Salesforce is not just a CRM platform. It is a brand that defines trends and makes what we refer to as best practices in the field of customer relationship management. With over 150,000 customers all over the world and virtually millions of users, there is a great deal of pressure on Salesforce to remain leader of the industry and continuously deliver the most stellar experience.
So, quite recently the company has decided to introduce its users to an entirely new UX – Salesforce Lighting Experience. It is an ambitious project which was more than just new fonts, renewed icons, and fresh color pallet. Lighting is a completely new platform altogether that meant to reinvent the way businesses around the world conduct their sales operations. Salesforce’s new interface is intended to maximize sales rep productivity as well as deliver all-new intelligence tools.
What is Salesforce Lightning?
Salesforce Lightning is a new UI introduced by Salesforce with added features and instruments that flawlessly delivers higher degrees of automation and improved personalisation services for its users. At its core, Salesforce Lightning is a centralized platform that enables its users to perform a vast number of activities quicker and with higher efficiency.
Special attention must be paid to one particular feature – the AI component with the nickname “Einstein”. This component is able to scan all the critical customer data, customer replies, sales team activities and then predict how new potential customers are most likely to behave going forward. On top of that, it assists companies in making important decisions through its sophisticated sales analytics. Not to mention the numerous time and effort saving features of Salesforce Lightning that allows your team to better concentrate on more business-critical tasks.
What is Salesforce Classic?
Salesforce Classic at this point barely requires an introduction – for many years, it’s been one of the most renowned CRMs in the world. For various reasons, the outdated platform UI nowadays leaves a lot to be desired. These reasons include oversaturation with text, massive chunks of empty, unused space, low-res graphical elements and lack of graphical elements in general.
Because of that many businesses have either already migrated to Salesforce Lightning or are seriously considering it. However, like with any migration, this process could be a little time consuming and troublesome. But in the end it usually proves to be worth it, as the advantages of Salesforce Lightning over Salesforce Classic are too many. Let’s have a closer look at them.
Salesforce Lightning Benefits
Improved Optimization – Salesforce Lightning is better optimized for high performance across many popular Internet browsers, including mobile browsers.
Sophisticated Forecasting — One of the more prominent Salesforce Lightning benefits over Classic; while Classic does provide revenue and quantity forecasts, Lightning also brings to the table product and schedule date forecasts, territory forecasts, forecast sharing, and other forecasts that are customizable by currency and number.
More Homepage Features — Both Classic and Lightning offer Events, Calendars, and numerous customizable dashboards, but Lightning also provides News, Key deals, and Performance Charts on the homepage.
AI Integration – Another reason why Salesforce lightning is better than Classic. Lightning will allow you to benefit from lead scoring and opportunity scoring functions that will assist you in managing customer support and marketing resources.
Activity Timeline — Lightning offers a timeline to help users monitor their activity history for each account or each lead, while Classic doesn’t have that functionality.
More Page Designs — Lightning empowers users to design new page types, from App Pages to Home Pages to Record Pages, while Classic offers a single basic type of page.
Stronger Security — Last but not least, Lightning includes LockerService, a special feature that adds a layer of security between the components that make up the Lightning interface. User permissions now also come with stronger authentication standards.
Salesforce Lightning Migration
For a long time, the typical Salesforce UI was one of the sufficient holdbacks, when it came to the platform’s adoption. And to be fair, the interfaces were outdated, despite the fact that it was backed up by some of the most advanced cloud computing solutions. Ultimately it doesn’t matter since from the perspective of your regular user – what customer sees is the final product, and there is nothing beyond worth looking it. And, when making a business case, there is some merit to such mindset.
Migrating to Lightning Experience will provide sales-and service-centric interface that extends beyond to service, apps, platform, and more, which makes it entirely applicable to other departments like marketing and customer service.
Salesforce Lightning vs Classic. What has Changed Exactly?
Although Lightning is a brand-new system, some aspects of your CRM system remain unchanged. Mostly this concerns the technical side of the platform, such as:
- Data;
- Business logic and workflows;
- Security.
These are still the same. You can, just as in the past, use process builders, setup validation, and workflow rules. So there is no need to recreate your custom fields, adjust security models or import data all over again.
However, there are significant changes that any buyer needs to be fully aware of:
- UI;
- Business Processes;
- 3rd Party AppExchange Apps (make sure that your existing apps support Lighting, in AppExchange there have to be a “Lightning Ready” tag);
- User Training;
- Analytics.
All of the above have undergone some changes, so if you look closely, it will become apparent that Salesforce Lightning Migration is essentially a reimplementation of the CRM. As Salesforce’ new interface will become more and more popular, just like with almost any softare, classic interface will be supported less and less. Although it is not going to happen just yet.
New features of Salesforce Lightning Experience
When designing the Lightning Experience the team behind the entire project wanted to improve and simplify the core features that are used by sales department on a daily basis. Salesforce went through all the trouble of interviewing thousands of sales reps around the globe to find out what was done right and what needs to be added in order to streamline the business workflow.
If we are going to take a closer look at Salesforce Lightning vs Classic platforms, it becomes apparent that the company is aiming towards enhancing the UX. Among the primary objectives in designing the system, Salesforce aimed at building an application that has a point of view on sale instead of merely being a database of customer information. Here are some of the best features that you will find most useful after Salesforce Lightning migration.
- Customizable Dashboards. When in the past there were only three columns available for building a report in Salesforce UI, now you can go up to nine. This was always one of the most considerable drawbacks to the in-built Salesforce analytics tools, and customers were screaming to fix this for years.
- Improved Navigation. This is not something that a user might request directly, but it can be a root of many different problems in the system. New efficient navigation of Lightning and the quick switch between custom-branded apps available straight in the interface makes the work in a new interface so much quicker.
- Activity Feed. This was far from perfect in the Salesforce Classic. Now with an improved feed, your sales reps can always know at least two things: what did just happened in an account and what they need to do next. Which is pretty much, half the battle in the sales department.
Salesforce Lightning isn’t simply user-oriented interface. It extends its benefits to many personas in your company. Your admins can create and customize pages faster, with reusable pre-built components and intuitive visual tools, called Lightning App Builder. Also, it provides more flexibility to admins, which is always good, as it accelerates customization work. The system offers many various benefits for developers as well.
Salesforce Lightning Migration & Customization Services at OMI
All in all, Salesforce Lightning is a vast improvement over the classic interface in every way possible. It lives up to its name and speeds up all of the core processes, not only for your sales department but for other people in your company as well. And with a new flexibility of development, the customization of the CRM platform opens up completely new possibilities.
If your company is interested in migrating from Classic to Salesforce Lightning and optimizing new interface to serve your corporate goals better, then you can contact us at Outsource Management Inc. As a Salesforce migration partner and a long-standing player in the area of CRM custom solutions development, we can take your business idea and turn it into a reality with Salesforce Lightning.
To learn more about Salesforce migration services at OMI