Drupal vs. Salesforce Agentforce Service

If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.

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I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.

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• Drag and drop functionality is easy to use
• Easy to switch between straight text and HTML content
• Ability to easily have multiple environments so that pages can be built in b/c-stage before they are approved and published
• Solid user experience where it's clear how to navigate the platform

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• Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
• The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
• Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.

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• This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
• Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
• The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.

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• We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.

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The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.

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I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.

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Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.

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Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

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The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

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As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

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Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

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Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

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I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

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Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.

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We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.

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Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

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The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

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• Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
• It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
• Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

• We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
• The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
• Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person

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