Axonify vs. Salesforce Agentforce Sales

Well-suited to the original purpose of delivering questions on a daily basis; everything beyond that gets complicated. For example, there are a number of program types available to deliver information (certifications, daily reinforcement, self-directed learning, assigned paths, etc.). However understanding how they all fit together requires advancing weaving together of multiple types of programs for individual groups, and requires more time than you would expect. Nearly 3 years into working with Axonify, we are still trying to iron it all out. We also have side groups of customers who meet to help each other because we all struggle with it too. We have a hard time helping our leaders and subject matter experts understand what is possible and what doesn't work well in the platform, since it is so different and doesn't work as expected. For example, communication to teams is one way - the recipients can't respond.

Incentivized

Obviously, for any business, there are two main areas to focus on — the sales path and the service path. Sales Cloud wouldn’t be suited for a company that’s primarily into support services. For those kinds of companies, Salesforce has a different product — Service Cloud. So, for anyone in the support or service space, Sales Cloud isn’t the right fit.

Incentivized

• Update the platform in response to feedback from current users- ex. Many of the features I wished Axonify had when I first signed up for it are now live, such as guided learning, the ability to add certification to guided learning paths, and the ability to tie outside metrics and behaviors directly to Axonify training frequency and scores
• Reinforce employee knowledge to ensure employees don't forget content they don't use frequently- ex. as long as an employee signs in to train regularly, you can be assured that they will learn what they need to because the Axonify algorithm prioritizes reinforcement questions on topics that the learner hasn't seen recently and topics that the learner has the lowest scores in. The end result is that the platform is always customizing the content watch learner sees to help improve the individual's weak points. This means that of an employee is under performing, we know it is either because the process is not working, or the employee is unwilling to follow the process, not because he or she doesn't know any better
• Foster competition and excitement around completing certain training milestones- ex. the Leaderboard can get pretty competitive as employees compete to reach the top. The platform also lets you auction off different prizes on the platform using points earned by answering questions correctly, thereby indirectly creating an incentive to complete training.
• I have never worked with a company that did such a great job at walking a new user through the implementation process. A year and a half after implementing the platform I still have a regular call from my rep (Erin Bresser) during which we discuss my company's training plan, pain points, strategies, upcoming features, and anything else training related. I could not ask for more or better support from a vendor.
• I love all the different content options I have. I can use the bare bones basics and simply add questions directly into Axonify, or I can support those questions by building a complex course, video, animation, or even downloading content from the Content exchange directly from Axonify. This means that weather I have a day or a year to prepare content, I have the ability to produce a functional and productive experience for my workforce

Incentivized

• The customizations - We have an organization that operates differently from most companies, so we’ve had to implement quite a few customizations — and Salesforce allows us to do that quite quickly. Most of the time, delays come from dependencies on other internal parties rather than the system itself.
• From my perspective as a consultant, one of the biggest advantages is that everything is in Salesforce — all the details, all in one place. The ability to customize it easily is a big plus; there’s really a lot you can do with it.

Incentivized

• Subjects and categories organization system can get a little confusing.
• While there is support for mobile phones, there's not an easy way to test it on mobile devices without deploying it first.
• Lots of options so it can get complex if you just need a straightforward solution.

Incentivized

• We still need to include the production part. We started using Salesforce to sell the seeds — our inventory is in SAP — and from there we handle sales and track the process of planting, harvesting, selling, and then collecting payments. But we don’t yet manage the earlier production processes, like production planning. We handle allocation, but not full production planning, and that’s an area where we still have room for improvement.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

Axonify is extremely easy to use, for both employees and managers. The platform is visually appealing, and Axonify offers a number of videos and tutorials for any administration and user functionality. The reporting is also very easy to obtain and review, with the ability to drill down to team and individual results.

Incentivized

Because I think it could be easier. We have different standards today since we’re used to interacting with consumer apps like Starbucks, where all you do is scan your card. Then, when you use Sales Cloud, there are still a lot of manual inputs. So my mission with AI is really about figuring out how to make that easier.

Incentivized

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

Incentivized

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

Axonify has been great for support. We have a dedicated rep but I have also just posted to the official user boards and gotten feedback as well. Axonify also has a conference every year that is a great way to learn. You can also become certified in Content or Administration with Axonify if you so choose.

Incentivized

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

I like the way Axonify provides chunks of information to the learner by overwhelming them by dividing them into bite-size content. The learners don't have a lot of time to give to training, so Axonify has helped has provided just in time training to those teams. It's very much suited to our organization. Axonify is extremely easy to use for both learners and managers. The platform is visually appealing and provides a lot of video-based content to learn the platform for any administrative and user functionality. It is a unique tool in its segment, it meets the requirements that other tools, LMS, or learning libraries don't.

Incentivized

So I've evaluated, implemented Microsoft Dynamics in the past. I've used Oracle CRM solutions. I've used Daylight, which is a very niche CRM system the last couple of years. And I've evaluated a variety from Legacy Microsoft Ones to Zoho and Sugar when making implementation decisions at other companies. But usually I've gone with Salesforce. I'd say it's better than most. The only one that I generally prefer, and last time I chose an implementation from scratch, I did Microsoft Dynamics. And the reason is for small mid-size organization, Microsoft Dynamics, if you already have Microsoft Office products, it's much better integrated to all of the Excel, Word, OneNote, Outlook email than what you get from Salesforce. And so that's the only one that if someone's a Microsoft organization and small sized company, it'll save a lot of integration things, a lot of security, a lot of login and access and IT management by just sticking within the Microsoft ecosystem. But outside of that, if you don't use Microsoft or if you're a large organization or have other needs that you want, Salesforce I'd say is better than all of the other CRM offerings out there. It's the easiest to use and the most robust and the most vendors and products for the ecosystem.

Incentivized

Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.

It's very scalable as it has a ton of features (but you do need an admin who understands how to leverage these features). Because of the various features, we've also needed to host onboarding sessions with our users so that they can familiarize themselves with the platform, which isn't always super user-friendly or intuitive.

Incentivized

Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.

• Before, we could not accurately measure if people were really reviewing our monthly safety material or really reading our new policy releases. Now we have nearly 100% compliance.
• Over the past two years since we implemented Axonify, we have seen a decrease of $200,000 in our workers comp annual cost. We expect this trend to continue or stay stable due to a staff that is more aware of safety.
• We maintain our position as a San Francisco and Silicon Valley Best Place to Work due to our high morale and employee engagement level. 99% of our employees engage with Axonify an average of 13x per month. This ranking has made us an leader in affordable housing with some of the best staff members in our industry.

Incentivized

• It allows me to keep a close eye on all of my performance metrics through the Dashboard Reporting, ie what my sales pipeline looks like, how much it's changed in the last 60 days, new opportunities created in the last 7 days, # of emails sent for the week, etc. The ease of the design and output make it really easy to check my progress throughout the day to find where I have holes and am falling short on my personal and work goals. It's resulted in greater transparency with my Mgmt Team and shorter 1-on-1 mtgs with my boss as he can see exactly where I am at all times (to be fair, I'm a senior sales rep, so he pretty much lets me do my job completely unfettered), but it does prove that I am continually producing which recently resulted in a raise I didn't even ask for.
• The SF repository is so detailed that I don't have to spend tons of time finding frequently used websites attached to a client or see what all interactions with the company look like. Even though I don't use SF for my bulk emails and email sequences, SF provides me with an email to use in the bcc of these emails which links everything back to SF. I find that extremely helpful. This really impacts my efficiency and I can honestly say that once I started using all the functionality of data management, it saved me about 20% of my time/week that I could then allocate towards other revenue-generating tasks like prospecting and account management. The more time I have for those, the better. My year-over-year on accounts 1 year and older just grew by 17% this last year.

Incentivized