 Example of product bundle configurator included in iDialogue package, based on Unofficial SF flow components. “The ability to provide spreadsheet-like functionality in Salesforce flows, plus integrate the components with iDialogue’s digital experience actions and platform events, enables Salesforce Users to easily interact with their customers” said Mr. Leach.
As Unofficial SF goes through packaging and versioning changes, iDialogue will maintain compatibility with key Unofficial SF components so that Flow Developers receive seamless, periodic component updates without the overhead of managing multiple packages, or keeping up with open source library updates. In the spirit of open source, iDialogue will submit pull requests and enhancements to the UnofficialSF Github repository to ensure its long-term success, plus provide Flow training to iDialogue Admins and Developers. Resources: https://unofficialsf.com/ Unofficial SF Github Repository https://github.com/alexed1/LightningFlowComponents Eric Smith's Blog https://ericsplayground.wordpress.com/author/ericsplayground
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Many blind people use screen readers to access web content. For Sales Enablement content creators, it is essential to understand how blind people use the web, and how to create Sales and Customer Experiences that are both operable and understandable by people who are blind [1]. Salesforce maintains Section 508 conformance for internal Sales reps. External customer-facing experiences must similarly be accessible for balanced, 2-way online "dialogues" with customers. As customer experiences get increasingly interactive, it's important that they do not sacrifice basic accessibility for trendy features. We recently submitted iDialogue Customer Experience (CX) rooms to several site checker and accessibility audit sites. And to be honest, I was bracing for the worst given the level of pre-built interactive screen elements. The good news is that our accessibility scores all passed (95/100 from accessibilitychecker.org [2]), but there is still some work to do. The functional elements of a B2B Sales customer experience, such as accessing documents and quotes, filling out forms, and submitting payment methods, are all passing. While iDialogue Room Builders can reliably build compliant and accessible rooms today, we've updated our 2022 product roadmap to reaffirm our commitment to section 508 conformance, and to be transparent in our progress towards achieving near perfect accessibility scores.   References
[1] https://equalizedigital.com/website-accessibility-blind/ [2] https://www.accessibilitychecker.org/ Generally speaking, a career in the Salesforce ecosystem does not require coding skills. A core principal of the platform is based upon no-code / low-code / declarative configuration. Agile companies want to move fast and respond to change, and the ability to point-and-click when making changes gives companies a competitive advantage when using declarative tools and processes. Companies prefer to hire people with business domain knowledge that can quickly convert business requirements into cloud-hosted solutions that scale ubiquitously. Writing code, developing unit tests, and managing multiple sandbox / dev environments slows the business down and increases operational costs. However, thinking like a coder in Flow Builder will increasingly become an in-demand skill and increase demand for your skills, while making your organization even more agile (more on this below).
When flows are utilized in iDialogue implementations, I'd speculate about 50% of the configuration was anticipated using pre-developed template flows included in our managed package.
Even distinctions like SMB vs Enterprise, or annual revenue are no longer absolute criteria for when Developers are required. It's not uncommon for startups to evolve into $100M+ companies using an entirely declarative approach to Sales and Enablement. This is in stark contrast to when I first entered the Salesforce ecosystem around 2006, and pretty much every custom business rule required an Apex trigger. But today, as I write this in 2022, the combination of Lightning page builder and Flow Builder, plus our own Document and Room Builder tools now provide Admins and Ops with 100% declarative configuration environments to build end-to-end Sales processes and apps. While coding is no longer required, I will say the ability to think like a coder when using Flow Builder will increasingly come into demand. Flow Builder has achieved 4GL status in recent releases; and as such, implements basic programming concepts like variables, collections, conditional branching, looping, and assignments; much like you'd find in many programming languages. The ability to name things correctly, refactor larger flows into smaller sub-flows, test, and manage version control processes are necessary skills when building Flows. However, a new ecosystem is evolving that provides pre-built essential flows, allowing Admins and Ops to simply configure last mile details. So ultimately, knowing the inner workings of flows is useful, but not required. Going forward, our measurement for success will always be to enable declarative configuration for all features. And as we grow and learn from our customers, we'll continue to evolve iDialogue in ways that increasingly offer sophisticated Sales Enablement, Content Management, and Customer Experience features without the need to learn or know code.
Is your Marketing department involved in Salesforce Opportunity page layout decisions?
Sales Reps spend up to 400 hours per year searching for deal-specific Marketing materials. Lightning page layouts allow for cross-functional alignment across Sales and Marketing to ensure customer-facing conversations and quotes carry their intended messaging. Marketers are skilled at pixel-perfect user interface design decisions, copywriting, audience targeting, and messaging. So why wouldn't you leverage their experience and bring their skill set to Opportunity page layout decisions and enablement rules? Benefits to adding Marketing content to page layouts:
Congratulations Salesforce Nonprofit System Administrators on completing another year! Now that the focus is on generating end-of-year donation letters, here's a list of some innovative solutions implemented by Sys Admins working with Salesforce NPSP and iDialogue. We're constantly amazed at the creativity and ingenuity of Sys Admins and Developers at Nonprofits. Tip 1: Create a Variety of Donation Letter Templates  Daniela Cruz, Administrative Program Assistant at Reading Power Inc., has accumulated several personalized donation letter templates, one for each Donation type, that she can generate, print, or email with just one-click. Daniela's screen flows also auto-update Acknowledgement Status and Date fields on Opportunity records.  Tip 2: Personalize Donation Acknowledgement Letters Utilize NPSP fields, like Formal Greeting and Informal greeting in letter templates. Add a signature image of the Nonprofits CEO, Founder, or Director. 4 Word doc donation letter templates are included in the iDialogue NPSP accelerator package, with pre-defined merge tags.  Tip 3: Create Separate Donation Letter Batches for Print and Email
 Tip 4: Generate Envelope Labels From Salesforce
Tip 5: Generate Letters From Custom Objects
One of many pre-built iDialogue screen flows included in the NPSP Accelerator package.  We take the security of iDialogue very seriously and actively monitor broader Internet security trends and bulletins.
For those with questions related to the log4j vulnerability,this post provides some details on proactive and preventative measures taken to ensure the security of iDialogue hosted data and documents. Our hosting provider, AWS, has assured us our Java 11 hosted containers were not exposed to this vulnerability, and that they've taken the following additional preventative measures: AWS Lambda does not include the Log4j2 utility in the Lambda Java managed runtimes (Java 8, Java 8 on AL2, and Java 11) or corresponding base container images. Functions that do not include impacted versions of Log4j2 within their code are therefore not affected by the issue described in CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046. We have applied a change to the Lambda Java managed runtimes and base container images (Java 8, Java 8 on AL2, and Java 11) that disables remote class loading by the RMI Registry or COS Naming service provider. This change helps to mitigate the issues in CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046 for Lambda functions that package the impacted versions of Log4j2. Customers using managed runtimes benefit from this change automatically. iDialogue has one transitive dependency on Log4J via our use of the Twilio Java SDK for sending SMS messages for two-factor authentication to rooms. In addition to upgrading this dependency to Log4J v2.17.0, we’ve also verified the utilization of the SDK does not log customer provided events. Online customer interactions can be described as "Events". Orchestrating a series of events is a "Flow".  One example of an event-driven orchestration:
 iDialogue raises dozens of platform events and provides out-of-the-box actions integrated with Salesforce Flow Builder to automate any end-to-end process that interacts with customers.
I've long been a fan of Jakob Nielsen's research on usability. I think the Internet, and customer experiences in general, could be improved by implementing many of his principles. Given iDialogue "virtual rooms" make great use of PDF documents, I found Jakob's recent article headline to be provocative. But like most provocative headlines, this particular article buries the lede and actually does offer some very useful advice in its conclusion, which is to "Use HTML Gateway Pages Instead of PDFs". "Pew Research brilliantly uses HTML gateway pages to summarize the findings in its reports while still allowing users the option to download the complete report PDF." We use this in practice when implementing CRM-driven dialogues. Let's use a typical Salesforce use case. When sending a PDF quote generated from a Salesforce Opportunity, the essential piece of information is the "Total Amount". In the iDialogue Room Builder, the value of the record's Total Amount can be merged into the HTML of the default landing page, with a link to an itemized PDF (see screenshots below). Invoices are another classic example of providing the customer with a high level summary of the invoice and an option to download a detailed PDF for their records, if necessary. Step 1 of 2. Add a merge field into the HTML template for a virtual room  Step 2 of 2: Contact clicks on link to room. Summary of quote is merged into the page. PDF with details is available.  Core to every digital CX (Customer Experience) is the concept of "Dynamic Personalization". Every web page, email, text message is personalized to the customer. "Bottom Up" a CX transaction is personalized through a series of layers: CRM DataA CRM Identity; such as Lead, Contact, or User; and a CRM Object; such as Campaign, Opportunity, Quote, or Contract, are the basis for personalization. Content Templates Templated content contains merge tags to be replaced by CRM data. iDialogue uses a handlebar format across all types of content, such as {{FirsName}}, {{Quote.TotalAmount}}, etc. Templates may merge single values or collections of table rows. Both text and images may be defined in templates. Merge Engine CRM data is merged with content templates based on the delivery medium. By decoupling the data and templates, any delivery format may be supported. Common formats include HTML, PDF, Word DOCX, and plain text. Transformations may happen in real-time or batch. DeliveryThe merged content may be personalized in real-time based on a web browser request. Or the content may be delivered as email with attachments. CX ClientsOften times the content must be delivered in a format that is responsive to the needs of the requesting client. The client is most often a browser on a desktop computer or smartphone. But may also be kiosks and other digital experience mediums.  Up to 80% of purchasing decisions are made as anonymous website visitors. Visitors are filling out less web forms and enabling more privacy protections in the browser. So, what secrets are your competitors implementing to convert their anonymous web traffic to leads? "The secret to converting more anonymous web site visitors is providing online product configurators." A product configurator gives web site visitors the ability to visualize and personalize your products or services, getting them one step closer to imagining themselves as buyers. The automobile industry was one of the first adopters of configurators, providing rich online user experiences to customize car colors, interiors, wheels, and packages. Customers can truly visualize what they were going to buy… all online without going to a showroom. In a post-COVID era of remote work and shopping, the ability to interact with a product prior to purchase is what separates progressive organizations from their competitors.  Extending CRM and CPQ When the term “CPQ” (Configure-Price-Quote) first emerged, the idea of customer self-service product configuration was a core part of the CPQ vision. The measurement of success for any CPQ implementation is the ability to move beyond data grids, page layouts, and spreadsheets; and provide an interface that is as close as possible to experiencing the actual product or service. This ensures customers receive exactly what they expected, reduces quoting errors, and reduces the time from lead to opportunity close. From a CRM perspective, anonymous web site visitors appear as Leads in Salesforce once minimum interaction criteria are met. Fingerprinting details, like IP address, browser agent, and a cookie-based session are recorded on the Lead. Slack messages can help celebrate minor wins that notify internal teams when web visitors interact with a configurator. From a resource planning and forecasting perspective, it can be useful to view the "shopping carts" of what anonymous visitors are configuring.
GenWatt 3DEvery Salesforce Consultant, Systems Integrator, and Administrator is familiar with the GenWatt product. GenWatt is an example product pre-installed in every demo version of Salesforce CRM. This live site demonstrates both 2D and 3D GenWatt product configurators using iDialogue. As visitors interact with the 3D configurator; leads, quotes, and opportunities are updated in Salesforce in real-time (contact me for a demo. You're guaranteed to love this!)  Pricing CalculatorsConfigurators are not exclusively for product manufacturers. SaaS, software, subscription, and usage-based tech companies effectively deploy online calculators to help customers explore "What If?" scenarios. Like "what if I upgrade from the 1GB of free storage plan to 50GB?" Amazon Web Services (AWS) pricing calculator is a great example of using transparent pricing and a range of products to help prospective customers understand the potential costs at various scales. https://calculator.aws/  MeasurementsImplementing a product configurator brings a whole new set of metrics to the lead generation process. In addition to traditional website visitors, product configurators introduce:
Lead ScoringOnce converted, configurator interactions can be integrated with demand generation solutions like Demandbase to provide advanced lead scoring signals. Implementation Web development tools have come a long ways since the early days of building websites. Using tools like iDialogue "Experience Builder", product configurator development is conducted side-by-side with CRM products, pricebooks, and Leads so that everything is integrated from the beginning. The waterfall of implementing a successful product configurator project is well known, and can be reliably estimated and implemented within a reasonable time frame.   Learn MoreConfiguration API and Project Implementation framework: https://docs.i-dialogue.com/#/configurators/overview I'd love to learn more about your business and discuss how a product configurator can have an impact on your Marketing and Sales processes.
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