The Lightning Experience isn’t just a new skin on top of Salesforce, it’s designed to be a completely new way of working. Lightning was introduced just before Dreamforce 2015, designed to give users a unified experience across all devices.
A focus on productivity has been one of the big drivers behind Lightning and its current success. A lot of the features you will come across in this article have been specifically designed to give you more contextualized information, in less amount of clicks. Here are some of the features that my users love about Lightning, and I’m sure yours will too.
Interactive Tabs
First up are the new interactive tabs. Because of Lightning’s inherently interactive and dynamic interface, more relevant information can be shown with just a click of a button. With Classic, you will be familiar with clicking on tabs and being redirected to the relevant page but, with Lightning, things have changed.
You can now click the little drop-down arrow next to any tab to view an array of extra features including
- Creating a new record
- Viewing recent records
- Recent list views.
Activity Timeline
If you’ve ever set eyes on Lightning, then you will be familiar with the already iconic ‘Activities’ timeline. A component that sits on almost every objects page, the Activities timeline gives you a glimpse into the past and the future.
You can view all the past tasks, activities, emails and events in the chronological order of when they are due, which is highly helpful for sales reps to get up to speed quickly. In addition to this, you can access the ‘Log a Call’, ‘New Event’ and ‘Email functions’ options which load inside the Component for ease.
Home Page Components
The Components model Salesforce have been focussing on has revolutionized how companies can use Salesforce. We can now use a variety of Components, some of which are pre-supplied by Salesforce, to bring relevant data to our users.
A great example of this is the Home Page Components. Salesforce gives you a selection of out of the box Components including a news widget, performance chart, recent record, and top deals. You can easily move these around, customise them, or download Components from the AppExchange which have been developed by ISV’s. My current favourite is the ability to change the Home Graph to anything your users desire!
Want to build a report similar to the one below? Check out this tutorial!
Path
Path is a feature of Lightning that has been around since the dawn of its release. It enables Sales users to visualise their sales process for a particular record, as well as see helpful tips and fields.
Path is now enabled on a number of objects and is great at giving your reps that extra helping hand when progressing a deal. You can easily change the status by clicking on one of the chevrons, and you can update key fields at each stage. This is particularly great for a less experienced Sales team, getting them to focus on the fields that are important.
Want to build a path of your own? Check out this tutorial!
The Assistant
Finally, we have the Assistant. This great feature gives you a summarised to-do list based on ever-changing parameters with your records.
As you can see from the screenshot to the right, Assistant provides you with insights and helpful tips to progress deals. For example, if there are no tasks associated with an open Opportunity, I think we can agree this shouldn’t be the case. Assistant will alert you about this as well as many other ways that you can see on the right.
The Assistant is getting smarter with every release, so check it out and see how you can make it work for you.
Conclusion
Although a lot of businesses were put off by Lightning's lack of features upon its release, this is certainly a thing of the past. Lightning has evolved throughout its two years on the market to something that can increase productivity, and open up a whole new world of tools for your users to get stuck into. Now with the new Migration Assistant that is improving with every release, you’ve got no excuse not to jump in!
