Salesforce Spring '24 Updates: Now Even Better with Generative AI

Salesforce, one of the most powerful toolbelts for B2B marketers, has recently published the Spring ’24 enhancements, which boast new product innovations built on Data + AI + CRM + Trust. 

Time is of the essence, let’s clip around our blue toolbelt and see what’s new in all its numerous pockets, compartments and loops.

New Login Features for Salesforce Help

It is no longer possible to login using your LinkedIn, Apple or Google account. When browsing help.salesforce.com > Login, make sure you prepare your Mulesoft, Salesforce, or the email associated with your Trailblazer account.

It’s much less complicated than it may seem at first glance if you need to make this change, as you’ll get a message with a single-use code in the email address associated with your LinkedIn, Apple, or Google accounts.

The Trailblazer account unites your experience with SSO across more than 30 Salesforce digital properties. By logging into Salesforce Help with your Trailblazer account, you have a simplified way to create and manage open cases regardless of what Salesforce products you use.

Supported Browsers

There are some changes to the supported browsers documentation, making it easier for both users and administrators to find what they need. One should bear in mind that supported browsers for Salesforce vary depending on whether you use Salesforce Classic or Lightning Experience.

Equally important, other browsers or older versions of supported browsers aren’t guaranteed to support all features.

Other things to know!

Don’t forget that Salesforce treats touch-enabled laptops, including Microsoft Surface and Surface Pro devices, as laptops instead of tablets. 

You will not be able to access the Salesforce mobile app on these devices. Users are redirected to the full site experience that’s enabled for them—Lightning Experience or Salesforce Classic. 

Also, only standard keyboard and mouse inputs are supported on these types of devices.

Speaking of tablets, these are the supported dedicated browsers:

‍

If you need to use Salesforce on your phone, it’s recommended to use the Salesforce mobile app.

Third-Party Browser Extensions and JavaScript Libraries

A lot of professionals are very fond of third-party browser extensions or JavaScript library. However, be aware that you need to check AppExchange for browser extensions and apps from Salesforce partners or the Component Reference for base components that match your requirements.

Equally essential, Salesforce can’t prevent any extension from accessing your Salesforce data, nor can it detect that there’s any attempt to access your data. 

Other very important things to bear in mind:

• Browser extensions that insert or remove elements in the DOM can interfere with the stability of Lightning Experience and lead to unexpected behavior.
• Browser extensions that don’t follow Salesforce security standards can fail to work properly in Lightning Experience. 
• The internal DOM structure of Lightning Experience can change in a future release, and compatibility with a third-party browser extension isn’t guaranteed.

General Enhancements

This year seems be a significant one for Lightning Experience users:

Starting April 2024, multi-factor authentication (MFA) will be required by default when users log in, to prevent unauthorized access to Salesforce accounts. Sandbox orgs aren’t affected. Orgs that are in a trial period aren’t affected until they’re converted to a subscription.

Starting in summer ’24, major release upgrades on Hyperforce will require no service downtime. Users who are online during the upgrade are prompted to log in again to comply with security requirements. Until now, core major release upgrades required a 5-minute maintenance window with downtime.

More abilities with record home pages and record create model

You will be able to create, view, or edit the record home pages with improved performance, stronger accessibility support, and better service availability when using  Lightning Experience and the Salesforce mobile app. This change doesn’t apply to the Field Service mobile app.

There will also be changes for the record create model that displays when you create a record via a lookup field. For all record pages, including LWC (Lightning Web Components)-enabled ones and those that aren’t LWC-enabled, when you create a record via a lookup field, the Save & New button no longer appears. The button continues to appear on Create and Edit models that are not opened via a lookup field.

• The create from lookup modal now also displays using LWC. 
• The create from lookup modal is now URL addressable. 
• The create from lookup modal now supports Dynamic Forms.

Not in the least, you will be able to manage contracts and pay invoices much easier from Your Account home.

‍Reassigning the service appointments will be a much easier process now for territory managers, who have at hand the Reassign Multiple Service Appointments flow.

Service resources in Lightning Experience in Enterprise and Unlimited editions where Salesforce Scheduler is enabled can now attend to multiple customers during the same time slot within their shift. You can define the maximum number of appointments that can be booked for the same time slot for the selected topics within the selected shift.

Identifying the issues related to Scheduler setup, service resource setup, and an Experience Cloud user setup can now easily be done by running the Salesforce Scheduler Troubleshooter

Einstein Search

One of the most amazing Salesforce features is the Einstein Search, which significantly enhances the global search bar within Salesforce. This is now enabled in all Salesforce orgs, unless your org has the DoNotAutoEnable flag turned on. You can opt out of Einstein Search features by disabling them on the Search settings page.

Let’s breakdown the most remarkable features:

• AI-Generated Search Answers creates a summarized response tailored to your question based on knowledge articles and other sources. This feature supports English-only articles.
• It gives end users more relevant search results with less noise by adding field rules to your search query configuration in Search Manager.
• You can also configure the search experience according to the distinct needs of your end users and deliver more relevant search results. For example, you can provide a unique search experience for your customers on LWR Experience sites for Experience Cloud in one configuration.

More features related to Einstein Search

Here are some more features that came into effect in January 2024:

‍

Einstein Platform

Salesforce users are able to create smart solutions for their business cases with generative AI, predictive AI, and everything in between.

Service agents can save a lot of time using NLP bots with the cross-lingual intent model, which offers intent and system entity recognition support for 19 languages, including Arabic (beta).

The disambiguation factor could massively help, as you can better understand customers and, if the customer selects a suggested dialog, you can use that data to improve the bot’s intent model. 

Enhanced bots, with boosted authentication, custom, form, and payment messaging components, can now handle more complex use cases on enhanced Apple Messages for Business channels.

More features related to Einstein Platform

Another great feature is being able to send your customers personalized files, such as an invoice related to an account, using an enhanced bot. You can now also dynamically populate and send a file with an enhanced bot. 

Salesforce users can now improve their customers’ shopping experience with the Commerce Concierge Bot Template.

Your customers can authenticate in the store, access multiple accounts, reorder, and leverage Einstein generative AI features, such as product discovery and product discovery feedback.

The new messaging components support powerful bot interactions with customers.

You can now:

• Verify a customer’s identity. 
• Embed an external app in a bot conversation. 
• Send a form to easily and securely gather information from a customer.
• Process a payment with Apple Pay.

Einstein Studio in Data Cloud

With Einstein Studio in Data Cloud, you can create your own predictive AI models, bring in predictions from models in Databricks, and connect to generative AI large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI and Azure Open AI. 

More features related to Einstein Studio

• You can even create AI models from scratch without leaving Salesforce in just a few clicks. For example, you could predict numeric measures like opportunity amount or case satisfaction score. Or predict binary outcomes such as whether you’ll win or lose an opportunity or the likelihood a case will be escalated.
• You can create or connect models and sort them in the table, or use search to find a model to quickly view and access it.
• You can now set up an external LLM as a foundation model to serve as a source for generative AI. For example, configure Open AI or Azure OpenAI to summarize text or generate chat responses to accelerate tasks, reduce response time, and enhance your overall operational efficiency.

• Data scientists and admins can access highly curated, harmonized, and near real-time Customer 360 data in Databricks. 
• You can briskly evaluate your predictions across large datasets and assess models before deploying them. You can use the aggregated outputs from your data transforms to create data visualizations in Tableau, CRM Analytics, and other Salesforce apps.

Hyperforce

Hyperforce is the state-of-the-art Salesforce infrastructure architecture built for the public cloud. It provides Salesforce applications with compliance, security, privacy, agility and scalability, and gives customers more choice over data residency.

Delivery via Hyperforce of the Salesforce Customer 360 application suite, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, B2B Commerce, Platform, and Industries Cloud is newly available in South Korea and Sweden. 

As a reminder, it is also available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Salesforce Customer 360 application suite is available on Hyperforce by request only in Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

Marketing Cloud Engagement

Marketing Cloud Engagement is one of the most powerful tools to plan and optimize unique customer journeys based on your business objectives. Users can create, automate, and personalise marketing campaigns using email, social media, mobile messaging, advertising, and web channels.

The current enhancements are bringing improved performance to Automation Studio. However, the Marketing Cloud Engagement mobile app is being dismissed on May 5, 2024. After this date, Marketing Cloud Engagement will only be available by using a browser.

More about the Automation Studio

Let’s focus a bit on the most important general enhancements to Automation Studio:

• Scheduled automations are 62% more on time.
• You can view your WhatsApp data and see which messages were more successful, which campaigns performed better, and how your customers engaged with your WhatsApp messages.
• You can use generative AI to build targeted audience segments in Data Cloud for Marketing with Einstein Segment Creation. Describe the target audience, and Einstein Segment Creation produces a segment in seconds using trusted customer data available in Data Cloud. You can also edit and fine-tune the segment as needed.
• You are now able to manage your journeys more easily from the Journey dashboard. You can select up to 10 journeys at one time and pause or resume the current version or all versions.
• When using the Engagement Split activity to track links clicked in an email, you can now enter any URL to track for path evaluation.
• You can now view the customer key in the data extension storage CSV file. 
• New file drop API validation prevents you from mistakenly creating unmonitored folders.
• You can now move CloudPages from one Folder to another, as well as nest Folders within one another. The updated user interface makes it easier to manage your Folders and their respective CloudPages assets.
• You can now restore items sent to the CloudPages Recycle Bin without calling Support. 
• To improve performance of the Contact model, data extensions with the "All records and data extensions" retention policy are no longer linked to the Contact model in Data Designer.
• Einstein Probabilistic Opens is now called Einstein Metrics Guard. 

Salesforce CMS

Salesforce CMS, the terrific content management system that empowers users to create, manage, and deliver digital content across various channels and devices, has also been enriched.

• You can create schedules for your Salesforce CMS content to publish and unpublish on designated dates and at specific times.
• To make your processes more flexible, you can now cancel a running workflow in your enhanced CMS workspaces. From the settings dropdown on the Workflows component, select Cancel. After you cancel the current workflow, you can start a new one.
• You are now able to preview only news, image, and document content types on your enhanced LWR site, before or after you publish.

More about Salesforce Flow Builder

Salesforce Flow Builder, a powerful tool which allows users to create and automate business processes using a point-and-click interface, has also received some enhancements:

• The possibility to compose intelligent workflows with Flow Builder and Flow Orchestration in just a few clicks. Additionally, when you create a secure process to connect the information stored in different systems, you build a real-time, integrated view of your customers and business.
• Send data to Data Cloud with flows. 
• Transform data in new ways with data aggregation. 
• In screen flows, use Display Text and Long Text area components to react to changes on the same screen at run time and use text templates to react to changes on the same screen at run time. 
• Validate the values that a user enters, and provide error messages for more screen flow components.
• Search a data table multiple times without worrying about losing your previous selections.
• Migrate more processes to flows.
• Delete workflow rules from managed packages.