Tips and tricks for a successful Lightning transition
Dear Ohana, on Tuesday this week, I had the incredible honor to co-host a virtual Circle of Success with the amazing @Lauren Wheeler. In this session, I shared a few resources that I leveraged while supporting one of my strategic customers during their Lightning pilot go-live. Here are my top under-rated tips that I hope you can benefit from too:
1) Start with the end in mind
Far too often I speak with customers who transitioned to Lightning just for the sake of it. Use this opportunity as a moment to step back and redesign the processes that you currently have in place. Pretend that you will implement Salesforce from scratch and ask yourself "if we would start all over again, what would we change" while considering all the new great technology that's coming with Lightning. Lightning shouldn't be the "Why" you migrate, it's the "How", so ask yourself "What" your customers and users really need to make their lives more simple.
2) Keep it simple
One of the biggest learnings I personally had was when my customer kicked off their Lightning migration project pilot. Instead of going for the big bang approach, they picked a group of 50 power users (contact center agents), stripped away all the unnecessary technical debt, and kept the UI almost exactly the same. This meant, that on the day they let their agents loose to explore their new Lightning console, their power users quickly realized that, yes, everything looks a bit different, however they knew from old habits where to look up for what field and what each stage actually meant. With the Summer '19 release we actually provided you with the possibility to make your Lightning record page look more like Classic, while still benefiting from all the new functions and features: https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer19/release-notes/rn_record_page_default_view.htm
3) Sharing is caring
Talk to your Salesforce account team! I can't say this often enough. Involve your Account Executive and your Success Manager to help you find the right resources and enablement strategy for your users. In my case for instance, our Solution Engineer worked together with the key Trailblazer from our customer to build their Lightning vision in a demo org with dummy data. This did not only allow our customer to ask the Solution Engineer about roadmap and future features, but also enabled them to redesign from scratch without having to clean up a dedicated sandbox first. When my customer then pitched the Lightning vision internally to their business board, it was very well received.
4) Performance is key
Probably the number one objection I hear from customers is, that there's the wide spread impression that Lightning has a slower performance compared to Classic. This is not true on a technical level, however understandable in terms of the perception. Lightning isn't just a new UI, it's a new technology. Hence, the way that components and pages are loaded in your browser is entirely different than what you were used to on Classic. Our legendary Architect @Eric Mijonnet wrote a great summary on Trailhead regarding the Experienced Page Time (EPT) that I highly recommend: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/lightning-experience-performance-optimization/measure-lightning-experience-performance-and-experience-page-time-ept
5) More out of the box
One of the key reasons to move to Lightning is the simple fact that by not doing so you're missing out on all these new brilliant features that you either can't access at all or will need to build yourself and put more custom burden on your platform. So, what you want to really focus on is to ensure you are aware of all the great nuggets that we provide you with as part of your advanced core licenses (check the requirements for Sales & Service Cloud Enterprise and Unlimited Editions which most often include a certain amount of e.g. Einstein Recommendations, Einstein Bot Conversations and other great AI capabilities to help you automate and optimize your users efficiency and your customers' experience (https://www.salesforce.com/uk/products/einstein/features/)). Check your org's readiness with the help of our Einstein Readiness Analysis: https://einsteinreadiness.salesforce.com/
Let me know what you think of these thoughts above. Happy to discuss!
