In 2022, Salesforce is again making every effort to become the ideal choice for enterprises that want to start fast and scale big. The software’s efficacy combined with several useful resources and communities, including the Trailblazer community, has made Salesforce the de facto choice for enterprise cloud software. The world’s #1 CRM has some big plans for 2022 with their upcoming product releases and feature updates. Here are some of them:

1. Slack integration will become more capable

Salesforce’s Slack acquisition in 2020 for a whopping $27.7 billion was perfect market timing. By bringing Slack under its wing, Salesforce is now able to integrate it seamlessly with Customer360 — the ambitious product which offers Salesforce customers a unified view of their customers. 

Customer360’s objective and promise is to unify all data points about customers in a single interface. All stakeholder teams consisting of sales, marketing, service, IT, and commerce will have a unified view of customer data. This empowers employees to deliver superior customer experiences, especially for businesses that are quickly scaling.

Source: https://slack.com/intl/en-in/blog/news/salesforce-completes-acquisition-of-slack

Since the acquisition of Slack, Salesforce has been strengthening the Slack integration to help users work in a productive and engaging manner without having to hop between multiple screens and tools. The automated workflows and several other Slack features are a great add-on for an enterprise software suite like Salesforce. 

“We really want Slack to be the primary engagement surface for our users, their communications, their work, their workflows, and the processes and the apps they support,” said Rob Seaman, SVP for Slack at Salesforce in the August 2021 Techcrunch article. 

According to McKinsey, at least 9 out of 10 companies are aiming for a hybrid work environment in the near future. Salesforce’s Slack integration will prove to be an excellent communication and collaboration platform that will bring remote and at-office employees together. Here is a comprehensive resource page where you can find all the upcoming Slack Digital HQ innovations announced in Dreamforce 2021.

3. Work.com will ramp up to deliver better employee experiences

One of the toughest challenges that employee-centric businesses faced during the pandemic phase was managing employee experiences. Even onboarding of new employees and managing transitions proved to be chaotic. Salesforce launched work.com in May 2020 with the aim of creating a new way to work during the new normal. Work.com can be rightly regarded as a Salesforce offering for employee experience management. It also puts businesses in a position to treat employees like their most valued customers. 

Source: https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2020/10/20/salesforce-announces-new-work-com-employee-productivity-and-communications-apps/

Work.com offers four critical benefits to businesses that are trying to manage a hybrid workforce.

1. Safeguard employee health and wellness, especially that of frontline employees coming in direct contact with external environments
2. Build trust with employees and customers by bringing in the transparency of records and employee journeys
3. Empower employees with self-service tools that will help them solve problems without waiting for technical intervention
4. Provide a customer-like experience to employees while working with internal stakeholders

The Employee Helpdesk Software feature (launched in October 2020) promises to deliver a seamless employee experience. The helpdesk feature allows employees a unified way to request IT assets, services, and internal approvals critical for carrying out their responsibilities. 

In 2022, work.com could evolve further to take on the avatar of a full-blown HR suite. It will become the single touchpoint for employees where they can find all their organizational information, track employment journey, manage onboarding documentation, track training modules, and so on. It will also act as a self-service concierge that will enable employees to find solutions on their own without having to call HR or Admin or even vendors.

4. AI becoming an integral part of Salesforce

Research by IBM found that AI adoption amidst enterprises has jumped by 150%.

Salesforce’s journey with Artificial Intelligence started in 2016 with the launch of Einstein. Einstein is perhaps one of the most popular AI offerings that Salesforce has introduced so far and is positioned by Salesforce as the first comprehensive AI for CRM. 

Under the hood, Einstein is a set of AI capabilities that sharpens the recommendations of Salesforce 360. As of 2020, Einstein was pushing out 80+ billion AI-powered predictions every day (News & Insights). 

All Salesforce cloud offerings including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud stand to gain immensely from the AI infusion in Einstein. In 2022, can Einstein get any better?

Yes. There are three major AI innovations that Salesforce has announced in 2022. 

1. Einstein Conversation Mining
2. Einstein Relationship Insights
3. Einstein Engagement Scoring

Einstein Conversation Mining

Customer interactions are usually filled with slang and natural language. In 2022, Einstein will become empowered with Natural Language Processing (NLP) thus becoming capable of identifying common patterns and insights out of customer interactions.

Einstein Relationship Insights

For sales and marketing personnel, finding customer and company information could feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. Einstein Relationship Insights will act as a magnet that can comb through the data to pull the right information effortlessly.

Einstein Engagement Scoring

Marketers need to know which customers are engaging the most with their campaigns. Einstein Engagement Scoring will help marketers spot those customers with the help of AI and cross-cloud data. 

5. Salesforce Cloud 2.0 — A promise for a better healthcare experience 

Salesforce Health Cloud 2.0 is Salesforce’s range of offerings to empower healthcare providers and practitioners. It will enable them to streamline operations and create personalized patient journeys, just like how a customer journey would be mapped out for a B2C customer. 

Salesforce launched Health Cloud 2.0 in September 2021 with the objective of empowering businesses and governments to deliver better health and safety for their employees, customers, and communities.

With Health Cloud 2.0, businesses can easily bring their employees and customers together by delivering healthcare services including COVID-19 testing, vaccination status, contact tracing, and so on. It helps businesses to segue into the new normal where a hybrid work approach is being tested out. 

Source: https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/09/21/salesforce-launches-health-cloud-2/

Salesforce Health Cloud 2.0 has four main offerings:

1. Dreampass – A unified system that will allow businesses to manage in-person meetings, attendee registration management, vaccination status verification, and admission management based on testing results. The pass can also be used to communicate protocol changes or inform possible exposure and send notifications to attendees in a timely manner.
2. Contact tracing – A simple way for businesses to collect minimal data from attendees in the case of possible exposure. This is a manual method of contact tracing that uses visual maps of contacts to assess exposure. 
3. Vaccine management – A simplified way for governments and organizations to conduct vaccination drives, manage appointments, manage vaccine inventory, monitor outcomes, etc.
4. Value-based care from anywhere – designed with the objective of providing personalized healthcare experiences in multiple care environments (in-person, remote, or hybrid) to patients by bringing together healthcare providers and external stakeholders. 

The safe environment that Salesforce health Cloud 2.0 creates will continue to play a critical role in 2022 and beyond.

5. Hyperforce – Public cloud services to fast-track scalability

Until recently, Salesforce has been using its own server infrastructure to manage workloads. As the company grew and volume of transactions also grew at astronomical rates, Salesforce had to move some of its workloads to public cloud servers like AWS, Google, etc. This was while continuing to host customer data on its own servers.

Now Salesforce is opening the possibility of letting customers manage their workload on public cloud environments. Hyperforce is the architecture that will enable customers to deploy their workloads in any cloud environment of their choice. Hyperforce will enable Salesforce customers to take any of their data, including that of Customer360, and house it in any public cloud platform that they are comfortable with.

Source: https://www.salesforce.com/eu/blog/2021/05/salesforce-aws-hyperforce-customers-united-arab-emirates.html

This will also help customers unleash scalability that could have suffered earlier due to restricted server workloads of Salesforce-owned servers. In 2022, Hyperforce will be rolled out on a global scale encompassing most of the regions where customers are located. 

The biggest draw of Hyperforce would be that customers can continue to store their data in servers close to their physical location. This has obvious advantages like delivering superior customer experiences. Further, it would also put them in a vantage position where they can ensure compliance with statutory compliances based on the company, the industry, or the region. Further, Hyperforce will have backward compatibility – all Salesforce apps, customizations, and integrations that have been built over the years will continue to work without hindrance. 

6. The rise of Salesforce workflow orchestrator

Salesforce workflow orchestrator was released in June 2021. It is a functionality that will allow admins to create a string of workflows across several users or teams. The orchestrator does not require coding and can be set up using clicks, not code. Admins can set up multi-user, multi-step, and multi-stage flows and eliminate duplicate or redundant workflows. 

Source: https://admin.salesforce.com/blog/2021/introducing-flow-orchestrator-unify-your-complex-business-processes-without-code

The feature has been released at the right time when users are working remotely and have wide gaps in their communication and collaboration. With the flow orchestrator, it is easier to hand off the next steps in a workflow to the next stakeholder and ensure that the process is completed in a smooth manner. 

The advantage of using the flow orchestrator is better org management. It also sheds light on bottlenecks that need to be addressed and opportunities that can be leveraged.

Salesforce in 2022 and beyond: Going forward in full force 

Salesforce is creating timely relevant tools and features that will help businesses to digitize their operations and move ahead without being bogged down by the challenges of external environments. 

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