Salesforce summer ’23 release notes – Dates & Highlights

Find Salesforce Summer ’23 in your pre-release orgs and review the highly anticipated official Summer ’23 Release Notes. As per always, the changes are causing a buzz in the Salesforce #ohana. This new release is again packed with numerous exciting features and enhancements that promise to take Salesforce users to the next level in terms of productivity and efficiency.

Salesforce Summer ’23 Release Notes – Dates & Highlights

The Official Release Notes are Here!

Dive into the key features of the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release Notes, their benefits, and how they will help businesses stay ahead of the curve. We highlight these flow improvements:

1. Flow Improvements

Besides good things like ‘Choice Lookup Component’ now being generally available; flow’s data table new ability to add a search bar and feature 1500 record rows, from an email marketers’s perspective: the best thing will be this:

Flow’s send email action can use email templates (Lightning Email Templates are supported !!!), and log the email on the specified records’ activity timelines. Don’t think that it will replace Pardot though, as the recipient limit is still 5. However,… if you think in terms of hyper targeted segmentation instead, you might have something here. Definitely something to try out for automated ‘transactional’ emails. Quick how-to: Go to Setup. Find Flows. Find a flow you want to be working on. Click and open. Canvas on the right, elements on the left. Look for ‘send email core action’.

2. Further Migration to Flow Support

For those of us who are into automations, this Salesforce Summer ’23 Release Notes bring the end of an era: no new Process Builders can be created! To make that notion more bearable, the ‘Migrate to Flow’ tool supports migrating ‘Scheduled Actions’ in a Process Builder to ‘Scheduled Paths’ in a Flow. For only one row of criteria though, but we’re heading in the right direction. Quick how-to: Go to Setup. Find Flows. Find a flow you want to be working on. Click and open. Canvas on the right, elements on the left.

3. For Case Email Notifications: set a Default No-Reply Address as System Address

Quick how-to: Go to Setup. Find your Organization-Wide Addresses page. Configure a default No-Reply address. Why is this significant: Gives you a reason to look over your case communications. Case functionality is used in both pre-sales and post sales client communications and as such make up an important component of customer engagement. As such, case emails should be branded visually and attuned with brand guidelines and company values overall.

These were beta features of the Spring 23 release to be made generally available in Summer 23.

So much more in the Summer 23 Release Notes

The Salesforce Summer ’23 Release Notes is packed with exciting features and enhancements that promise to take Salesforce users to the next level in terms of productivity, efficiency, and user experience. As many ideas by the community are addressed, there is likely to be something for everyone in this release.

If you’re a Salesforce user, it’s important to stay up-to-date with the latest features and enhancements to take advantage of the full potential of the platform. By incorporating these new features and enhancements into your daily workflow, you can streamline communication, increase productivity, and provide a better user experience for your customers.

Furthermore, staying up-to-date with the latest Salesforce releases and features can give your business a competitive advantage. By being one step ahead of the curve, you can stay on top of industry trends and meet the ever-changing demands of your customers.

Highlights of the Summer 23 Release, cloud by cloud.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Pardot Release Notes Summer 23 highlights (click highlighted title) are discussed in more detail.

Sales Cloud Release Notes

Our client Sales teams are looking forward to do their jobs faster and more effectively with new Salesforce features. As we are email marketing and overall customer engagements specialists here at CloudAnalysts, we tend to look at those features first.

Salesforce Email

Your users can do their jobs faster and more efficiently by sending a meeting request with one click from the dynamic activity composer. In Lightning Experience, they can easily propose three upcoming meeting times. Control who can use organisation-wide email addresses. And there are more ways to verify the identity of email senders.

3 Salesforce Inbox upgrades

1. Send a Meeting Request Quickly from the Dynamic Activity Composer. Reps can now start the process of setting up meetings with one single click! Previously, reps had to open an email and click twice to insert proposed meeting times.

2. Propose Three Future Meeting Times in Lightning Experience
Instead of having to email email back and forth with customers to set up a meeting, now reps can quickly add three upcoming meeting times as a suggestion and avoid the negotiating.

3. Track only external Email clicks/opens: Tracking email opens/clicks indicate customer’s interest. Stop polluting this indicator with your colleagues activities. Now only emails to external email addresses are tracked, so that you’ll know if your customer opened the email or clicked on the included links. Choose what your company wants to track.

In addition, some minor Salesforce Inbox improvements for mobile, basically to stay in step with mobile operating systems (iOS and Android) and 3rd party requirements.

In sum, these useful features for Sales Reps, but the prerequisite is a Salesforce Inbox license (extra charge/user applies).

Security Measures

Next are 3 email security measures you must follow up on:

1. Org-Wide Email Address -updates: To improve security, you must use a verified organisation-wide email address to send automated process emails. To get greater control over who can use organization-wide email addresses in the From field on outgoing emails, you can use permission sets to limit who can use each org-wide email address.
2. Salesforce Email gets seriously more secure. You can now use the DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) key feature to let Salesforce sign outbound email sent on your company’s behalf. For each DKIM key, you can now create a comma-separated list of domain patterns with optional wildcards. When an email is sent, Salesforce matches the domain in the From header against the patterns for each key. When a match is found, the key is used to sign the message. This builds confidence by the recipient that the email is indeed from you.
3. In addition, you can now also verify email sender legitimacy with DMARC and DKIM. Basically this means: checking the legitimacy of the sending server before it processes incoming mail. This was always done to some degree. But now, to improve that verification, the email service now uses an expanded list of authentication protocols, including DMARC and DKIM.

Overall, tweaks to adjust to, but no major changes for most Salesforce users when it comes to Salesforce email.

Other Sales Cloud New Release Features

Pipeline Inspection

This helps you keep your Sales Reps accountable and secure more deals. With this feature enabled, sales teams can view and filter pipeline metrics and related opportunities all in one place. It shows important opportunity changes (in red), giving sales teams more insight into their opportunities which helps them to forecast more accurately. Sales managers can also use Pipeline Inspection to coach their reps to close more deals and ensure that opportunities aren’t falling through the cracks. Prereqs: Free with Enterprise Ed.

Sales Basics

Salesforce brings us some interesting new features here: opportunity product splits, which allows you to coordinate opportunity revenue across your sales team and enables you to see how multiple products and team members fit into complex sales deals without leaving the opportunity record. Opportunity product splits information carries through into reports and forecasts.

In addition to these splits, there’s also appointment scheduling efficiency brought in: Sales reps can save time by accessing their calendar in a new tab and other calendar enhancements.

And third, you can now create quotes without a related opportunity. For one of my clients, who sends out ‘preliminary quotes’ to get early customer buy-in, this is wonderful. Not being force to follow the opportunity-to-quote flow is a winner. This client’s sales reps can now easily fast-track deals by creating quotes without first creating an opportunity, speeding up delivering quotes to their customers for review. Quotes must be related to an account when they’re converted to orders.

How-to: Most of the adoption cost will be sales team training, as it appears to be simple to configure. When you enable quotes in Quote Settings, select Create Quotes Without a Related Opportunity. Be sure to go over all your business practices and workflows before you adopt this new feature as no doubt there will be some adjustments to make.

Sales Engagement

This is improved as follows: you can now manage the timing of cadence steps more easily, let users control the timing of cadence task assignment, repeat steps in quick cadences, and see cadence usage data. You also can let managers create automated actions, search for items in the To Do List, and manage work items from flows in the To Do List. Pre-req: Sales Engagement which costs $75/user/mth.

Einstein Conversation Insights

Your teams can now use Einstein Conversation Insights with more voice recording providers, including Dialpad, RingCentral, Aircall, and Amazon Connect. Einstein Conversation Insights also supports 16 languages (incl. Danish and Swedish) and several different dialects, and enhanced reporting features are available for everyone. Einstein Conversation Insights users are also prompted to turn on the speaker separation feature to help with the creation of transcripts and call insights. Pre-req: Einstein Conversation Insights available at a separate cost for Enterprise Ed.

Revenue Intelligence

Try the new Sales Rep Command Center, which is laser-focused on providing your reps with key information. Identify potential sales using the Product Whitespace feature in Einstein Account Management. Understand your sales stages and identify bottlenecks using the Sales Stage analysis tool in Revenue Insights. Access your Revenue Insights dashboard directly from your mobile devices. Pre-req: Revenue intelligence, at an additional cost for Enterprise & Unlimited Eds.

Collaborative Forecasts

Assess the health of your forecasts with built-in charts. Make decisions with all the data you need in one place with referenced data in a custom column on the forecasts page.

Enablement for Sales Teams

Empower your sales teams with all the product and process knowledge needed to quickly open opportunities, close deals, and help achieve your company’s revenue outcomes. That’s what Enablement is all about, after all.

You will find new features for building, assigning, and managing programs. All this to help your Enablement teams deliver more robust, timely, and job-specific resources for your sales teams in their flow of work. Pre-req: Sales Enablement, available at $100/user/mth.

Collaborate in Real Time with PRM for Slack App (Generally Available)

Bring internal teams and partners into one partner channel for streamlined collaboration and communications. Access, update and share records, and automate vital business processes, all within Slack.

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) for Slack connects your sales teams, partners, and important data through partner portals so you can scale productivity and streamline communication.

Pre-req: Slack. And PRM for $10/login or $25/member.

Sales Performance Management

Generally speaking, Sales Performance Management is a structured, data-based approach to plan, analyse, manage and improve sales performance.

Basically, the new sales planning tool gives your stakeholders a central workspace for collaboration at all stages of the process. It makes planning more fun as it takes the chore out of the planning process. Owners can evaluate their sales plans for the best possible outcomes to keep your sales teams in front of fast-changing conditions.

You can take it further with Territory Planning, engage with prospects as a team using Enterprise Territory Management, plus visualise utility service lines in Salesforce Maps.

Pre-req: software available for an additional cost. (Although, everyone can make a sales plan and embed that onto its Salesforce instance, of course.)

Sales Cloud Einstein

Monitor changes to Einstein Forecasting predictions with a new chart that shows a prediction trend line across periods. Get ready to bid farewell to Account Insights and Opportunity Insights, which are being retired.

Integration with Other Products

Updates to Einstein Activity Capture resolve connected account issues, simplify your setup experience, and track email and event updates. Use the Salesforce Chrome extension to work with records and the To Do List, and view engagement alerts.

Salesforce Meetings

Align everyone before a meeting starts by showing them valuable information about prospects and customers with Meeting Digest. And ensure that customers book meetings with you only when you’re available.

Note: Einstein Activity Capture will add extra info to the Digest, and this is certainly a use-case of EAC where it adds value.

Sounds interesting?

to Learn More or

Get Help Implementing.

Service Cloud Release Notes

There is a lot here in this release for Service Cloud as well.

Einstein for Service

Transform conversation data into service insights and build bot intents with Einstein Conversation Mining. This is now GA. Update replies with on-demand template creation.

Use Bot Blocks (beta) to add a custom or Salesforce-provided dialog groups to multiple bots.

Expanded support for messaging components gives you more ways to add structured content to your enhanced bot (see illustration of a bot to schedule appointments).

Get reply recommendations in enhanced messaging channels.

Use email conversations or select related transcripts to build conversation mining reports. [Learn more]

Service Catalog

Service Catalog enables you to give your customers and partners advanced self-service automation. Turn requests for your company’s products and services into approved and documented orders through self-service automation. Lovely! [Learn More]

Service Cloud channel upgrades

“Take advantage of new features in Messaging and Service Cloud Voice, and explore new tools available in multiple Service Cloud channels.” This may seem like a ‘one-liner’, but there’s a slew of new ideas embedded in this!!

[Learn More]

Customer Service Incident Management

Communicate with internal stakeholders more effectively with enhanced broadcast alerts, and broadcast Slack messages. Keep your incidents centralised and easily accessible to incident teams with the new Incident Alerts All -tab. And with custom templates for broadcast Slack messages, your teams can remain efficient while delivering proactive incident updates that are tailored to your business. [Learn More]

Feedback Management

This new feature, ‘Feedback Management‘ enables you to get responses from guest users who can take surveys without authentication, via APIs. Get custom notifications and alerts for survey responses. View detailed delivery status for survey emails that are sent to a list of recipients. [Learn More]

Swarming

A feature called “swarming” with Service Cloud gives the agents in your contact centre the tools they require to collaborate quickly at scale with experts. This can be very useful to solve certain customer issues, and reduce what’s called “swivel chair pains” (meaning: process whereby a worker manually enters the same data into multiple systems).

• Collaborate in Salesforce with the look, feel, and fun of Slack.
• Apply the power of swarming and cross-functional experts in Field Service.

Requires clients to have either of the following products: Slack or Field Service Lightning.

New Routing Options with the Omni Supervisor Wallboard (a pilot)

This looks promising.

The Omni Supervisor wallboard (pilot) shows more metrics and supervisors can focus on metrics for a queue. Set up routing to consider agents’ capacity for interruptible work (pilot) so that chats or calls interrupt less pressing work such as cases. This is what it looks like: wonder what you think of it:

Interested companies can join the ongoing Omni-Channel pilot programs: [Learn more]

Knowledge

Building a knowledge base is something that somehow resonates with me. Things today are far different from when I first started working with Salesforce Knowledge in 2018. The capabilities keep getting better.

Today, you can author articles easily and more effectively and optimise agent interaction with your knowledge articles by:

• controlling content visibility,
• create a more granular publishing schedule for knowledge articles,
• simplify your knowledge article maintenance and review process,
• grow your knowledge base with confidence, and
• expose Knowledge records in the Lightning Web Runtime.

[Learn more]

Cases

In Email-to-Case, get an updated and feature-rich HTML text editor when you switch to the Lightning editor (beta) in the docked and case feed email composers. Make your agents more productive with a flow template that finds and links contacts to your cases. [Learn More]

Self-Service
Self-Service provides an online support channel for your customers, allowing them to resolve their inquiries without contacting a customer service representative.

That’s it for the Service Cloud release notes for summer 2023.

But there is more…

A lot more.

Other Highlights of the Summer 23 Release Notes:

• Salesforce Flow: Compose intelligent workflows with Flow Builder, OmniStudio, and Flow Orchestration. Integrate across any system with Flow Integration. (as discussed in the intro)
• Security, Identity, and Privacy: Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and enhanced domains rollouts continue. Track file activities with File Event for Event Monitoring. Automate processes for Security Center data with flows. Build native identity experiences with new and improved Headless Identity APIs. And host preference forms via your own Salesforce instance.
• Analytics: improved features for Lightning reports and dashboards, CRM Analytics, analytics apps, Einstein Discovery, and Tableau.
• Commerce Cloud: upgrades for B2B and D2C Commerce, Omnichannel Inventory, Salesforce Order Management, and Salesforce Payments.
• Intelligence: smarter predictions and insights from Einstein Prediction Builder using data from related objects (beta). Use the new Salesforce Connect adapter for GraphQL to connect external sources that expose their capabilities via GraphQL. Assign field-level security for permission sets instead of profiles.
• Data Cloud let’s you ingest, harmonise, unify, analyse, and stream data. This release brings expanded functionality for getting organised and segregate data based on your business needs. Merge and analyse data using existing segment rules and common elements.
• Deployment: Send customisations from one org to another by adding these components to change sets. Your dev will love this.
• Development: Your Dev will love this too: Development enhancements. Whether you’re using Lightning components, VisualForce, Apex, platform events, or our APIs with your favourite programming language, the new enhancements help them develop amazing applications, integrations, and packages for resale to other organisations.
• Artificial Intelligence (Einstein): Use Decision Optimisation (beta) to refine your Einstein recommendations based on your business rules, objectives, and constraints. Spin up propensity models for common use cases across Industries clouds with Scoring Framework, now generally available. Easily add prebuilt functionality to multiple bots with Bot Blocks (beta). Include emails and related transcripts to build better Einstein Conversation Mining reports. (see above in the service cloud section)
• Enablement and Guidance: Delivering enablement programs focused on improving revenue outcomes for your company. Guide users to curated resources that can help them excel. Bring learning, career growth, skills development, and business-critical job performance to your users where they work in Salesforce.
• Experience Cloud: today lets you personalise your LWR sites with Expression-Based Visibility and device-based visibility settings. Discover an abundance of new and improved LWR components, including Tabs, Logo, and Knowledge Article. Migrate your Aura sites to GA4. And enjoy a boost in performance and productivity with improved custom domains, component caching, site navigation, and more.
• Hyperforce: next-gen Salesforce infrastructure architecture for the Public Cloud. It enhances Salesforce applications’ compliance, security, privacy, agility and scalability, and gives customers more choice over data residency.
• Industries solutions shape Salesforce to the needs of your business, reducing the need for you to customise things yourself.
  • Financial Services Cloud: Actionable Segmentation
  • Health Cloud: Schedule home healthcare visits.
  • Nonprofit: Manage lifecycles of awarded grants with Grantmaking.
  • Loyalty Cloud: Automate selection of members for tier change and tier upgrade assessments.
• Other industry clouds: Schedule test drives and service appointments with Automotive Cloud. Calculate order prices online and plan store visits with Consumer Goods Cloud.Orchestrate end-to-end warranty lifecycles with Manufacturing Cloud. Build ship and debit programs with Rebate Management. We also have plenty of changes for Education Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Media Cloud, Industries common features, and many more.
• Mobile: Salesforce Mobile App Plus is here. The operating system requirements for the Salesforce mobile app have changed. Mobile Publisher for Experience Cloud apps can now require app updates natively and with a 15-day grace period.
• Revenue Cloud: Bundle your products and services in Subscription Management, and configure discounts on longer subscription terms. Create quote templates more easily in CPQ Plus.
• Salesforce CMS: Create workflows and streamline approvals in enhanced CMS workspaces. Manage CMS content from the improved content detail page. Manage unlimited content with Salesforce CMS. Create enhanced CMS channels to associate with enhanced CMS workspaces.
• Salesforce Starter: this new beginners product for people who are new to CRM combines sales, service and marketing features. It’s touted to be ‘most efficient way ‘to get started with Salesforce. Launched in January 2023, it’s going to replace Salesforce Essentials and allow small companies to better service its leads and manage its business. (As such, it’s Salesforce’s answer to small business-focused competitors Monday.com and HubSpot. )

These are the highlights.

Be sure to visit my detailed release notes for marketing: Pardot release notes summer 23. And, once new features in SFMC becomes available, you will find our take on them here: marketing cloud release notes summer 23 highlights.

How to use the release notes?

Start with actually reading / rereading this overview. Then, following this link to find the details of what interests you: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=release-notes.salesforce_release_notes.htm&release=244. Next, explore matters hands-on. Either enjoy the Summer 23 features in your sandbox or sign up for a prerelease Dev org to learn more about the changes ahead and prepare for them.

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Last Updated on May 16, 2023