Salesforce Spring ‘21 Release: Top 10 Features

Salesforce Spring ‘21 release notes contain some real gems. If you don’t have the time to sift through all of them, we’ve highlighted some key features we think are of particular interest. Read on to see our top ten updates for this release.

1. Flow Improvements

There are so many flow improvements in this release that we decided to devote a separate article to them, which you can access here.

2. Survey Improvements

Salesforce Surveys is, in our opinion, a powerful and underutilised feature (although reporting leaves something to be desired!). It seems like Salesforce is keen to develop the feature further, with a number of improvements being released in Spring ‘21. Similar to Flows, we decided these changes deserved their own article. Read more here.

3. Give agents time to complete conversations

As any support agent can tell you, having time to wrap up the conversation they’d just had is key. Currently only available for Voice Call channels, After Conversation Work (ACW) allows you to specify how much time to give agents before receiving more work. Hopefully the feature will be rolled out to additional channels in the near future.

4. Prebuilt Entitlements

For any company using Service Cloud, Entitlements are a key feature to measure KPIs such as SLA compliance. However, they can be tricky to set up correctly if you don’t have much experience. Luckily, in Spring ‘21, prebuilt Entitlements will be available for use in new and existing orgs with Service Cloud licenses, allowing even notice users to make use of the feature.

5. Salesforce Meetings: Meeting Digest and Visual Studio

Salesforce Meetings is an interesting new feature that allows reps to prepare for, host and follow up on calls without ever leaving Salesforce.

Before the call, reps can get information such as meeting attendee bios, customer history and open service cases all in one view called Meeting Digest. Reps will also be able to see key details like if a decision maker is not attending the call or if there are any documents that have been shared beforehand

During the meeting itself, the rep launches Meeting Studio, a concatenated and clean view of the presentation and presenter, which appear side by side on the attendees’ screens. This is not a replacement of a video conferencing service but an add-on that simplifies content sharing while keeping reps organized and participants engaged.

Once the call is over, Meetings will provide automated action items and call notes that reps can access through the Salesforce Anywhere app.

6. Track Accounts as Campaign Members

In a move that may simultaneously delight and horrify marketers everywhere, it’s now possible to add Accounts as Campaign Members alongside Leads and Contacts. While this is just a beta feature, we imagine it will open up avenues for campaign attribution and potentially expand the use of Campaign Influence.

7. Add Zoom Meeting Links to Events Created with Insert Availability in the Gmail Integration with Inbox

Sales reps can now connect their Zoom accounts and automatically add Zoom meeting links to invitations created using the Insert Availability feature in Lightning Experience email. Automated Zoom meeting link additions means reps no longer add links manually after attendees select an event time.

This change applies to Lightning Experience orgs with Salesforce Inbox and Enhanced Email enabled.

8. Lightning Sync for Google and Microsoft will no longer be updated

Salesforce has officially confirmed that they will no longer be making updates to the Lightning Sync for Gmail or Lightning Sync for Microsoft features. This marks an official switch over to Einstein Activity Capture, which sees a few improvements this release, such as the ability to sync internal events and the ability to configure the feature by profile.

Einstein Activity Capture differs quite significantly from the Lightning Sync feature. If you’re curious about getting started with Einstein Activity Capture, we recommend reviewing the two features side by side here.

9. Data Mask

Data Mask is an interesting new feature that allows you to anonymise data automatically in sandboxes. Because sandboxes are typically used for development and testing, data and security compliance can be often overlooked even though a larger group of developers, employees and contractors might need to be given access to a sandbox org. Although this app was only released a few months ago, we have already seen our clients starting to use it.

You can now share records and manage record shares in Lightning. Previously you had to switch back into Salesforce Classic to give specific users and user groups access to records. Hoorah!