It’s that time of the year again; the Salesforce annual summer release has made a big splash with its focus of turning insights into action with the customer success platform. For those who don’t want to dig through the full release notes that contain more than features, we’ve distilled the most exciting features on Analytics, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to help you cut through the noise and reap full benefits from the new features:

1. Analytics Cloud for Apple Watch
   With the release of the Apple Watch, Salesforce is capitalizing on the wearable craze by giving employees up-to-the-minute customer data on the go. Simply swipe and tap to create useful dashboards, and utilize the voice search feature to access dashboards hands-free — you’ll never leave home without your data in hand. For a comprehensive take on what the Apple Watch means for Salesforce customers, check out this blog.
2. Data Loader for Mac
   Using the data loader just became that much easier for Mac users with the introduction of the new “Data Loader for Mac." Gone are the days of utilizing third Party Tools (Jitterbit, LexiLoader) to import and export important information from your org.
3. Sales Cloud Engage
   An add-on to Salesforce Pardot, Engage allows Sales reps to easily leverage marketing approved content to increase close ratios. Alerts can be customized and triggered for reps to follow up based on specific customer activities. Engage Campaigns allow Sales reps to to add potential prospects to campaigns on the fly via web, desktop or through Salesforce1. To learn how to Campaign ROI, check out this blog. With Engage, sales reps can move potential prospects through the sales process more effectively, ultimately translating to higher close ratios and tighter messaging to prospective clients through Sales and Marketing partnerships.
4. Duplicate Management
   We have all encountered the scenario of entering information into Salesforce and praying to the CRM gods that the data is not duplicate. Enter Duplicate Management via Work.com to the picture. This Data.com technology does not require Data.com licenses which is a great selling point for any org. Administrators build logic around identifying duplicate records, what types of records can be created as duplicates as well as what actions will be taken if a user tries to save a duplicate record. As the old saying goes in the CRM community, “The data you pull out is only as good as the data you put in.”
5. Omni-Channel (Beta)
   Salesforce has stepped up its Service Cloud capabilities with new beta version of Omni-Channel which allows you to route any Salesforce Object in any Salesforce queue directly to your agents with ease. This flow allows you to prioritize items for your agents while also tracking their productivity and availability. Omni-Channel takes the manual process of selecting things out of a queue and replaces it with built in routing to the best available agent with availability in real time. To get the most out of the Service Cloud offering, take a look at Bob Furniss' recent blog.

What are you most excited about from Salesforce's summer release? Let me know in the comments below, or get in touch.