Grasshopper vs. Salesforce Agentforce Service

Seems like it is perfectly suited for ANY small to medium business. I can imagine that a business would outgrow the system eventually, but probably around 75-100 employees? Great system for offices that are not managed full time, companies with remote workers, budget conscience start ups, anyone with a need for a registered office line.

Incentivized

Probably where you have a number of service teams that all contribute to a knowledge base is one area that's really useful. AI response, it looks like with AgentForce, that's going to be one of our next deployments. So they're AI based on the trust layer is, I like that it has the trust layer because it's already got some built in safeguards around privacy and security controls for AI, which is very important right now. Where it's probably less useful:gain, round robining a very email heavy conversation, so it's not the best email tool. A lot of our team still uses Gmail and logs to the case rather than actually emailing directly out of Salesforce. Email signatures are not great because you can only have plain text email signatures, you can't have HTML.

Incentivized

• Since calls always come into my cell phone from the same Grasshopper number I just saved that number in my phone as my company name. So I always know when a call is coming in for my company and that it's not a personal call. Of course, all calls are saved and logged in Grasshopper so if I need to go back and check the actual caller ID I can do that.
• All voicemails are immediately sent as audio files in an email to the email address on file for each extension. I personally love this feature. I can choose to go into the Grasshopper app to listen to them but its use so much more convenient to get an email, open it up and listen right from the email. The caller ID for the call is also included in the email text. So all the info I need for any missed calls is right there. Great stuff.
• By far, one of my favorite features is the option to receive faxes to the same business number. Even though fax is being used less these days it is still used quite a bit and being able to receive faxes and having them immediately emailed to me is great.
• The ability to transfer calls from extension to extension (as in cell phone to cell phone) is great. It doesn't matter where my colleague is. I can send the call to the right person and it's ringing on their phone in seconds.

Incentivized

• Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease
• Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work
• Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system

Incentivized

• Making calls from your Grasshopper phone number - Sometimes (well, most of the time) I'll just make a call directly from my cell phone because the process of opening the app, typing in the number I want to call and then making the call can take more time than the call itself.
• Missed Calls - Myself and other coworkers have experienced frustration with Grasshopper and "missed" calls. Sometimes my phone won't ring, but I'll get an email with a voicemail. So it skips ringing my phone all together and goes directly to voicemail. I've had my phone in my hand before, ringer on, and never receive a call but received an email with a voicemail.
• Checking Voicemails on your phone - In order to hear a voicemail from your mobile device, you have to log into the app. But the voicemail shows up under missed calls / voicemails like normal phone calls but when you try to listen to it, it's just a recording of grasshopper telling you that you have a voicemail.
• Transferring Voicemails - You have to memorize all the extensions and the process for transferring voicemails. While it's just memorization needed to make the process work correctly, it takes a lot of time to remember how to transfer the call, the extension you want to transfer it to, and sometimes after going through all of the steps I accidentally hang up on the caller. It's user error, but I feel like if they made the process simpler, and they gave you a directory when you indicate you want to transfer the call, it'd make it a lot easier.

Incentivized

• There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
• Costing is high.
• Maintenance is more.
• Expertise is required for implementation.
• The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.

Incentivized

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.

The admin functions are kind of confusing in the old interface which was my most recent experience on the admin side.

Incentivized

I love that the Salesforce Service cloud provides all of the functionality that I need when implementing business processes for our customer support representatives. It even has enough functions and features that allow us to customize and expand upon our current processes, giving us the ability to go above and beyond what we've thought we could ever do. Using cases coupled with Salesforce's automation tools help ease the workload and keeps our data integrity intact.

Incentivized

Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.

Load times can be slow, but this is also based on how much customization you have done. We added a lot of custom fields which could cause additional slowness in loading. This was never anything that affected our overall efficiency. I did not notice that Service Cloud slowed down any of the systems we had it integrated with

Incentivized

When I was setting up my account I contacted support a couple of times. They were also very professional, personable, and helpful. Their response is prompt and thorough. I'm confident I can get any question answered as well as help with any issue I might have. That's pretty important to me.

Incentivized

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.

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

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We moved away from Grasshopper when we implemented an answering service that had an application which provided the same functions as grasshopper for calling and texting. We initially selected Grasshopper as our communication solution because our original answering service just handled incoming calls and did not have an app available to clients.

Incentivized

Zendesk - I think it's not exactly user-friendly for the final user, but it's user-friendly for the configuration. So it's easier to manage when we have these amounts of data we're going through and it's more AI prepared. So by far Salesforce is more ready for what we want as the next level of hyper-personalization in sales and for sales.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Having an IVR allows us to miss fewer calls from clients or prospects, positively impacting our sales.
• Saving money by not having to hire a receptionist helps keep our expenses down.
• I do believe that the professional image our Grasshopper IVR gives our customers has a positive impact on our customer loyalty.

Incentivized

• Positive, absolutely the speed to market and being able to get the product out there. The continuous improvement that we've been able to deliver in terms of small incremental developments, moving from basically a more rigid homegrown solution that they had where the turnaround time was about six monthly releases. We've got it down to three monthly releases of hoping to go to one month releases very soon. So just that whole speed to market being government, I mean that is just a major improvement in terms of what they've been able to do.
• I think the negative part was integrating it and the complexity we had in terms of integrating DevOps as a concept and being able to use the Salesforce DevOps tools to be able to get that all rolled out in their existing current, very structured and rigid environment. And that probably took us a solid year to get those processes up and running. But yeah, now that it's working, it's absolutely fabulous.

Incentivized