Salesforce had brought out its new Lightning interface and continues to improve it over time. In fact, you can still access the old Classic interface; however, there are a lot of reasons why you should make a switch to the new Lightning. The customers on this new UI of Salesforce are noted to increase productivity by about 25%. Salesforce expects that all the Classic users may migrate to the new lightning interface within a couple of years.
If you are on Salesforce, you may also start by putting on the Lightning as per-user or department basis. It is advisable to try Lightning first with the service or sales teams and get them trained initially. When they start to use it comfortably, you may expand it to the immediate next departments. The employees can ensure better productivity, and you may be able to help them better with the results once you start to completely shift to the Lightning.
There are a lot of Salesforce users who are still confused about the need for a shift to Lightning as all their team members are quite comfortable with Classic. However, you can see that all available experts advise a shift to the new lightning platform, which is deemed to be essential for the new-age users to enjoy the next level user experience on the Salesforce platform. As many may think, the shift to Lightning is not challenging if you do the proper groundwork and prepare the users for this fundamental shift.
What is Lightning Experience?
Lightning Experience is a classic interface that will help you build the applications faster and help create a custom user interface and business logic. Offering a comprehensive redesign of the old Salesforce Classic, now the Lightning Experience could be considered a new-age interface for the generation-Z, allowing the users to build Lightning pages without the need for any complicated coding.
Instead of doing any custom coding, users of Salesforce Lightening can easily build their app components directly. Lightning is not a brand-new interface, but it can be considered as an empowering experience that lets the users further improve their activities and enjoy a better user adoption. Organizations in business constantly need to re-evaluate their strategies and reoptimize all their systems depending on the changing business needs. Lightning may also be integrated effectively with different standalone platforms like Salesforce Einstein, Salesforce Automated Intelligence, and so on. Einstein will offer better insights into the jobs and also make it easier for users to boost their productivity. Further, we will discuss some of the usages of benefits of Lightning Experience. if you want to build some web applications like salesforce forms, custom documents, etc you can check this Salesforce form builder.
- A better interface
Above all the new features mentioned, Lightning Experience essentially looks way better than the UI of the Salesforce Classic version. You can effectively personalize the Salesforce experience by customizing it in line with your branding and overall brand image. There is a scope of customizing colors, patterns, and pages, which anyone can do with simple drag and drop features. It is also possible to make each page of the Salesforce app unique based on the record type you identify as relevant for the type of business you run. Along with all these different instances to look for, Lightning may also be easier to handle than the old Classic version.
Every element of the Lightning Experience platform, from the basic record creation to editing is much faster than previous. For example, while you are on a particular lead or record as a sales executive and want to call it up, the new Lightning UI will instantly allow you to dial the prospect from the lead page itself by clicking the call now button. Also, if the customer does not pick your call, it is possible to leave a prerecorded voice mail to their inbox. As an add-on feature, Salesforce Quick Action will also let the users update their records simply with add-ons and can also send a quick mail. You can also create tasks and reminders directly from the Lightning platform.
- Advanced Lightning features
As we have seen, Salesforce is more focused on Lightning, and all the expected new features may be made specifically for Lightning. So, if you do not move to this brand new platform, Classic users may miss out on many of these enhancements in the Salesforce system. This may adversely affect their productivity and work culture. Lightning is integrated with the Salesforce analytical tool of Einstein, which helps to leverage data better and predict any outcome of the sales in the future. Einstein may also offer better insights into whether the future sales deals may be bigger or smaller than current. You may also get some insights as to whether sales to be pushed to next month etc. Adding to Einstein Analytics, you may also find many other features too exclusively for Salesforce Lightning. You can consult with providers like Flosum for Lightning implementation. Let us explore the difference between these here.
- Insights on Einstein campaigns
- Advertising Studio
- Einstein metrics and guidance for pricing
- Integration of Marketing Cloud and integration of Google Analytics 360
- Salesforce Essentials.
- Customized mobile experience and mobile Salesforce app.
- Timesheets, health checks, and extended match work rules.
- Forecasting for a specific time period and case routing.
- Code-free prediction on records.
- Recycle bin.
- Expanded channels, improved management of articles, and flexible styles.
- Customized reports, customized dashboards.
- Quick actions.
- Lightning flows
- Kanban use etc.
- Einstein enhancements of existing features
Salesforce also took off the pain points that the users had on Classic and tried to improve Lightning. For example, there are many added enhancements to the existing features like dashboards and reports. Lightning dashboards look much better than classic now that the users are not limited to the simple 3-column layout. You can customize the dashboards to any specific size or style which fits your needs and interests. Adding to the look and feel of the dashboard, Salesforce also added Kanban view, which is a big hit for the Salesforce users. Kanban view allows the users to take any random list, and with a click of a button, users can also see each record as a card with a drag and drop feature to move it into different stages based on where their deal has reached.
We are so used to using the Classic version of Salesforce, so making a quick switch to Lightning may be challenging initially. Also, any migration to Lightning may be something you need to have a solid budget and run over a particular time period. So, one should consider switching to Salesforce Lightning as an essential move over time, and doing this may help the whole organization in terms of effective Salesforce usage. Here, the recommendation may also be to contact some professional services that will run you through the transition without facing any hassles and make each step of this shift easier.