The Salesforce Winter ’24 Release is underway, packed full of exciting features and enhancements.
As a top-tier Salesforce partner with a 5/5 Customer Satisfaction Rating that’s in Salesforce every day, Coastal Cloud can be counted on to deliver “need-to-knows”, saving you time and energy. Our Senior Consultant Nancy Brown dug into the release and chose 21 of the most impactful updates. Nancy is an 8x Salesforce Certified Consultant and leads the Salesforce Orlando Women-in-Tech Group.
Timeline
First things first—you need to be aware of when your production instance will be upgraded to the Salesforce Winter ’24 release. The deployment of Winter ’24 depends on your specific configuration, with the first rollout occurring on September 2, then on October 7, and finally, on October 14.
Need to know what Salesforce instance you are on? Find out here.
Salesforce Overall
Highlight #1: Set a Password or Expiration Date on a Public Link to a Salesforce File
When generating a public link to share a file, now you have the option to establish an expiration date for that link. You also have the ability to secure access to the file using a password. By default, the link expiration feature is activated and configured for a duration of 30 days. The decision to activate password protection is based on the default settings for passwords. When password protection is activated, an automatically generated password will be displayed in the dialogue box.
Highlight #2: Configure Searchable Objects for Profiles More Easily (Beta)
The Search Manager configuration window now guides you through configuring searchable objects for a user profile. Get information when you need it directly in the application.
Analytics
Highlight #3: Explore Tableau Views in CRM Analytics Dashboards With Custom Filters (Beta)
Enhance your exploration of Tableau views within dashboard components by introducing custom filters, allowing you to unveil even more valuable insights. Instead of creating numerous component views to accommodate various data scenarios, you can now integrate a filter parameter. This interaction can involve static values or a filter integrated into a CRM Analytics dashboard. Now you can maintain a single Tableau view without creating and switching between different views.
Highlight #4: Transfer Ownership of Lightning Dashboards (Beta)
Facilitate continuous updates to Lightning dashboards by seamlessly transferring ownership when there’s a shift in responsibilities or when the original dashboard creator departs from your organization. With this change, the new owner gains complete control over the dashboard’s content. This eliminates the previous need to clone or recreate the dashboard when the creator transitioned to different roles or left the organization.
Highlight #5: Open Reports and Dashboards in Multiple Tabs from the Analytics Tab
Now, it’s possible to have multiple reports and dashboards open in separate tabs. In the past, you were limited to viewing just one report at a time within the Analytics tab. This enhancement brings improved work organization and the freedom to simultaneously engage with various analytics tasks.
Customization
Highlight #6: Reporting on Custom Permission Set and Permission Set Group Assignments
With Winter ‘24, you can create a custom report type and build reports on custom permission set and permission set group assignments. This feature will allow you to view all users assigned to a particular custom permission or group. Alternatively, you can utilize it to examine the assignments of an individual user.
Consumer Goods Cloud
Highlight #7: Trade Promotion Optimization
Trade Promotion Optimization empowers key account managers with baseline and uplift predictions, enhancing trade promotion planning efficiency and ROI. By leveraging AI-driven baselines from Einstein Discovery, managers save time, leading to more accurate plans. This feature streamlines the promotion planning process, providing real-time uplift factors and allowing easy review of predicted outcomes. This comprehensive approach improves promotional effectiveness and ROI assessment.
Flows
Highlight #8: Reactive Screen Components (GA)
With reactive screen components, your screen components can react to a user’s actions on the same screen. This release introduces new enhancements, including the use of global variables and custom labels in reactive formulas, employing choice components to respond to user selections, utilizing more formula functions for real-time logic, configuring Display Text components to react to changes, and informing screen reader users about dynamic changes due to their actions. Overall, this enhancement empowers Salesforce users to create more dynamic and responsive screen flows that enhance the user experience by reducing unnecessary screen navigation and providing real-time interactions.
Highlight #9: Custom Error Messages
This new feature lets you design and display personalized error messages in flows that activate when record changes are rejected. Previously, unfriendly validation rule or apex errors were returned. This new flexibility is useful for making specific rules to double-check information, showing error messages when there are problems, and even preventing records from getting deleted.
Highlight #10: Save a Flow Without Configuring Some Elements
Now you can configure flows faster by saving draft flows before some elements are fully configured. Errors that previously prevented saving are now just warnings. For Winter ‘24 this feature will only be available for the Create Records and Start element of Record-Change trigger flows.
Highlight #11: Transform Your Data in Flows (Beta)
With Winter ‘24, Flow Builder will introduce the new Transform element for transforming collections of data between flow resources. Combined with the Action element that makes an HTTP callout, you can build a flow that fully integrates data outside Salesforce with no code. Previously, you built a flow that included the Loop element and the Assignment element. Now you can do it all with the Transform element when transforming data in screen flows, autolaunched flows with no triggers, and record-triggered flows.
Highlight #12: Dynamic forms on Standard Objects / Dynamic forms for mobile
Dynamic Forms enables you to create flexible and dynamic user experiences using the Lightning App Builder. Previously it was only available for custom objects and a limited number of standard objects. With Winter ‘24, this functionality has been expanded to include hundreds of standard objects that use LWC technology. There are a few exceptions to this, such as the Note object and objects that don’t use LWC technology. For instance, Campaigns, Products, and Tasks will continue to rely on page layout information rather than using Dynamic Forms.
Dynamic Forms on Mobile is now generally available on all Dynamic Forms-supported objects. Mobile users now have the same customized experience that desktop users have.
Service Cloud
Highlight #13: Einstein for Service
Einstein for Service is designed to significantly enhance customer service efficiency and quality. Integrated seamlessly into agents’ workflow, this feature automates various aspects of customer interactions. It automatically generates service responses, condenses communication summaries, and provides answers to frequently asked questions.
Customers seeking swift answers can input their queries into the self-service portal’s search bar, prompting Einstein to draft relevant responses. In cases requiring more assistance, customers can engage directly with agents. During these conversations, agents benefit from personalized service replies generated by Einstein, utilizing historical case data, CRM information, and knowledge articles. Additionally, when agents require speedy answers, the feature leverages Einstein to search and deliver solutions from trusted knowledge articles. After a case is resolved and closed, Einstein for Service automatically generates interaction-based summaries.
As a result of these streamlined services, case resolution times are accelerated. This allows agents to allocate more effort towards creating exceptional customer experiences.
Sales Cloud
Highlight #14: Einstein GPT Call Summaries
Einstein Conversation Insights enables users to generate AI-powered summaries of both voice and video customer calls. This is made possible through the integration of Einstein GPT technology. This feature introduces a “Summary” tab within call records, enabling users to generate editable summaries that encompass important details like action items and customer input. These summaries can be easily shared among team members, enhancing collaboration within the workflow.
Highlight #15: Sales Emails
With the Winter ‘24 release of Einstein GPT for Sales, the time-consuming process of generating sales emails is streamlined. The integration between Einstein GPT and the Salesforce CRM allows users to create stylized emails aligned with their individual tone and style, all while drawing from Salesforce data. Users can quickly edit generated emails to add any relevant info before sending them directly from Gmail, Outlook, or any webpage, resulting in faster and more effective sales communication and outreach.
Experience Cloud
Highlight #16: Create Component Variations in Enhanced LWR Sites (Beta)
Component Variations are now available in enhanced LWR sites. Create several versions of the same component and then use visibility rules to determine who sees what. Variations inherit properties from the default component and remain in a draft state until you add visibility rules. After you add a visibility rule, the variation leaves the draft state and can be prioritized.
Translate your LWR Sites into up to 25 languages
With Winter ‘24 users will be able to offer LWR sites in 25 languages rather than the previous limit of 10 languages.
Data Cloud
Highlight #17: Use Data Cloud Related Lists to Enrich Your Contacts and Leads
You now have the capability to incorporate related lists containing Data Cloud information onto your Contact and Leads record pages. This empowers administrators to access a unified perspective of customer engagements across various channels like email, website, phone, and others, all conveniently accessible in one location. This enhancement fosters enhanced user productivity and satisfaction by streamlining access to critical data.
Marketing Cloud
Highlight #18: Referral Marketing
This feature, integrated directly into Salesforce, aims to create differentiated referral programs that drive higher revenue conversion and customer retention, offering a powerful tool for marketers. These programs are designed to acquire new customers, drive product adoption, increase sales, and gather valuable data. Marketers can identify potential referrers using the “Likely to Refer” dashboard and then proceed to build a referral promotion through a three-step wizard. The first step involves customizing the appearance of email templates and the referral widget on the commerce site. The second step focuses on configuring referral rewards, including selecting the target audience for the promotion. In the final step, marketers review and activate the promotion, which automatically generates corresponding email journeys within Marketing Cloud. The referral widget can be embedded on the company’s e-commerce website.
Highlight #19: Sandbox to Production Flow
This feature streamlines the process of moving assets from sandbox to production, facilitating smoother campaign development and deployment for marketers. This functionality is particularly beneficial for building and testing landing page templates, dynamic content, and form handlers before deploying them to the production environment. The process involves selecting the desired business unit for copying, verifying the assets for transfer, configuring their placement in the production environment, and receiving confirmation upon completion.
Nonprofit Cloud
Highlight #20: Fundraising Portfolio Management
The new Winter ‘24 Nonprofit Cloud fundraising app empowers organizations to create and manage targeted campaigns, track donor behavior and interactions, and efficiently manage major gift portfolios, all aimed at building and maintaining strong relationships with supporters while optimizing fundraising operations.
Highlight #21: Outcome Management
The Winter ‘24 release of Nonprofit Cloud introduces Outcome Management, enabling nonprofits to define, measure, and evaluate their impact strategy within a single platform. Organizations can create outcomes, link them to activities, and define measurement indicators. The feature visualizes the strategy, sets time-bound targets, and tracks progress over time, ensuring resources are effectively utilized for maximum impact.
Learn More
To learn more about how to apply these updates to your organization or optimize release updates, reach out to one of our experts.
Resources
- Release In A Box
- How and When Do Features Become Available
- Salesforce Winter ‘24 Release Feature Matrix
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