Yesterday, Salesforce announced new products for its Spring and Summer ‘16 releases. The release focused heavily on enhancements to the Lightning Experience. Here is what the four most important announcements actually mean for Salesforce customers. 

Employee experience, not customer experience, was the focus. 

Marc Benioff dubbed it “The Age of the Customer” and recognized a key trend that, to many, is very familiar: the importance of enriching the customer experience. But those who log into Salesforce every day stand to benefit the most; nearly every product announcement and demo focused on improvements to the employee experience. 

All the new Lightning features, from SalesforceIQ Inbox to Lightning Voice, improve  the employee experience by bringing all components of users’ day-to-day jobs into a single application. Given that over one-third of Salesforce customers said improving the employee experience was a top objective for 2016, Lightning is well aligned to their goals. But companies will still need to invest in improving their own processes, activating new functionality is only a part of the solution. 

The single user interface is the best part of Lightning.

A significant portion of yesterday’s presentation was spent on Lightning capabilities, now available for Sales Cloud, soon to be available for Service Cloud (Spring ‘16) and Marketing Cloud (Summer ‘16). New Lightning apps mean that the entire sales cycle, from lead management to data analytics and quote creation, can now be completed on a mobile device. SalesforceIQ Inbox syncs a user’s email inbox with Sales Cloud, Lightning Voice allows users to make calls directly from Salesforce, and Field Service Lightning brings together agents, dispatchers, and mobile employees. The emphasis was on integrated processes — the ability to run your entire business from any device, anywhere, at anytime. Here, the real opportunity companies should seize is the one to establish a single user interface. It is the best way to improve the employee experience; employees are more efficient, only having to log in and work from one system, and work faster with integrated customer data right at their fingertips. 

Lightning will mitigate the data problem.

Data is a big issue — 76% of Salesforce customers struggle with integration and data quality. With more integrated products and functions, Salesforce applications are continuing to solve some of the data problem. Integrating SalesforceIQ Inbox and Lightning Voice into Sales Cloud not only enables employees to move and sell more quickly, but keeps track of all data generated from email or phone actions. For example, after using Lightning Voice to call a prospect, the app prompts users to log the call time and topic in real time. Automating this process means that users no longer have to remember to log their calls on their own time, ensuring data is updated immediately and more accurately without ever leaving the system. 

The Front-Office CIO

Marc Benioff said that he seems to only meet with CEOs, but that CIOs are coming to Salesforce asking how they can move out of just managing a technology stack. Today, both roles are sharing more responsibility for a company’s success than ever before. New Lightning integrations and mobile capabilities can facilitate the involvement of “back of the office” employees like CIOs to engage in “front of the office” goals. Collaboration between customer-facing roles, like the CMO, and the people who run the back end of a business is now easier than ever. CIOs can now easily be involved in marketing, sales, and service strategies thanks to the integration of all data management tools, like Sales Wave App, onto the singular Salesforce platform. The best CIOs will embrace cloud technology, move away from strict infrastructure maintenance, and focus instead on ways to increase employee and customer engagement that drive business results. 

To learn more about how the best companies are using Salesforce, download your free copy of The State of Salesforce, Bluewolf’s annual report based on data from over 1,500 Salesforce customers.