedly earn the trust of existing customers. This makes it even more difficult when the new entrants and existing competitors are making their best attempts to gain more customers. Fortunately, Salesforce will have your back to promote customer retention. 

Value of Existing Customers Over New Customers

Your existing customers are the ladder that takes your company towards success. The longer customers patronize a business, the more they keep getting involved with it. Businesses highly rely on customers to keep the revenue flowing, which makes it essential to come up with products and services that customers would prefer.

Furthermore, it’s the steady customers who perform word-of-mouth marketing for their favorite company that supports brand advocacy. People always look forward to what enthusiastic customers have to say about a business. 

Ways to Retain Customers Through Salesforce

Salesforce is all about doing the best to promise a top-notch customer experience that makes them hold on to you. There are plenty of ways Salesforce can support sales teams for improving customer retention rates. 

1. Centralized Customer Data

Data is the lifeblood of a company and makes it keep moving. Salesforce allows you to centralize all the sources through which you obtain the customer data, making it easier to manage it from a single location. Salesforce makes it convenient to integrate your voicemails, notes, emails, etc. to form a customer record. Thus, sales teams can maintain a centralized view of each customer that allows catering them uniquely by enabling teams with a better decision-making approach.

2. Personalization using Customer Data                                                                            

Each customer has different expectations from a business. You probably have a lot of information about your customers, but if you are not using it to improve customer service, the data is worth nothing. Salesforce allows you to integrate customer data to analyze their behaviors and expectations to offer services that can resonate with the customers. Customers want to feel special, and using the personalized approach to cater to them would convince them to hold on to your business.

3. Track Interactions with Customers                                                                     

Data can tell the story of each customer. From their work to their expenditures, any data can help a business understand its customers in a better way. Salesforce is a helping hand here to keep a pulse on customer behavior by tracking their interactions in real-time. All this data helps in making meaningful engagement with the customers at the right moment. For example, if you find out that a customer has read your blog, you can shoot a follow-up email to ask for a review or to suggest similar blogs that might be of interest.

4. Re-Engage with Inactive Customers                                                                                 

If the customers are not coming back frequently for purchase, you don’t have to sit back and wait for them. Instead, the best approach here would be to re-engage with them. The customers who haven’t purchased from you for a long time are still more likely to purchase in comparison to a new prospect who is not familiar with your business much. Salesforce integration with your email platform would allow you to segment such customers and send them a personalized message to re-engage them.

5. Integrate Tools for Customer Service                                                                   

Considering the importance of customer integration, Salesforce Service Cloud allows the team to have centralized access to user complaints and requests that make the customer service process quicker. With all this information, a company wouldn’t just offer a suitable solution to the customer but would also upsell the existing products or services that may be a better fit.

Salesforce Partners to Help You Retain Your Customers 

It’s the customers who make a company a brand, which makes it essential to focus on keeping the customers at the center of the business. All the above-listed ways are effective to deliver front-line support to offer the customer experience that 21st-century clients expect. Our Salesforce consulting services as your support for customer retention would simply mean more smiles, more fans, and more return revenue!

Sales professionals pitching to existing accounts can be an embarrassing mistake which might end up in confused prospects who might reply, “yes, we already know your company and have been talking to some other representative at your company.” For the sales team, these miscommunications and oversteps can occur quite frequently. In aggregate, such mistakes can end up costing in terms of disruption and wasted prospecting time.

Various issues can end up causing this trouble. New leads might appear that erroneously roll up to an active opportunity that belongs to some other sales team member. Similarly, leads from target account lists for outbound campaigns can also end up in the wrong place; and in some cases, leads might be duplicates. Now for the big question: why does this even happen?

The Challenge with Lead Data

For a sales rep, outreach and engagement with prospects can be the biggest success drivers, and likewise, these activities should occupy most of their time. But in most cases, they end up spending too much of the time verifying that data in Salesforce is correct before outreach. It indicates that sales reps spend too much time on non-revenue generating activities, missing out on the genuinely pressing tasks. 

In such cases, the data cleanup inevitably gets abandoned in favor of prospecting, and the data drift in Salesforce CRM of the company continues. And the solution to this problem in sales is lead-to-account-matching.

Lead-to-Account Matching for Productive Sales Effort

Lead-to-account matching is a subtle but impactful method for tightening sales and marketing alignment. It acts as a central component of account-based marketing, which increases sales productivity by avoiding any confusion or data discrepancy. 

Lead-to-account matching can be thought of as an automated process that helps match and filter out incoming leads from existing accounts. It also prevents the sales team from prospecting leads at customer accounts or active opportunities. 

How does it work?

Lead-to-account matching allows the sales team to analyze leads, utilize characteristics of that lead, and match the leads to the right account. By including more sophisticated technology, lead-to-account matching can be done using algorithms, rules, and multiple fields, like geography, to intelligently find the potential matches. 

This method of identifying leads from existing accounts by looking at different variables makes it easier for the sales team to make judgment calls on whether a lead should link to any specific pre-existing account in the database. It saves time in two different ways:

1) Data cleanup: Bulk matching

Running the process of lead-to-account-matching helps to cut down all the time spent on a massive data cleanup. The process works by pairing leads to accounts by the thousands, which takes days in cleanup work when done manually.

2) Data maintenance: Individual on-demand matching

Even after a data cleanup, the team needs to work on maintaining the data quality. Lead-to-account-matching can also help with that, enabling users to see potentially matching accounts and easily match leads to accounts with a click of a button. 

Deliver Excellent Customer Support while Saving Time on managing Leads

With lead-to-account matching, you’ll finally have the confidence that your sales team is engaging with the correct leads. This not only saves your team from a world of confusion when a sales rep transfers a lead to another team member but also minimizes the possibility of redundant lead records. Get your sales team the help they need to manage leads efficiently. Talk to our Salesforce experts for more ways you can improve your custom lead generation process. Reach out to us at sales@360degreecloud.com.