Salesforce's Summer 201818 forecast is "cloud"y

While the summer season doesn't officially start for a few more days, Salesforce’s summer has already begun. And the Summer ‘18 release is a big one for all the Clouds. In the sections below, we highlight some key Summer ‘18 features for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, and Analytics Cloud.

Sales Cloud

The enhancements made to Sales Cloud bring Einstein Activity Capture into this Cloud, meaning users will no longer need to have Einstein for Sales Cloud to leverage the power of Einstein Activity Capture. Einstein Activity Capture will now automatically sync Emails and Events to Records in Salesforce without a need for a connector. These new capabilities, which will require either Outlook 365 or Google, will allow management to have a view into all the activity happening around Opportunities and Accounts.

The task tab for Activities has also gotten a few key updates. Now list views can be created with custom filters and displayed in the standard table view or the Kanban view like the Opportunity list views. 

Service Cloud

Einstein has not only been a focus for Sales Cloud, but he has come to help Service Cloud users as well. In this release, we are introduced to Einstein Bots. These Bots can save your Service users a ton of time when it comes to answering basic questions via Live Agent, which is currently the only supported messaging channel for Einstein Bots today. There are two different methods to setting up a new Bot: a simple button and menu style Bot or an intent-driven Bot. The button and menu style can prompt a user to select a predefined path to resolve their issue. This could be for resetting a password or checking the status of an order. This is all driven off a Process Builder that powers the Bot. The intent mode Bot is driven off an Intent Model built in Salesforce. This trains the Bot to look for keywords or phrases before offering an answer. These Intent Modes will and should evolve over time as you are working on training the Bot. 

Marketing Cloud

Einstein has come to help out users in the Marketing Cloud as well. In the Summer ‘18 release, we will now have a capability called Einstein Flow Control. By using Einstein Flow Control, users can leverage Einstein Behavior scoring predictions with journey builder. This allows for users to drag Einstein Splits on the Journey Builder and customize the flow based on subjects, content offers, and channels. Each split is tailored based on these key elements. 

Analytics Cloud

This release provides customers the ability to connect to more data sources than before. Connections can now be made to SAP Hana and Microsoft Azure SQL databases. Users are now able to connect to up to 100 objects instead of the 50 they were limited to before. With the schedule replication feature, users can control how frequently data sets are replicated. Often times, Sales and Opportunity data sets need to be updated daily, but product information needs to be updated less frequently. 

Community Cloud

Give your Community members, customers, and other external users the convenience of logging into your Community with a verification code instead of a password.  Have your external users log in with a code that will be sent via email or text message. 

Users are increasingly using their mobile devices to do their work. Some users, like retail customers and service reps, work solely on their mobile devices. Regardless of whether users are accessing a browser on their mobile device or desktop, remembering a password is inconvenient. Give your users the option to verify their identity another way. Instead of passwords, your external users can verify their identities with a one-time email password, Salesforce Authenticator, time-based one-time password (TOTP), or Universal 2nd Factor (U2F). Users can also verify their identities by text message (SMS), currently in beta.

And that’s a wrap on the Salesforce Summer ’18 Release. If you want to discuss any of these features in greater detail, reach out to us!