The business executive’s guide, part 2

Salesforce’s Winter ‘23 Release Notes were 700-plus pages long. This business executive’s guide summarizes the new features that, if successfully implemented, can impact your business. 

Marketing, Loyalty Programs and Customer Service features from the winter release are summarized in this edition. Part one featured updates to Commerce and Sales. 

New capabilities enable marketing/ecommerce teams to share insights, optimize engagement and transaction experiences

Perhaps the most exciting update is the new Ecommerce Marketing Insights App, one of the many new features within the Intelligence platform. 

As digital-first consumer engagement and transactions continue to become the norm for brands, ecommerce and marketing insights are critical. Thus, marketing and commerce teams must come together to understand how marketing investments impact commerce spend. But oftentimes, these teams operate in silos and don’t necessarily share all of their data and insights appropriately. 

The new Ecommerce Marketing Insights app helps break down these silos, allowing teams to combine their data from the point of awareness and consideration, all the way through conversion. This helps to gain insights that inform loyalty and retention strategies, as well as optimize engagement and transaction experiences. 

Marketing Cloud supports more third-party integrations

External Actions were updated to enable marketers to integrate third-party martech apps into Marketing Cloud Engagement. Marketers can do all kinds of things all from within an engagement studio program, including:

• Sending an SMS message to a prospect.
• Registering a prospect for a webinar.
• Sending out surveys.

External Actions are fully customizable and built on top of Salesforce Invocable Actions, which provides options from no code to full code to build your own actions. External Actions can also be listed on the AppExchange, which over time, will provide a growing library of out-of-the-box tools for marketing teams to use.

There were several enhancements to engage loyalty members through journeys and improvements in gamifying retention strategies in the latest release. 

You can now build stronger member relationships with new loyalty member badges that can be displayed on member profiles and are completely customizable. Let’s say you want to reward your channel partners for carrying new products. You can define the badge type, how long it’s valid for and the image you’d like to use for the icon. 

Also, you can further engage your customers by embedding Member Engagement Widgets on external portals and websites to enable loyalty program enrollment, view member loyalty information and view and enroll members in promotions. The widgets are easily configured based on your branding needs and you can create widgets to drive differentiated member experiences.

One of the reasons you probably chose Salesforce is that you’re getting these updates without having to do any work yourself — they’re rolled out to all Salesforce users no matter how engaged or disengaged from the platform they are. While that makes it easy on the surface, it also makes it easy to fall into the trap of not really paying attention to them. 

Collaborative customer service added to Service Cloud

One of the biggest items in Service is upgrades to swarming ability, which enables organizations to collaborate with experts to solve customer issues. The new capabilities are available in a few ways, including:

• An enhanced swarming set-up page.
• The ability to solve issues as a team directly from Slack with the Service Cloud for Slack app.
• The ability for agents to add multiple swarm members at once, automatically close swarms and update swarm record names.

The Service platform has also enhanced its capabilities for Facebook Messenger. Services teams now have the ability to deliver richer customer conversations by creating an extensive library of interactive message components. This makes it easier for agents to share enhanced links, send questions with static or dynamic options and schedule appointments. 

Additionally, agents will now be able to transfer a session to another agent or flow, as well as leverage new session statuses to route and track messaging sessions more intelligently.

Next release

Throughout the coming year, I’ll be breaking down each of the Salesforce Releases to help you better understand how they can help your business. Look for my next article on Salesforce Spring ‘23 Release soon — the early preview looks like it will be a big one.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

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About the author

Joe is Vice President, Salesforce Technology at Shift7 Digital. As a member of the Shift7 leadership team, Joe works to craft solutions and architectures that meet ambitious client goals using the power of the Salesforce platform, including product ownership for Shift7’s Industry GTM Accelerators. Joe brings more than 20 years of experience implementing Salesforce and other digital platforms including enterprise solutions and complex technology implementations. He sits on the Salesforce B2B Commerce product advisory board. Shift7 Digital is a Salesforce Ventures-backed agency, revolutionizing the digital experience for manufacturers, distributors, and their customers.