This week some of Sqware Peg’s functional team had the chance to listen to some wonderful speakers at the Salesforce Lightning Adoption Summit Event. Understanding the key benefits of the new interface is a big part of the decision to switch to Lightning Experience.
Key Highlights: How Lightning Experience compares with what you’re used to in Salesforce Classic
Lightning Experience is the next generation user interface that includes improved user experience leading to greater end user productivity, helping sales reps sell faster and service reps support customers more productively. It includes many new features and entirely redesigned pages. It is important to note that not every Salesforce feature is supported in Lightning Experience, which is why Classic is still available, and users can switch between the two at will.
Hurdles to get to Lightning
There are many reasons to transition from Classic to Lightning, however for most companies this is easier said than done. Organisational culture, resistance, fear and a lack of executive endorsement can make the decision to change seem onerous. The focus tends to be more on what’s left behind rather than what can be gained from making the investment to transition to Lightning.
The main obstacle is budget, or rather a clear understanding the potential Return On Investment (ROI) enterprises may realise by deploying Lightning, making it difficult to convince management to provide the extra budget required. On top of that, technical debt prevents organisations from taking advantage of the improved technology of Lightning. Big numbers of Visual Force pages, for instance, scare many organisations off. How are we going to migrate them to Lightning? Not knowing the possibilities of Visual Force pages and Lightning may create an additional fear to migrate.
Obviously, there are plenty of innovators in the Salesforce ecosystem that are very keen on trying out the new features of Lightning. However, they might become hesitant to change when seeing the results of their Lightning Readiness Check. Again, unfamiliarity gets in the way of modernising a company. The good news here, is that the Lightning Readiness check gets updated and improved every month.
So Why Make the Switch?
Because Salesforce Lightning is all about innovation, it has a business and user impact as well as an IT speed and agility impact. There is a strong focus on lowering the technical debt and winning valuable time using automated activities.
Business and User Impact IT
- Sales productivity
- Service productivity
- Customer, Partner, Employee Collaboration
- Operational Reporting and Intelligence
- Process Optimisation
Speed and Agility Impact
- IT productivity
- IT staff delivery
- Application Deployment and Usage
- Application Modernization
- IT Analytics and Data Intelligence
According to research conducted by Forrester and presented during the Lightning Adoption Summit, the most remarkable quantified benefits are;
- Users found that Salesforce Lightning brings improved end user productivity because users are able to eliminate a lot of unnecessary clicks throughout the process.
- Time savings have been found for business sponsors/power users because there are more flexible and efficient reporting and dashboard capabilities.
- With regards to the IT benefits, Forrester found that low-code app development and reusable components, thus Developer Resource Efficiency Savings, to be one of the most valuable features of Lightning Deployments.
- Furthermore, employees became more engaged and motivated due to the new skills they have gained leading to a reduction in application developer turnover.
Using Salesforce Lightning gives end users a better experience, gives admins and developers more possibilities within the platform, and gives organisations better access to an appexchange, that empowers the ecosystem.
With so many new features available in the new interface, it begs the question…why do companies remain working in Salesforce Classic?
The only question is deciding when to enable Lightning Experience.
Organisations underestimate the risks of staying too long in Salesforce Classic. It’s pretty obvious that not making the switch to Salesforce Lightning will result in reduced growth and missed opportunities for any organisation regardless of industry. It need not be an overwhelming and costly process. Our experienced team at Sqware Peg can help guide you through your transition to realise the added value that Salesforce Lightning can bring in helping to future proof your organisation.
