Winter Happy Image by Ellen26 from PixabaySalesforce has announced its Winter ’23 Release preview, which is now live. The preview includes hundreds of new features on display before the release becomes generally available on October 17. This second article about the release looks at the updates to the Salesforce industry clouds.

The first article covered Sales, Commerce, Service and Marketing Cloud and applications such as Slack, MuleSoft and Tableau. There were also updates for Financial Services, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Public Sector, Media, Energy & Utilities, Communications and Net Zero Cloud. While some of the features will be available in October when the release is live, others will require administrators to configure and/or activate them.

Financial Services

This release includes functionality that enhances customer relationships and helps to reduce the cost of administrating relationships. Some highlights are given below. The Actionable Relationship Centre (ARC) is improved with a new graph template that administrators can customise, leveraging Einstein analytics. This shortens the time needed to generate graphs. Users can search for interest tags quickly by using a new browse interest tags window.

KYC compliance is improved with a new workflow that helps users validate the caller using information already in Salesforce or from third-party sources. Salesforce has also added a KYC data model that helps improve the processes for identity verification, risk assessment, and screening checks of parties.

There are several enhancements targeting the banking market. The release adds a new dashboard, Analytics for Retail Banking. This dashboard provides insights for Branch Unit Related Records and identifies the branches and bankers with the maximum number of leads and opportunities.

These insights, coupled with the interest tag window mentioned above, enable bankers to segment and target customer groups. In addition, new CRM Analytics templates for Wealth Management and Retail Banking were added. It highlights customers likely to churn or are open to cross-selling, enabling focus where it matters most.

For insurance companies, the FSC Insurance Analytics Fast Start template enables users to create dashboards quickly to analyse their Book of Business. New dashboards can analyse the Book of Business and identify cross-sell opportunities in the existing customer base.

Healthcare and Life Sciences

Within this industry cloud, some updates impact the end user, and some changes will help administrators with their tasks. For Life Sciences, there is what Salesforce describe as a new “flavour” for key use cases in the Life Sciences sector.

Improvements for Healthcare include a new Advanced Therapy Management feature. It allows booking multiple appointments across multiple locations for more complex cases. It also enables bookings for physiotherapy, nursing, and consultants in a series of steps depending on the requirements and availability.

This is strengthened with the introduction of Virtual Care, integrated with Amazon Chime, which allows users and patients to access video appointments, improving accessibility to Healthcare regardless of geographical or physical limitations. Patients can also self-schedule these calls, further reducing administrative costs and improving the patient experience.

Using OmniStudio and Discovery Framework, users can now create customer health assessments. It ensures that patient records are kept up to date and can identify new health risks or concerns with analysis. Healthcare Medication Management has added Medication Therapy Management. It includes a range of services to optimise medication regimens. Also included is the ability to conduct medication reviews to improve patient safety and reduce medication related errors proactively.

For administrators, there are new and changed objects. Salesforce has extended the timeline for supporting the EHR Data Model and the transition to the Clinical Data Model. However, from Spring 23, new customers cannot create records for EHR objects that have counterpart objects in the new clinical model. Future development on Health Cloud will only support the Clinical Data Model. However, Salesforce gave no indication of transition timescales in the release notes. There are also new Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) APIs.

Also, whilst the press release notes that MuleSoft for Health Cloud is now available for no extra cost, there is little other information available

Manufacturing

The updates for manufacturing cloud enhance the relationship with customers around sales and service engagements. For Sales, there are improvements to Sales Agreements, Account Forecasting, and Advanced Account Forecasting.

The update includes the introduction of weekly sales agreements to enhance planning. In turn, alerts are sent along with suggested next actions when targets are missed on forecasts. The service console for manufacturing enables service agents to receive calls, create contacts, create cases, register products and process returns from within a single interface.

There is stronger support for partner relationships with partner visit management. This feature enables representatives to assess distributor performance, renew warranties or sales agreements, resolve cases, or upsell products during visits. Field reps can schedule, perform and complete visits easily.

For administrators, there is an improved onboarding experience with guided help to set up the manufacturing cloud. This includes links to set-up pages, help pages and Trailhead resources for further guidance

Public Sector

Recent research by Salesforce showed that citizens are looking for greater digital engagement. The inference is that while trust is low, the easier public sector bodies make it easier to engage digitally, trust is likely to improve. With this release, Salesforce has also added Composable Case Management. It enables organisations to create custom services to better help individuals and families.

A new decision explainer for citizens enables organisations to share their reasoning behind application decisions, whether for fee calculations, eligibility determinations, benefit calculations or others. It can explain how decisions are reached, helping increase transparency and build trust. It also means that future applications are better and are more likely to succeed and waste less time by eliminating errors.

As with other industry clouds, Salesforce has added a new guided set-up with access to help and trailhead articles. There are also new and changed objects with Public Sector Cloud that administrators should note.

Other Clouds

The press release also listed changes to other Industry Clouds, but the release notes did not contain further details. They included

Communications

  • Order Management Analytics
  • Enterprise Self-Service
  • MuleSoft Starter for Communications Cloud

Energy and Utilities

  • Customer Self-Service
  • API Integration Suite
  • MuleSoft Starter for Energy & Utilities Cloud

Media,

  • Subscriber Analytics for Media
  • Loyalty Management for Media
  • Advertising Clean Room

Net Zero Cloud.

  • Carbon Credit Allocation
  • Water Management
  • Supplier Product Emission Factors Management
  • Enterprise Times: What does this mean

Enterprise Times:  What does this mean

This is another substantive update from Salesforce. For Salesforce customers, their administrators should pay close attention to the changes to objects and the new functionality they can now roll out to take advantage of. The new set-up wizards align with the recent announcement of Salesforce Easy. It simplifies the onboarding process for all customers, offering the promise of self-service.

More information is likely to flow out in the coming weeks, and Salesforce will no doubt provide more detailed information as well. With Dreamforce occurring in person this year, people will also be able to see and hear in more depth about these and future updates.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here