Low Adoption
We all know that Salesforce is the gorilla of the CRM market, a $35B behemoth that boasts over 150,000 customers worldwide, with market share larger than the next five competitors combined.
And yet, when I speak to people who use Salesforce, there is often a lack of enthusiasm for the Lightning User Experience. Many users find it clunky, slow, and hard to use.
As a result, they minimize their use of the platform, opting instead to spend most of their time in third-party or offline alternatives. Many just enter the bare minimum of data into what they consider to be a system of obligation, rather than the productivity booster it was intended to be.
This is the phenomenon of “low adoption,” and it can ruin the best-laid plans for a Salesforce system, not to mention the ROI on the entire corporate platform.
Salesforce Response
Salesforce certainly recognizes the issue, especially in the past three years when they have featured a presentation at Dreamforce and World Tour events called 6 Guiding Principles to Maximize Your Salesforce Adoption. It’s always one of the most popular breakout sessions, with well over 100 attendees.
There’s even a Salesforce Adoption Strategies course in Trailhead to reinforce these guiding principles.
This course and the 6 Guiding Principles presentation are full of helpful tips, techniques, and guidance to increase adoption. And yet, the problem of low adoption still plagues many companies using Salesforce. Is there anyone out there who is perfectly pleased with the sales utilization of their Salesforce org?
Lightning Usability
I submit that the biggest problem is with the Lightning User Experience (LEX). Because if your users don’t like the User Experience, all your other efforts to improve adoption may be in vain. No combination of carrot and stick (or SPFF and Condition of Employment) is going to get users to utilize the platform if they just don’t like the way it works.
Some of this is due to a sub-optimal configuration, and sometimes it’s just that the org has become a bloated accumulation of management and user requests over a long period of time, with dozens of fields, many of which are required, that stretch down through multiple pages.
But much of the problem is the nature of Lightning itself. Designed nine years ago as a highly configurable “No-code” platform before the advent of Web 2.0 standards, it started out much slower in performance than Classic, becoming a rather “classic” oxymoron. The poor performance created such resistance that it took almost five years for even half of the users to convert from Classic to Lightning. And there are Classic stragglers to this day.
Salesforce’s Solution
Salesforce’s architectural answer is Lightning Web Components (LWC), announced in 2019. It is a framework that replaces the original Aura framework and embraces Web 2.0. If you’ve noticed your Salesforce org speeding up somewhat in the past couple of years, that is primarily due to Salesforce rewriting the core components in LWC.
But another important benefit of LWC is that it has opened a whole new world of User Interface design in Salesforce, because it allows you to code new components in JavaScript. So you can plug your own tab into the Lightning toolbar and create truly new and innovative user experiences, right inside of Lightning.
Leaping Fox has done just that with the Express Console for Sales Cloud.
The Express Console™– a Next-Generation LWC Application
The Express Console is one of the first third-party applications written entirely in LWC. It provides an alternate Opportunity tab for the Sales Cloud, with a streamlined workflow and integrated to-do facility. It’s so efficient that managing a pipeline and associated tasks takes about 50% of the clicks of standard Lightning. And with HTML 5 (an aspect of Web 2.0) most of the code actually runs in your browser, so it’s FAST – pretty much as fast as your Salesforce org is capable of going.
The Express Console has won two major Salesforce-sponsored demo contests. The prototype won an LWC Demo Jam at Dreamforce, and the new production version recently won the highly competitive internal AppExchange SE Demo Jam, where Salesforce Solutions Engineers vote for their favorite new app.
Quick Look
Here’s a quick look at some of the innovations that Leaping Fox has been able to build with LWC: 7 Things You’ve Never Seen Before in Salesforce.
If you’d like to discuss the Express Console or see a demo, reserve a time for an online meeting here.
Or contact me directly at 203.253.7900, or lkhill@leapingfox.com.