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Great platform but email marketing lacking.
November 02, 2012

Great platform but email marketing lacking.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

Unlimited

Modules Used

  • Sales Cloud
  • Service Cloud
  • Chatter
  • Knowledge & Articles
  • Content

Overall Satisfaction

  • The whole idea of platform as a service as an idea is great. It’s all there, it makes it so simple.
  • You can customize the heck out of it. The flexibility is incredible.
  • All your data is in one location.
  • You can deploy during business hours.
  • The stock look and usability is not there still. It’s a little cumbersome. We have customized the look and feel. We have developed our own quoting tool, and many other tools that we’ve built in Visual Force because of that reason.
  • I would like it to do a better job of email marketing. They let you email from Salesforce.com but it’s a very limited amount – for us, just 400 emails per day. It would be nice if they bit the bullet and allowed you to send mass email. We use Eloqua for email/marketing automation, but we have sales people who want to just email out of Salesforce.com as they have access to the templates. We would pay extra for that service. Frankly, I don’t think we use the full functionality of Eloqua. I’d rather just have native email in Salesforce.com. For mid-sized to small companies, I don’t think they use the full range of marketing automation tools. We are really just using Eloqua for email campaigns.
  • The reports are decent but don’t offer the full richness of what accompany actually needs. That’s why we are using Crystal Reports. You cannot really have formulas in Salesforce.com. You have group formulas, but they are not detailed on the row itself. There’s a need for a lot of manipulation of data outside of Salesforce.com.
  • IT labor cost savings. Virtually the whole company uses it. I don’t have to hire a SQL person, SVN (versioning), nobody to take care of email/db servers. We are saving two people’s salaries, which almost pays for it.
  • Everything is in one place. Because you are able to customize to include support, implementation managers, tutoring for software, all information is in there, quickly go into one location.
My advice is to watch your limits (e.g. around email sends). We haven’t hit storage limits yet.

It’s still a growing tool. I would call it a 7/10 on the maturity scale. They are listening to their customers – but mostly their big customers. You see ideas posted by multiple small companies and they say they’ll try and get to it, but when a large company like GE posts, they say they’ll tackle in the next release. Also a lot of the focus is on social business. That’s less relevant to us. Our customers are not social/chatter users. We have had a hard time with Chatter internally too.

Product Usage

250 - 250 have Salesforce licenses and chatter (free edition) of a total of 300 employees. Most all business functions outside of curriculum and content development folks.
3 - In IT, we have 3 people – 1 Apex/Visual Force developer, 1 data analyst/reporting (maintains new users, reports, page layouts, crystal reports), and myself.

We also give our support team access to do their own customizations. They have specific people that we trust. Field changes they can do themselves. They cannot do Visual Force customizations or workflow. I know that it will increase limits when we do something.

Adding new users is just done by IT for security reasons.
  • Sales Cloud – sales force automation
  • Service Cloud – customer service (support ticketing, response)
  • Knowledge and Articles – a customer support knowledge management add-on that we pay an extra license fee for - not included with Service Cloud. As you’re working a case and people have done the exact same thing before, you can go into Knowledge and Articles location, to see how they have solved the issue before.
  • Content – we are storing content inside Salesforce.com
  • Project management - we are not using a packaged Professional Services Automation tool. We are mostly customizing Salesforce.com for project managers and the implementation team. The project management team also use Jira and some use Basecamp. We are thinking of using Do.com (from Salesforce.com) internally in IT.

Evaluation and Selection

Switched from JD Edwards way back – 5 years back

Implementation

The main implementation was before my time. Other projects have been pretty straightforward. Reliability is good.
  • Implemented in-house
  • Professional services company
We have used external consultant services for deploying 3rd party products like Big Machines and consultants to implement solutions inside of Salesforce.com

We used Strategic Growth for a recent project to build a dashboard (a comprehensive account view). It was a good experience.

Training

  • Self-taught
I just used help documents and learned my way.

With premier support, we have the ability to get training and plan to do so for new members of our team. We go to Dreamforce and attend webinars for continuing education. We read release notes.

Configuration

We have done a lot for a company of our size. We have done Visual Force customizations for pages/layout We have customized workflow/triggers extensively. We have done a lot in Apex.

Support

Depending on what time you call, there’s sometimes breakdown in information and service level. The other day we were trying to deploy a product and I was running into limitations. It was 10pm at night and when I called Salesforce I got someone in India and asked to have a limit increase in order to address our limitation. The answer was sure, we’ll get that taken care of by tomorrow. I explained that we needed to solve the issue now and he tried to do it but then relayed I’ve escalated the issue and someone will be in contact with you in next 30 minutes. No one called. As a mission critical platform, we expect consistent 24x7 service.
Yes - Without premium support, you cannot find specific information. With premium support, if you simply submit case, they have 2 hour time for turnaround, and in most cases it works fine. If you really need information, you need to call, to escalate etc.

Reliability

In the past year, we have had some downs for searching etc, but our people don’t see it.
There are time periods when it’s a little slow. It varies when.

Integration

  • Greatplans - accounting/general ledger
  • Eloqua - marketing automation
  • Crystal Reports - reporting
  • Insight2 (appexchange app)– leads and contacts – overall picture of what activity has been happening – breaks it into nicer GUI
  • LogMeIn Rescue (appexchange app) – “LogMeIn Rescue Integration Services offer you the ability to access your remote support session data through a set of standard web services.”
  • CalendarAnything (appexchange app)- Create customizable calendars for any standard or custom object
  • Boldchat (appexchange app) – Visitor monitoring and proactive chat service
  • NTR support (appexchange app)– When s/o calls in to our call center, enables Salesforce.com to pull up their information based upon their phone number.
  • DemandTools from CRM Fusion (appexchange app) – for data quality management.
  • Avalara (appexchange app) - sales tax calculation
GreatPlains – on a 1-5 scale, the difficulty was a 3.5. We had a 3rd party firm called NexCorp do the integration. They also host Greatplains for us.

Eloqua – I don’t really deal with the integration piece too much. The basic integration works. For extensive integration, you need to hire someone or Eloqua services. We hired a firm called Bulldog solutions previously. Right now we are hiring Eloqua professional services to do another piece.

Crystal Reports - We used to use directly. It took just as long to pull a report. We use a 3rd party called DBamp which pulls all information from Salesforce.com to a SQL server data warehouse, and then use Crystal Reports for reporting, and RippleStone to schedule crystal reports to automatically run and cache. Cystal Reports. Reports get sent out by email and are viewable online.

Avalara – very simple, you just install from Appexchange. We talked to them when we had issues.

Vendor Relationship

I do compare what I’m paying with others. It’s hard to haggle on the price as a mid-sized company.