Microsoft Yammer vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

Yammer is great when you have a company culture that encourages friendly collaboration and communication. It can be a great supplement (but certainly not a substitute) for bonding and sharing ideas and thoughts. Certain channels can be really successful, too, like a channel where people can post dog pictures or something fun like that!

Incentivized

Salesforce Experience Cloud is well-suited for organizations that have clients who periodically or routinely need to access historical data or documents. The product also offers an exceptionally effective tool to engage with customers around support/service issues and the entire Case management functionality built into the Salesforce platform. The product might be less well-suited in environments where there is exceptionally high staff turnover within customer accounts, or where there is a substantial lack of very basic computer skills.

Incentivized

• Providing a platform for social news in the company where "bottom up" topics can percolate freely across department
• Social networking across the company where folks can divide their work into topics instead of teams
• Basic collaboration within a group including document sharing with ability to pin documents to a team

Incentivized

• Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
• Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required

Incentivized

• Although the social enterprise network works very well, there is room for some slight improvement - such as the ability to attract users. By being part of the Microsoft Office Suite, it is offered as an "add-on" and many overlook it and see it as unnecessary at first. It would be smart for Microsoft to sell it as its own product so it could gather more popularity as a "social network".
• Giving an option to filter results could be better as well as giving an option to turn off the "recent activity" bar on the home page.

Incentivized

• The documentation for implementing Experience Cloud can be a bit confusing as their rebranding hasn't made it's way into all articles, resulting in different terminology being used to refer to the same thing
• Some things are not as intuitive regarding their customizability, so there's a bit of a learning curve (i.e. Lightning apps can't be used to customize layouts in Experience Cloud)

Incentivized

Microsoft is dedicated to continual improvement on Yammer. They realize the value that Yammer brings to the table with their clients. In the short time that we have had Yammer implemented, we are just now beginning to see the strong impact it has on becoming more effective and efficient around collaboration.

Overall easy to use and intuitive, although limited in the possibility to personalize layout and look & feel of a site. Some functionalities are not easy to use, like document editing, but some others are quick and effective (posts and tagging above all). Performance and responsiveness of the Yammer site is typically acceptable, in my experience.

Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it

Incentivized

Very available

It's a simple product but it does provide value.

It's delivered on our original requirements and we've found ways to grow its usage. We continue to build on our original success and we can report our data out to leadership to show a true return on investment which is great for growing support and expanding uses for the system.

Incentivized

We have never had to use the support for Yammer. The tool works well and we have not come across any bugs. User Interface is simple and easy to use, similar to other forum type products, thereby removing the need for any extensive training. Team members are invited in and immediately are able to start using the tool.

Incentivized

We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.

Incentivized

The training that Microsoft provides is very generic training for Yammer. I like the fact the training is short and easy to understand

We organically implemented the product

Our team briefly used Salesforce.com's Chatter product before switching over to Yammer in 2012. While Chatter is essentially the same product as Yammer, it left much to be desired. Chatter's design was (and remains) clunky and difficult to navigate. Yammer is a simple, easy-to-use product that offers similar functionality as Salesforce's Chatter.

Incentivized

I have used Datatel/Colleague/Recruiter before. There were issues because only one person at the institution was able to have the student's record open at a time. This was problematic when collaboration between departments was necessary especially in the case of admissions, financial aid, and registration. We also had to do our work and then log out before asking a questions of another department. Sometimes simultaneous use was necessary. However, this was years ago and they may have since updated the program.

Incentivized

• My company is pleased with the positive impact Yammer has created departmentally and on an individual basis with work flow efficiency.
• Adversely, most old and new employees are more familiar with SharePoint, causing the company to pay for training for all current and incoming employees.
• As Yammer becomes more widely used, the need for training may diminish, which is where we will see our return on investment, as the product clearly provides a more effective form of file sharing and communication between employees and their department.

Incentivized

• Improved online admission application completion rates from mid-60%s to mid-80%s.
• Positive user experience from start-to-finish to leverage one data system for all prospective student data
• Fewer data integrations transforming and loading sensitive student data by leveraging Salesforce Community Cloud to access already existing data

Incentivized