Change is hard.  Changing our personal behaviors is hard enough, so changing a team’s processes or those of an entire organization consisting of n individuals is harder to the nth degree.  But there will always be opportunities to change for the better, and moving to Salesforce’s Lightning user interface (UI), a revamp of what is now called the “Classic” UI, has a lot of good things to offer your team.  To help you manage your organizational challenges when considering and executing your Lightning upgrade, West Coast Consulting Group wanted to summarize a recommended approach that has worked for our customers.

PLAN
The Salesforce Lightning experience is a significant step in the platform’s evolution, delivering not only a new graphical look and feel to your reports and dashboards, but a host of new features that deliver both increased user productivity and embedded analytics that will make your business more efficient, whether you are a small business with a handful of Salesforce users or a large multinational corporation.

To assist you with planning your migration from Classic to Lightning, the Salesforce platform provides online tools that identify which existing features in each functional domain are impacted by Lightning and what new usability and analytics features are available to you.

LIGHTNING ENHANCEMENTS
Many Lightning features have been proven to deliver a better user experience.  We believe that some of the most valuable Lightning enhancements include:

Paths. 
In the Classic UI, most data is presented to the user in tabular form.  For example, in Classic a sales rep can view all of his leads in a table, filter and sort them based upon a parameter like “lead score,” and then make decisions to take a certain action.  In Lightning, you can define paths that present the same data in a columnar fashion that guide the user through the steps in your established process.  Now the sales rep’s leads will be presented in each state so that they can easily and graphically visualize how the pipeline is progressing.  Paths are available across the Salesforce platform for numerous objects including accounts, leads, campaigns, opportunities, quotes, contracts, orders, cases, and custom objects.

Notes.
Salesforce’s note-taking tool allows you to quickly and easily jot down Notes as you work your way through a process, working on accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities and custom objects.  Your notes can contain rich text, lists, images and attachments and can be associated with a single record or multiple records. In Lightning, you can configure where the Notes area will appear on your page layout.  This feature allows you to optimize the placement of Notes to streamline the user’s flow, minimizing the need to move their eyes or their cursor up to a toolbar at the top of a form when their focus is elsewhere on the page.  You can place the Notes where they make the most sense and streamline the user process.

Related Files, Views and Global Actions are some of the other great features offered in the Lightning UI experience.

To create your upgrade plan, you should conduct this review to identify which features are important to your existing processes and begin to envision what new capabilities can do for you business.  Create a check-list of low-hanging fruit, high-reward updates, and high risk/high impact items.  Develop a multi-stage plan to try and then adopt each update.

TRY IT
One of the great things about the Salesforce platform is they have given you the ability to turn on Lightning views and features for a specific object, for a single user, for a group of users in a region, or all across your organization.  And, even greater, you can toggle back and forth between Classic and Lightning for all forms.  This means you don’t have to deal with the fallout of a Big Bang migration; you can try it for the forms related to a specific business process or object and with a small group of test users, capture their feedback (Chatter is a great tool for this), and optimize your configuration before you do a wide-scale rollout.

EXECUTE YOUR PLAN
Our customers have realized great efficiency gains and user satisfaction through Lightning adoption, and we want to help you set out on your path to Lightning.  Do your assessment, plan to take incremental steps along the way, test and get user feedback, and monitor your progress towards maximum adoption.  Call West Coast Consulting Group at 415-626-3493 or email at info@westcoastconsulting.com today to get started.

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