Salesforce Lightning is a modern, intuitive user interface designed to focus on streamlining processes and increasing productivity. With powerful features and flexibility, Salesforce Lightning is quickly becoming the go-to platform for businesses of all sizes. Whether you are new to Salesforce, or looking to upgrade your existing system, Lightning is a game-changing decision that can help growth and profitability.
Let us get a detailed picture of the key features of Salesforce Lightning, and how it helps in customizing a homepage and implementing Lightning Components!
What is Salesforce Lightning Experience?
Salesforce Lightning Experience is a modern, responsive user interface that is designed to provide users with a faster, more efficient, and more personalized experience when using Salesforce. The Salesforce Lightning Experience is important for businesses because it provides a modern and intuitive user interface, making it easier for users to interact with the platform.
The Lightning Experience includes a variety of new features such as a customizable home page that allows users to add only the apps that they need, a streamlined navigation menu that makes it easier to navigate through a Salesforce org (it is located on the left-hand side and is divided into four main sections: Home, App, Object Tabs, and Favorites), and interactive dashboards.
Let us investigate the Key elements that enable Salesforce Lightning to give a unique experience:
- Quick navigation and the ability to switch between apps that the user chooses to include on the home page.
- A change in the way records is laid out focuses on what a user can do rather than what a user can view and provides a personalized view.
- Turbocharged list views allow users to easily filter and visualize data and make it easier for users to create and customize list views for any object such as accounts, contacts, and opportunities, as well as apply filters to display only records that meet specific criteria.
- The newly designed experience provides quick access to commonly used productivity tools in the utility bar.
- Dashboards are now better organized to find data.
- Report views have been configured so that data can be quickly filtered.
Why Switch to Lightning?
The key benefits of using Salesforce Lightning set it apart from Salesforce Classic and make it a platform that is easier and more navigational to use. The important features help to get the full Lightning experience and enable a user to gain optimal productivity.
- Dynamic User Interface: The Dynamic User Interface provides a more responsive user interface that offers a customizable home page, easy-to-use navigation, and drag-and-drop functionality. Clicking the colorful square launches the App Launcher’s different apps available to add to the customizable home screen. Not all users add all the apps to the home screen leading to a cluttered view.
- Collaboration tools: Lightning provides users with collaboration tools such as real-time chat, file sharing, and social feeds which allows users to collaborate with team members. Users can post and receive updates, polls, and questions to notify other group members.
- Custom App Builder: With the Custom App Builder, users can build customized dashboard-style apps, single-page apps, and “Point” apps that are customized to solve a specific task, along with custom record pages for objects that can be tailored to user needs.
- Advanced Artificial Intelligence: Using Advanced Artificial Intelligence features such as Einstein Analytics and Einstein Discovery, users are provided with data analysis and predictive capabilities.
Einstein Analytics is a cloud-based analytics platform that allows users to visualize and analyze data from multiple sources in real-time and create custom dashboards and reports. Users can make data-driven decisions as it offers features to identify patterns for demand forecasting.
Einstein Discovery is an analytics tool that enables organizations to discover insights and patterns in their data by using machine learning algorithms.
- Seamless Integration with different Cloud platforms: Salesforce Lightning integrates seamlessly with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud enabling users to manage their entire journey from a single platform. This results in improved efficiency and productivity, collaboration, insights, and analytics, and a better customer experience.
- Lightning Voice: The Lightning Voice feature allows users to make and receive phone calls directly within Salesforce that are available through Amazon Connect. By integrating Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, Lightning Voice provides users with call logging, and call routing.
- Global Search Bar: The global search bar allows users to search amongst hundreds of different records, files, reports, and dashboards from anywhere in Lightning, and provides an advanced search syntax that allows users to refine searches. A Template called ‘Search Results Templates’ allows administrators to customize the layout and content of the search results page for different objects.
Lightning Data table provides a way to display data in a table format with features such as sorting, filtering, pagination (breaking down data into pages), and inline editing (which allows users to edit data directly within a data table without having to navigate to a different form).
- Outlook Integration: Salesforce has integrated Outlook to synchronize emails, contacts, and calendars to allow users to create and track tasks, appointments, and emails in Salesforce directly from Outlook.
- Kanban View: The Kanban board is an interactive report and a great way to track the status of records using customizable columns. Sales reps can move records within the Kanban view which is useful to track the status of deals.
How to Customize Your Home Page & Streamline Navigation?
Customizing your home page on Salesforce is one of the best ways to improve user experience and productivity. One can do this through the homepage of the Salesforce Lightning application. When a user first logs into Salesforce, the Home Page is the first thing one sees, therefore, it is important to customize it to display tasks that are mostly used by the user. Lightning page layouts are specific to the Lightning Experience.
Many elements are supported in the Lightning experience including:
- Actions display highlights panel, Activity tab, and a Chatter tab. Actions are quick ways to perform tasks from creating a record, updating a field, or sending an email. Such Actions can be accessed from different places in the Salesforce user interface including the Salesforce Mobile App.
- Canvas apps are external applications that can be integrated into the Salesforce Lightning experience. There are Visualforce Canvas apps that allow users to embed Visualforce pages within Salesforce and add them to the Lightning dashboard. Developers can create custom user interfaces and web applications to be integrated with Salesforce to display data, gather user input, and perform complicated functions.
Streamlining Navigation
Streamlining processes helps create custom workflows and approvals that guide users through specific processes. Salesforce Lightning offers a navigation bar on the left side, providing quick access to all key areas. The bar can be customized, making it an intuitive experience for users so they can easily find what they are looking for and provide easy access to records, dashboards, and reports.
The key feature of streamlined navigation is the ability to open and work with multiple records at once. Users can open multiple tabs within the same browser window allowing them to switch easily between different records and keep track of all work in a single location.
Conclusion
Salesforce Lightning can boost productivity, and enhance user experience with its modern, intuitive platform. We provide top-notch Salesforce Lightning implementation services, and with extensive experience and deep knowledge of the platform, help you achieve your business goals and transform the way you work.
Contact us now, to learn how Prudent Consulting can help your business implement Salesforce and see the difference it can make for your business or check out these links if you want to learn more about Salesforce!