Bloomreach vs. Salesforce Agentforce Sales

One scenario Bloomreach is particularly suited for is omnichannel abandonment campaigns. We have scenarios that look whether a customer has been into one of our stores, and then if they are subscribed, we can send them more information about the products they have viewed. That wouldn't be possible without Bloomreach. Another scenario that Bloomreach is well suited for is price drop - we can alert users that an item they've viewed has dropped in price, and this has been a really successful campaign for us.

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

• The product recommendations engine allows for us to create a personalised experience for every customer across the 3m emails we send each month. This ensure that our customers remain connected to our brand.
• The customer data platform attached to Bloomreach Composable Personalization Cloud provides an all-in-one solution for our business intelligence needs. Allowing up-to-date purchasing, behaviour, and engagement reporting from our email to website activity.
• The ability to integrate with Meta and other paid ad formats allows for us to create a connected omnichannel experience for users, ensuring we are providing the right message, to the right person, at the right time, in the right place.

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

• Could improve some of the dashboarding to make reporting on emails more time efficient
• Could offer a way to easily combine email templates if they already exist separately
• A way to allow multiple people to work in a scenario at the same time and all saves be registered

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

We are extremely satisfied with Bloomreach. It is a central and indispensable pillar of our personalization and data-driven marketing strategy. The platform provides us with unparalleled scalability across 27 countries and guarantees high availability and stable performance, even when working with an enormous volume of data.The fact that the platform is intuitive and allows a wide range of our teams (from CRM to UX) to work effectively with personalization significantly reduces our dependence on IT support and accelerates campaign deployment.Given the robustness of the architecture and the positive results we are generating across channels, renewing the contract is a logical step to ensure our future organic growth.

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

In my time working with Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud, I always liked to work with it. It is crucial that you get support from experts from the beginning to show you how to work with the vast amount of options and activities to choose from. The learning curve is also well-rounded because of its user-friendly interface and highly skilled customer support.

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

The platform is generally reliable - major outages are rare and most day-to-day campaign operations run without interruption. Where it dips: occasional slowdowns in the analytics dashboard during peak loads, and sometimes scenario executions get delayed without clear explanation. The real-time event processing is mostly solids. Overall uptime is strong - it is not something that keeps me up at night, but it is not flawless either.

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

Performance in Bloomreach Content is quite good but you need to be ready. Your implementation should follow all the good practices (avoid crazy patterns) and the environment setup should be the right one. With all that, Bloomreach's performance is quite solid. Our usage makes use of complex queries and most of them are really quick. Only when you need something really complex and you aggregate queries that should be separated you would get slower results (but then again, that is not a good practice for any platform).

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

The project team consistently delivers excellent collaboration and is always available whenever assistance is needed. Their responsiveness and commitment make working together smooth and efficient. Bloomreach support, which is included for free in the platform, can also be quite useful, especially for quick clarifications. However, the quality and speed of their responses can sometimes vary, depending on the issue.

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.

The Training was awesome

Incentivized

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

very informative and patient

Incentivized

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

All the deployments were done on time

Incentivized

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.

Bloomreach is far superior than SFMC as that platform requires too much technical knowledge. Ometria is very good and I would say is quite similar to Bloomreach although I would say Ometria is a smaller company. Dotdigital is also very powerful but not more so than Bloomreach. This being said, Dotdigital and HubSpot does have telephone support which is amazing and something I would like to see from Bloomreach in future or at least shorter wait times for customer support live chat.

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.

there is an option of multiple projects per organisation, customers and assets can be copied across. Multiple sites can be managed in one project, different activities organized under initiatives. Splitting work into sensible units is therefore well possible. The billing is based on number of tracked and number of stored events, no package-based deals. It should therefore be well scalable from a small e-store to a large corporation.

Incentivized

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.

• Emails, banners, and weblayers brought us an increase in conversion and additional profit.
• From a marketers perspective, it allows us to reach far and wide and see how well a campaign is doing in real-time.
• Knowing the customer allows improved communication and personalize our recommendations.
• Bloomreach Engagement has created revenue uplift with acquisition and conversion.
• The most effective tool out there when ROI is in question.

• 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