Top Features in Salesforce Service Cloud Winter '18 Release

There are some interesting new upgrades and features released this Salesforce Service Cloud Winter ’18 Release. Macros, Omni routing and Live Agent are now in Lightning experience. Field Service Lightning sees a new app for Android, while Communities is now outfitted with a new portal template. Learn more detail below.

Salesforce Service Cloud Winter Release ’18 – top features

Salesforce upgrades its software 3x a year. These upgrades are made in response to customer and consultants requests, who can vote for suggested product improvements. The top 7 newly released features for Salesforce Service Cloud are:

Macros – in Lightning Experience.
Omni-channel Routing & Supervisor – in Lightning Experience.
Live Agent – in Lightning Experience.

Field Service Lightning – App for Android.
Field Service Lightning – Advanced Scheduling.
Field Service Lightning – Multi-signature Service Reports.

Community – Customer Account Portal template.

New Winter ’18 Features

Let’s briefly discuss each of these in turn.

Macros are the most popular tools for agents in Service Cloud. They automate common repetitive tasks, reducing multiple steps down to a 1-click. These can be done within a case, to save customers & service delivery time.

Omni-channel Routing allows a service department to automatically push the right work to the right agents at the right time. It can do so across service channels such as social media, phone, email and the website. It can even include service from third parties. The Supervisor allows service managers a real-time view of what his happening across his service teams.

Life Agent is a real-time chat functionality. It is one of the most-used support channels, and also has the highest Customer Satisfaction of any Salesforce channel. It allows agents to hold multiple conversations at once. This functionality is now available in Lightning experience.

Field Service Lightning App for Android is an offline-first, native Salesforce app that brings for the full power of on-site job management to a mobile workforce. Mobile and voice can now get instant updates, access to knowledge on the go, offline workflow, capabilities for managing inventory, updating work orders, and job statuses. And it’s easy to apply your branding to the app.

Field Service Lightning’s Advanced Scheduling. This helps to manage scheduling multi-day and complex field work. It includes an advance optimisation scheduling engine.

Field Service Lightning’s Multi-signature Service Reports boost the internal communication efficiency of mobile service workers and ensures sign-offs from all key stakeholders. Instead of creating multiple versions of the same job, this feature allows service reps to create multiple service reports for all key stakeholders to keep them informed and involved.

Communities is all about creating the engagement layer on top of the Salesforce platform. This new Customer Account Portal template enables a company’s customers to access knowledge articles and Salesforce records that belong to their account, and complete basic self-service tasks like the reordering of a lost loyalty card.