By Samiur Rahman, Blogger, Lava Protocols
A Dream Come True
Dreamforce is a dream for the Salesforce community that comes to life every year bringing thousands of customers, partners, and employees. Although a lot of people were unsure whether the long-awaited event would take place and live up to its hype during the year of pandemic and social distancing, Dreamforce 2020 surprised everyone by making announcements that only made the participants be more hopeful about the forthcoming of their businesses and work. According to CEO Marc Benioff, Salesforce has reimagined how virtual conferences take place and it promised to carry the event unlike anyone else. Although separated physically, Dreamforce virtually brought together thought leaders, industry pioneers, and thousands of their peers for an odyssey of learning, inspiration, equality, and fun. The program kicked off on the 12th of November with a virtual keynote from the CEO.
Wide Array Of Announcements
Major announcements took the limelight at Dreamforce this year with Salesforce unveiling brand new products in their line-up. The game-changing features and innovations will focus on the issues you have been experiencing and improve usability far better than anyone. Furthermore, Salesforce has spoken about its expansion through the acquisition of the leading business communication platform – Slack. To understand the gravity of the new features and collabs, let us go through a case by case analysis of what we know so far:
- Acquiring Slack: Slack is a leading business communication platform. Its acquisition turns out to be the biggest ever by Salesforce to date. Slack can now be accessed in the Customer 360 suite of products. To get some more perspective, Marc said the following:
At one end of the spectrum you have these systems, automated processes, machines talking to machines. A customer makes an order and your inventory is updated. Someone submits a ticket and that goes into the queue for a response. One step up from that, you have these applications, wonderful applications like Slack, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, this whole layer that you interact with. Above that, there’s the conversations, the social part, the messy decision making, the arguments Slack, I think, has done a great job in taking that conversational level – the context, the decision making – and bringing it to the applications. You put those all together and you really have the opportunity for end-to-end digital transformation and that’s what’s really exciting.
- Introducing Hyperforce: Salesforce introduced Hyperforce, a total revamp, and reconstruction of Force.com. Now Salesforce will enable the users to position Salesforce apps and services securely on prominent public clouds.
Hyperforce features include: Performance at B2B and B2C scale, Built-In Trust, Local Data Storage, Backward Compatibility
Salesforce’s Chief Operating Officer, Bret Taylor had his say regarding Hyperforce:
We have been working for the past two years on probably the most significant technological shift in this platform since [the Salesforce founders] created it over 21 years ago…Simply put, we’ve been working to enable us to deliver Salesforce on public cloud infrastructure all around the world…We’ve had to completely re-architect Salesforce to work in this way. As a consequence, it’s horizontally scalable. That means that if you have a B2B company with 10,000 customers or you’re a B2C customer with 100 million or more consumers, you can now use Salesforce as your single source of truth for all of that data.
He further stated,
Thanks to our incredible partnerships with all the amazing public cloud companies around the world, we are going to deliver this in every region where you do business. This is already live. It’s live in India, it’s live in Germany and we’re rolling out in 10 countries next year. If you have data residency needs, Hyperforce is your key to bring in Salesforce where your customers are…It is 100% backward compatible. Your apps will work with no changes and you can benefit from all of this automatically.
3. Presenting Einstein Automate: A tool of empowerment for businesses through end-to-end process automation which winds up boosting the productivity and efficiency of the organization. It lets you seamlessly edit smart workflows and connect data across any declaratively configured smart workflows, and integrate data across any independent systems without having to code.
4. Flow Orchestrator is a newly released low-code tool for Workflow development. It lets users create vigorous workflows that automate tedious business processes. With Flow Orchestrator, organizations can heighten projects and lessen delays in achieving solutions.
5. MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce provides the fastest way to connect independent systems, apps, and data to Salesforce and build a 360-degree view of your customer without the need for new codes. It has a library of pre-built connectors and templates that enable admins and developers to smoothly automate integrations.
6. Public Sector Solutions from Salesforce are transforming the public sector to be on par with the private sector. Through such solutions, public sector agencies are able to deliver the same high-quality, personalized service as the private sector with features such as License and Permit Management, Inspection Management, and Emergency Program Management using one single platform without any hassle.
7. Customer 360 Audiences is a self-serve customer data management tool that can be used to push more personalization and interaction with your customers. It is structured into a set of tabs and sections. In this process, you follow a sequence of steps to send your data to selected activation channels.
8. Customer 360 Privacy Center is a controlled package that helps you to comply with data privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In meeting customer demands, you can also be transparent on how their Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is saved, erased, and transmitted.
9. Salesforce Order Management (GA) is used to tackle all facets of the order lifecycle, beginning with order collection, fulfillment, distribution, payment processing, and, eventually, service. In order to have a centralized view of order and service history, it is combined with B2C Commerce and natively supports Service Cloud.
10. Einstein Discovery in Tableau (GA 2021) now gives AI-powered forecasts and suggestions to Tableau. Based on the data in your context, the Einstein Discovery dashboard extension comes with forecasts, interpretations, and recommendations for a positive change directly into the Tableau dashboard.
11. Workforce Engagement (GA Summer ’21) enables executives and managers of the service sector to predict customer demand and organize & prepare their whole staff. Depending on the need, you can now fill in the best agents with the right expertise at the right time.
12. Einstein Call Coaching for Video (GA Spring ’21) uses Artificial Intelligence in order to evaluate patterns, crucial moments and recognize what a team member has committed to during the meeting, and automatically schedules follow-up activities.
May The Salesforce Be With You!
Even though Dreamforce 2020 was not the usual event we expect, it was definitely a reimagination of virtual meetings. Moreover, even if the participants could not visit the venue in person, they have surely never seen so many announcements in a single Dreamforce in a long time. Surely, the big reveal compensated for the lack of atmosphere and gave inspiration to you and many other business personnel to carry out businesses keeping Salesforce in mind. We can only imagine what the next year’s Dreamforce 2021 has in store for us. Till then, let Salesforce guide us through.
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