Salesforce is cloud-based CRM software. It makes it easier for companies to find more prospects, close more deals, and connect with customers in a whole new way, so they can provide them with amazing service at scale. Salesforce brings together all your data, from any source. Customer 360, a complete suite of products, unites your sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams with a single, shared view of customer information. With artificial intelligence integrated across all products,…
$25
per month
Zywave Sales Cloud - Agency Management
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
BrokerageBuilder is an insurance agency management system from Zywave in Milwaukee, suggested to automate office processes and centralize customer data.
Salesforce is great for any business that is building to scale YoY; even with a very low spend amount you can get so much out of the tool and really tailor it to your liking. Any business that's GTM strategy includes a dedicated Sales team and Marketing team should utilize Salesforce in some capacity. However, Salesforce can work for small businesses, but the marketplace has became so fragmented with easy to use industry specific CRMs that are lightweight and built for an exact purpose. The downside to Salesforce is the initial lift and to configure it how you want it....it's not the most difficult thing out there, but it definitely takes time and thought, typically more than a smaller business owner would be willing to put it for a business with sub 15 employees or so
prospects easy to find; however not all current information is listed. The process for importing prospect lists into the agency management system could be streamlined.
Customer Relationship Management is made so much easier by using Salesforce. I love the ability to move between customer contacts easily and to chatter with my other teammates.
It’s so beneficial to have more industry data and to store it in Salesforce. From comparing my customers, I can make better recommendations as to what practices will be most beneficial and productive for them to use.
I love the integrations that I can use with Salesforce. It will document the communication I’ve had between customer contacts. It also documents tasks for me to complete regarding their implementations. I find it so easy to navigate to find good data.
In Salesforce I can also see the files and contractual agreements customers signed, and I love that it’s easy to find in their profiles. It’s helpful because sometimes my coworkers do not add the files to the google drive folders we use for storing customer facility data, so this is a great backup resource.
The Knowledge module can be improved. It is still limited compared to regular CMS. Still not possible to have a filter view per data categories
Using the Community portal also comes with a limited Community reply function that doesn´t allow text formatting. Very difficult to move staff away from emailing customers when this text box is very poor
Rigidity when you work in a big organization with same template. It needs to be a one fits all instance and the local needs are deprioritized because SF doesn´t allow customization
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.
Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.
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.
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 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 Zywave Customer Support team is phenomenal! Never any complaints. They resolve things quickly. You can call and talk with a real person, submit a chat question, or email them. Their training videos are good—short and sweet. We still use multiple Zywave products in our Benefits, Commercial Lines, and Marketing departments. They are a great company to work with. The implementation/onboarding for all products has been amazing! Training for products has always surpassed the training we received from other vendor partners.
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've used Act CRM by Xperience previously. Salesforce is way more robust and intuitive and meets the needs of an enterprise company with enterprise clients way more effectively. I don't think there is another CRM in the market with the overall functionality and usability that can complete with the Salesforce platform for someone in my role.
We moved from BrokerageBuilder (BKB) to Epic in June 2019. Epic pros over BKB: You can use Epic for CL, PL, Bonds, and Benefits—one system for your whole agency has a lot of advantages. In Epic, you can drag and drop emails and documents to clients, policies, and activities. Epic has an auto-save feature. Reporting in Epic is better. Epic cons compared to BKB: The design aesthetic of Epic is not as nice as BKB. Navigating Epic is clunky—everything is in multiple layers. Epic is less flexible for custom fields. Epic is designed for CL/PL, so it's not ideal for a Benefits user, although they are improving/investing in the benefits side. BKB is just better for a Benefits user.
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.
I've worked with Salesforce since 2001 in companies ranging from 4 to hundreds of sales people and the system has been able to scale and perhaps more importantly expand (functionally) to the needs of larger organizations. In fact in my previous company, as a provider of a solution that integrated with Salesforce, we had customers that had thousands of sales people using Salesforce.
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.
It requires a lot of time to manage but does a good job keeping everything in one place
Managers! Quit having sales professionals create spreadsheets and reports ad hoc. The information is in SFDC. Build a report so you can get it yourself.
If used properly and not restricted and overmanaged, SFDC will provide huge ROI
