Salesforce Revamps Core CRM Offering

Salesforce.com has overhauled its bread-and-butter customer relationship management (CRM) product with a brand new look and added capabilities. The changes are collectively known as Lightning. Here’s what you need to know about this new offering from the software-as-a-service (SaaS) juggernaut.

Image: Salesforce Lightning Experience dashboard.

From its humble beginnings as a SMB cloud service provider to a US$50 billion enterprise player, Salesforce.com has proved a canny business innovator. It is now looking to further its success with the Lightning CRM offering which it hopes will enhance customer engagement for organisations and, in turn, grow their businesses.

Here’s what’s new about Salesforce Lightning, which consists of three parts:

  • Lightning Experience
    The name for the new desktop CRM app with a updated user interface. It consists of a flat design. The look is a lot cleaner and users are able to customise the dashboards to suit their needs. Salesforce took customer feedback into account when building Lightning Experience, which resulted in over 25 additional features in the new CRM tool.

  • Lightning Design System
    Style guides and modern enterprise user experience best practices for Salesforce developers, allowing them to build components that adhere to Lightning’s clean design that work with every device and operating system. You can access Design System here.

  • Lightning App Builder App Builder allows developers to drag-and-drop visual features from Lightning’s repository of components to easily build and customise apps for the Salesforce CRM platform.

Salesforce is also announcing its Financial Services Cloud which was created with Lightning Experience. It’s the company’s first industry-specific product which caters towards the financial services vertical to help sales teams in that particular industry.

Lightning Experience for Sales Cloud is now available in preview and will be generally available in October. Lightning App Builder isn’t ready just yet and Salesforce will start to pilot it in October with general availability expected for early 2016.

Existing Salesforce CRM customers can choose when they want to move over to Lightning and can even test it with a small number of users in their organisations before committing to a full rollout.


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