November 6, 2024

Salesforce Summer ‘24 Release Highlights to Have on Your Radar for Sales, Service, Marketing, and More

Let’s explore some of the key updates and most exciting features of the Salesforce Summer ’24 release.

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With every Salesforce release, users anticipate a slew of new features and updates to enhance their experience across various clouds.

The Summer ‘24 Release brings a host of exciting new features and functionality across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Field Service, Revenue Cloud, and more. With AI and data taking center stage, Admins and users alike can expect to see new capabilities that will streamline workflows, personalize customer interactions, and drive deeper insights.

From intelligent forecasting in Sales Cloud to predictive analytics in Marketing Cloud, the Summer '24 Release empowers businesses to make smarter data-driven decisions and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Enhanced automation tools and advanced reporting capabilities further elevate productivity and enable teams to focus on what matters most: building meaningful connections and driving growth. 

As organizations continue to adapt and evolve, Salesforce remains at the forefront of innovation, providing powerful solutions that fuel success in the digital age. Let's dive into some of the key highlights you should have on your radar.

Summer ‘24 Release Highlights for Sales Teams

Get ready, sales teams! The Summer ‘24 Release from Salesforce is here, packed with powerful features designed to boost your productivity and streamline your workflow. From automated contact creation to AI-powered email drafting to enhanced territory management with Salesforce Maps, these updates are set to transform the way you sell.

Automatic Contact Creation

Automatic Contact Creation will replace Einstein Automated Contacts in February 2025 and will give users new capabilities. Sales reps can now benefit from an automated process where contacts are suggested or created based on email activity thresholds. This feature streamlines contact management by reducing manual input and ensuring important contacts are not overlooked.

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Einstein Can Draft Sales Emails

Sales reps can draft common emails, like a follow-up or a meeting invitation, by choosing an email type or by using generative AI. Email types can include product information or related objects. The Einstein Sales Emails feature is available in Lightning Experience in Performance and Unlimited editions. 

Einstein, Salesforce’s AI-powered assistant, can help sales reps craft personalized emails using sales data. By leveraging generative AI, Einstein can create tailored email communications for various scenarios, such as meeting follow-ups, enhancing productivity and effectiveness in sales outreach efforts.

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Salesforce Maps

Salesforce Maps now incorporates travel time functionality, enabling more equitable distribution of workload within sales territories by factoring in drive time. This feature is particularly useful for companies with sales teams operating within specific geographic regions.

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Salesforce Inbox and Salesforce for Outlook Retirement

Salesforce Inbox has been officially retired as of February 1, 2024, with Salesforce for Outlook scheduled for retirement in December 2027. While users can continue to use these tools until the retirement dates, it’s recommended to transition to alternative solutions such as the Outlook Integration and Einstein Activity Capture to ensure seamless workflow integration.

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Cadence Builder Classic Retirement

Cadence Builder Classic is a Sales Cloud Sales Engagement feature that lets Sales teams design and activate sales playbooks for sellers to follow. Cadence Builder Classic is set to retire in the Summer of 2025 and will be replaced by Cadence Builder 2.0. This updated version offers a more streamlined approach to cadence management with separate tracks, necessitating a transition for users currently utilizing branched cadences.

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Revenue Lifecycle Management

Revenue Lifecycle Management, a newer product offering from Salesforce, offers a full suite of features for automating and optimizing revenue at scale. With RLM you can automate everything from product to cash, including product catalogs, pricing, configuration, quoting, order management, fulfillment, billing, and contracts.

The beauty of RLM is that you’re able to unify all your teams on one platform for more efficient revenue lifecycle management. While Salesforce CPQ enhances the quoting process, RLM takes a broader approach, addressing the entire revenue lifecycle to drive business success.

Some features and enhancements we’re excited about include:

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Summer ‘24 Release Highlights for Service Teams

Service Cloud users are in for a treat with exciting updates aimed at enhancing email communication, call recording accuracy, and workplace management. These new features and enhancements will allow customer service agents to work faster and more efficiently across customer service channels.

Lightning Editor for Email Composers in Email-to-Case

Service Cloud users can now take advantage of the Lightning Editor for Email Composers, offering a comprehensive set of configuration tools for composing emails within the Email-to-Case feature. This update improves the user experience and allows for more efficient email communication with customers. 

The new editor provides similar functionality in the docked and case feed email composers in Lightning Experience. Agents can upload images, attach files, use merge fields, and apply email templates.

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Accurate Call-Recording State in Omni-Channel

Service Cloud Voice brings together phone, email, social media, and CRM in real-time, giving service agents a single interface. It also provides live call transcriptions and AI-driven suggestions for agents' next actions.

Service Cloud Voice unifies phone, digital channels and CRM data in real-time in one centralized platform. With the integration of Amazon Connect, Service Cloud now provides accurate call-recording status within the Omni-Channel widget.

This enhancement ensures that agents are appropriately informed about call recording status, contributing to improved compliance and customer service quality. Previously, if you used an Amazon Connect flow with call recording off, the Omni-Channel widget falsely indicated to agents that the call was being recorded. 

All models of Service Cloud Voice are available as an add-on license in Service and Sales Clouds.

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Social Customer Service Retirement

The Social Customer Service feature is scheduled for retirement on November 16, 2024. Users who previously relied on the Social Customer Service Starter Pack, particularly those without access to Social Studio components, should prepare for the transition to alternative solutions.

Get in touch with our team to discuss potential third-party products that provide similar functionality as Social Customer Service or Social Customer Service Studio (Marketing Cloud Social Studio Products). 

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Manage Your Employees with Work.com

The Shift Scheduling app helps coordinate shift patterns while the Contact Tracing app helps identify Individuals, health risks to communities, and geographic hotspots. Both fall under work.com — Salesforce’s workplace operations solutions.

Work.com offers a suite of applications and services designed to help organizations effectively manage employee-related activities, especially during major events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to remote-first work. From internal wellness surveys to service catalog tracking, Work.com provides versatile tools for employee management and support.

Work.com consists of four parts:

Work.com is able to leverage functionality from other products in the Customer 360 platform including Tableau, Communities and Salesforce Surveys.

Field Service Einstein

With Pre-Work Brief, your mobile workers can access vital customer data, asset history, and service records before entering the job site.

By utilizing the Pre-Work Brief template within Prompt Builder, you can effectively tackle field service challenges. Customize the prompt to align with your specific business requirements. This enables mobile workers to access a personalized AI-generated brief, providing comprehensive details about their upcoming tasks. 

Pre-Work briefs provide a quick overview of work to be completed for each Work Order with customizable details such as price book or standard processes to be used while performing the work.

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Work Capacity Updates

New features enable dispatchers to reserve workforce capacity during scheduling, ensuring flexibility and readiness for handling emergency work. This feature addresses field service challenges by enabling you to set precise work capacity limits tailored to your operational needs within a designated service area.

By defining these limits, you gain control over scheduling within specific territories. Whether it's restricting daily work hours or determining the percentage of available workforce, you have the flexibility to optimize resource allocation effectively.

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Asset Management

You can now utilize the CRM Analytics and Data Cloud integration to enable dynamic health scoring of customer assets. The Proactive Asset Service tackles field service challenges head-on by constantly monitoring key factors such as asset age, usage patterns, and maintenance history. 

This service dynamically updates the Asset Health Score dashboard, providing clear indications of an asset's condition: whether it's in good shape, fair condition, or requires immediate attention due to critical issues. With timely notifications, you're alerted when an asset needs your attention, empowering you to swiftly address performance concerns and solve impending issues. 

This proactive approach ensures seamless operations and maximizes asset performance, both minimizing disruptions and optimizing productivity.

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Field Service Intelligence App

Utilizing data from Data Cloud and CRM Analytics, the Field Service Intelligence App offers insights on work orders, assets, service appointments, and service resources. With this app you can access powerful dashboards that centralize your field service data to help you make informed operational decisions.

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Field Service Mobile

Mobile workers can now use augmented reality to measure between two or more points directly from the Field Service mobile app.

Mobile workers can now use augmented reality to measure distances directly from the Field Service mobile app. This cutting-edge feature tackles common challenges faced by field workers. With augmented reality, mobile workers can accurately measure distances between multiple points directly within the app, streamlining tasks that previously required additional tools or manual calculations.

Once the measurement is taken, workers can easily transfer it to the necessary field by copying it to their clipboard and pasting it into the required field. Leveraging Lightning Web Components and sophisticated Lidar technology, this functionality is specifically designed for iPhone 11 and above, ensuring accessibility and precision for on-the-go service professionals.

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Maintenance Plans Frequency and Frequency Types Retirement

Maintenance Plans Frequency and Frequency Types are being retired Winter ‘25. This information will need to be moved to the Maintenance Work Rule to ensure that you don’t lose the scheduling of Work Orders by your existing Maintenance Plans. In addition, workflows, process builder, and triggers defined using frequency fields won't be supported.

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Summer ‘24 Release Highlights for Marketing Teams

Let’s dive into the exciting updates and enhancements designed to elevate the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing strategies. From groundbreaking enhancements in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) to innovative improvements in Marketing Cloud Engagement and Growth Edition, this release is packed with features to empower marketers like never before.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) Updates & Enhancements

With the latest release comes a wave of exciting updates and enhancements for marketing teams utilizing Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot). 

From the ability to send operational emails in Engagement Studio to streamlined user experiences and expanded API capabilities, this release promises to empower marketers with the tools they need to drive engagement and maximize their marketing efforts. 

UX Improvements 

The Status column in the Account Engagement Optimizer shows whether the measure is in Good, Concerning, or Critical standing or if there are actions that can be taken.

Marketers can now transfer images to a Salesforce CMS workspace for future marketing initiatives. We’re hoping this change will allow users to copy Account Engagement files into Salesforce CMS instead of the painful process of downloading and re-uploading them. This change applies to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Growth edition, with Data Cloud enabled.

Marketers can also access alerts and feature recommendations conveniently within Optimizer — the Account Engagement Admin control panel. This new messaging section will display alerts and recommendations for available new and existing features. This change applies to all Account Engagement editions.

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API Changes

Several enhancements have been made to Account Engagement's API capabilities, including support for exporting relationships, creating landing pages, and utilizing API V5 for Flow, providing users with more flexibility and functionality in their marketing automation processes.

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Send Operational Emails in Engagement Studio

You can now send non-marketing emails to opted-out prospects directly from Engagement Studio. Previously, you could only send operational emails as list emails.

Instead of having to create the email, build a list of prospects, and finally send out the email, Engagement Studio allows prospects to be added/removed according to their demographic or behavioral data. This will allow marketers to send out necessary emails to customers while remaining compliant.

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Engage for Gmail Chrome Extension Retirement

Because Google is disabling its Manifest V2 Chrome extensions, the Engage for Gmail extension, which is built on Manifest V2, is projected to retire in June 2024. We recommend working with your Account Engagement users to create a transition plan. You can continue to send emails directly through Salesforce using the Account Engagement Sales Email & Alerts feature.

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Marketing Cloud Engagement Updates & Enhancements 

While the full release is slated for June 7, 2024 through June 28, 2024, we're here to offer a sneak peek into what's coming for Marketing Cloud Engagement. Check back in the coming weeks for more updates for the Marketing Cloud Engagement Summer ‘24 Release. 

Unified Messaging in Marketing Cloud Engagement

Managing multiple customer communications channels such as email, SMS, and WhatsApp can lead to messaging inconsistencies and fragmented customer experiences. Unified Messaging consolidates these channels into one unified platform. You can now bring your existing WhatsApp number into Unified Messaging and improve the customer support experience in Journey Builder with new tools.

Users can now transfer a WhatsApp conversation from a Marketing Cloud Engagement interaction to a Service Cloud interaction. This is done by placing the WhatsApp Session Transfer activity after a Wait Until Chat Response or an Inbound Chat activity. The information passed as part of the transfer includes conversation history, journey data, the recipient’s WhatsApp number, and the cross-cloud WhatsApp phone number.

For WhatsApp numbers in Unified Messaging, you can control whether a Marketing Cloud Engagement message is sent to a customer engaged in an active or open Service Cloud support conversation. This prevents customers from receiving promotional or other low-priority content while they work with support and ensures they receive only relevant messages.

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Marketing Cloud Growth Edition Updates & Enhancements

Work with content shared from a source workspace to a target workspace in the new Shared with Workspaces folder. After a content admin or manager configures the Workspace Settings to allow sharing, marketers can easily find that content in the Shared with Workspaces folder.

With a focus on streamlining workflows and enhancing campaign effectiveness, the Summer '24 Release brings forth several exciting features and improvements to the newly released Marketing Cloud Growth Edition.

Marketing Cloud Growth is built on Data Cloud and can help small businesses drive growth efficiently with CRM, AI, and data. Some of the key features available with this edition include the ability to kick-start campaigns with predefined options, build meaningful audiences from unified data, and create automated messaging using new Flow elements.

Some enhancements we’re excited about in the Summer ‘24 Release include:

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Summer ‘24 Release Highlights for Data Wizards

Salesforce is powered by data and with Data Cloud you can unlock meaningful and more personalized experiences for your customers.

From segment population estimation to waterfall segments to API enhancements, the Summer ‘24 Release promises to transform the way you engage with your customers and leverage insights for strategic decision-making.

Segment Population Estimation

Data Cloud now provides a quick estimate of segment population count to validate segment rules, ensuring users have accurate data for their marketing initiatives.

When building a segment, get a quick estimate of the population count to validate your segment rules. Use the new Approximate Segment Population field to confirm that the segment count meets your expectations. You can then adjust your segment rules and save your segment to get the final segment population.

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Waterfall Segments 

When managing a campaign featuring multiple offers, implementing the Waterfall Segment feature facilitates the establishment of a hierarchical framework, resolving various challenges encountered in prioritizing campaigns.

For instance, when faced with the dilemma of ensuring that a customer doesn't receive more than one offer from a pool of four different discounted offers, implementing a waterfall segment offers a solution. By constructing a prioritized hierarchy of mutually exclusive segments, each audience member is allocated to only one sub segment within the waterfall, guaranteeing they will receive only one promotional offer.

The flexibility to reorganize subsegments within the waterfall enables adjustments to the priority of offers. This feature, now generally available, incorporates several enhancements compared to its previous iteration.

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API Enhancements

REST API calls enable querying of data graphs for primary and related objects, facilitating seamless data integration and retrieval for enhanced analytics and decision-making processes. You can also query data from a specific data graph by ID or by using secondary lookup keys. Use Query API V1 to query data graphs.

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Omnichannel Inventory Management

Omnichannel Inventory tracks inventory availability across locations and selling channels, offering valuable insights for stock management and customer order fulfillment. You can use the Omnichannel Inventory Connector to ingest your inventory data into Data Cloud and uncover valuable inventory insights and predictions.

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Parting Thoughts

The Salesforce Summer ‘24 Release brings a plethora of enhancements and new features across various cloud products, empowering organizations to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and drive business growth. 

We hope you found our list of top updates and features from the Salesforce Summer ‘24 Release helpful — whether you're a Salesforce user, Admin, or Trailblazer looking to expand your knowledge. With a focus on innovation and customer success, Salesforce continues to lead the way in cloud-based CRM and enterprise solutions.

If you have questions about how these updates may impact or benefit your business, get in touch with our team to learn more. We’re ready to help you Solve Things with the power of Salesforce — wherever you are in your Salesforce journey. 

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