Salesforce Communications Cloud Summer ’24 Release: Elevating Business Performance and Workflow Efficiency
With its Summer ’24 release, Salesforce Communications Cloud unveils an array of powerful new capabilities designed to elevate business performance and optimize workflow efficiency. In this blog, we’ll explore some of our favorite new features, including Field Service improvements that provide technicians with better insights and user experiences, new TM Forum API integrations, and Enterprise Sales Management (ESM) enhancements.
Field Service
Field Service for Industries optimizes field operations by equipping service teams with advanced tools, enabling companies to maximize asset lifetime value and enhance customer satisfaction. This release includes unique capabilities tailored for field technicians to help with work order execution and asset management.
- Work Order Estimation: Communications companies that provide service-location-specific work often require a field technician to visit the site to provide customers with an estimate for copper, fiber, or cable installation costs. Salesforce introduces a new feature allowing work order estimates to be created and initiated from accounts, assets, or existing work orders. These estimates can then generate proposals. Once a customer approves an estimate, an official work order is automatically created. Business Use Case: Alpha Fibers has received a potential opportunity from a major hospital for fiber installation. To provide an accurate estimate, a technician must conduct an on-site assessment to provide labor charges for the access point. Once the work order estimate is complete, the sales rep can quickly generate a proposal for the customer using native industries document generation. Upon approval, an official work order for the technician is created.
- Asset Lifecycle Management: Company asset data is often stored externally in various formats or in ways that make it difficult to access. Paired with Salesforce Data Cloud, Communications Cloud now seamlessly enables the representation of asset data to field technicians in an actionable format, allowing them to create cases for specific assets and initiate repair processes. Business Use Case: A field technician is troubleshooting an issue with a cable wire at a major hospital customer. The hospital’s asset data is stored in an external system. With asset lifecycle management, the data can be extracted and transformed using Data Cloud. This makes the data easily actionable for the field service technician, allowing them to view asset details and create cases to initiate repairs.
TM Forum
In the latest Summer ’24 release, Salesforce has delivered two additional TM Forum APIs, enabling seamless integration of Communications Cloud instances with external systems. These include the TMF620 outbound Product Catalog Management and TMF651 inbound Agreement Management APIs.
- TM Forum 620 Product Catalog Management: TMF620 gives users the ability to provide and manage a catalog of products to an external system: it can create a product catalog, offerings, and specifications, and retrieve product offering prices. Business Use Case: QuantumLink Communications is a multiregional internet service provider using Communications Cloud to manage their enterprise product catalog, product pricing, and quoting. The company needs to synchronize its commercial product information with an external billing system to create and maintain a billing product catalog. QuantumLink will trigger the TMF620 outbound API call from Salesforce Communications Cloud containing relevant information such as commercial product details to the billing system.
- TM Forum 651 Agreement Management: The TMF651 inbound API allows for the querying, creation, update, and deletion of agreement specifications and agreement instances to enable contract information management across systems. Business Use Case: Alpha Fiber’s partner portal allows vendor partners to place internet orders for end customers, leveraging the TMF651 API to create and manage agreement instances within Salesforce Communications Cloud. This API facilitates the creation of contracts and their retrieval for review and validation within the partner portal, ensuring partners can accurately review terms and conditions before presenting the finalized contract to the end customer.
Enterprise Sales Management
- Dynamic Product Merging: Users can now dynamically merge the products of up to four assets added to a change quote. The resulting bundled plan will include all the individual products. Business Use Case: A longtime customer of Alpha Internet has internet, TV, and phone as separate services on their account. The sales rep wants to combine these three products under a newly launched Triple Play offer. The sales rep goes into the account, selects all three assets, creates a quote, and selects “Change or Merge Plans” to merge the three assets into a Triple Play Bundle. The Triple Play Bundle will save the customer $10 a month from bundle-based pricing, and the three products will be saved as child products under the Triple Play product.
Conclusion
The main features in the Summer ’24 release allow businesses to operate more efficiently, enhance user experience, and create an open and flexible platform with TM Forum APIs. There are also many other exciting enhancements such as CPQ API improvements, built-in diagnostic tools for EPC configuration, and more.
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