Salesforce.com yesterday introduced the next generation of its Customer Success Platform, Salesforce Lightning, and previewed its product strategy for the first half of the year. Included in those plans is an upgrade to Service Cloud Lightning, the company's unified customer service platform and ecosystem.
Through upgrades to Omni-Channel Supervisor, call center managers now have greater insight and visibility into their operations and agents' workloads, enabling them to reallocate resources as needed. Capabilities include real-time activity view, operational alerts, filtering and sorting capabilities, and dynamic activity tracking and routing to help during high-demand service periods.
Salesforce.com also entered the multi-billion dollar field service market with Field Service Lightning, enabling companies to connect their entire service workforces with tools for agents, dispatchers, and mobile employees. Dispatchers can leverage smart scheduling to provide automatic, real-time assignments based on employee skills, availability, and location. Service employees in the field can also create and update work orders and change requests and job status from any device.
In addition to the innovations coming to Service Cloud Lightning, Salesforce's Spring and Summer releases will include more than 300 advancements across the entire Salesforce Customer Success Platform. Included in these are several capabilities added to Community Cloud Lightning. They include the following:
- Lightning Community Templates, which allow companies to create rich online communities in days;
- Lightning Community Management, which empowers community managers with analytics and tools to foster community growth; and
- Live Agent, which connects any self-service community directly to the service console to provide seamless customer support.
Lightning Community Templates are generally available today to Community Cloud users at no additional charge.
Salesforce.com launched Salesforce Lightning, a multitenant metadata platform that provides a consistent, modern user experience across any device, at its Dreamforce users conference in the fall. Since then, more than 90,000 customers and 55 partner components now take advantage of the advanced features of Lightning.
"Lightning is a game-changer for Salesforce and our customers. It is fueling an unparalleled level of innovation across our entire Customer Success Platform," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, in a statement. "No other company is delivering this kind of platform, ecosystem, and user experience to enable companies to transform themselves and connect with their customers in entirely new ways."
Salesforce is also set to introduce new core editions for Service Cloud to give customers more customization and configuration capabilities. Salesforce's Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Unlimited Edition for Service Cloud will be replaced by new Lightning Professional Edition, Lightning Enterprise Edition, and Lightning Unlimited Edition. They will be priced at $75, $150, and $300, respectively.
These new editions are expected to be generally available on a rolling basis this summer.