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Salesforce.com: Much more than a CRM for your company!
October 13, 2015

Salesforce.com: Much more than a CRM for your company!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Professional

Modules Used

  • SalesCloud
  • Force.com
  • Chatter
  • Content

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com

We're using Salesforce.com as a CRM solution and also we've developed some applications over the Force.com platform. We've implemented Salesforce as a global solution for our main division and it currently serves our 4 main regions (North America, South America, Europe and Asia Pacific). We have also implemented different orgs for smaller divisions.
Mainly we're using Salesforce.com as a CRM tool to track opportunities and provide a 360 view of the customer to our Sales Reps. We are also running some processes natively on the Force.com platform like sample requests and marketing share info. We have integrations with legacy systems, so we can concentrate customer information into a single platform.
  • Opportunity tracking: It makes the process very easy by leveraging all the standard features of Salesforce.com
  • Collaboration with tools like Chatter and Content: Chatter really changed the way our users communicate and it's a new paradigm that is capable of replacing, reducing email usage.
  • Easy to customize and implement any custom process: The Force.com platform makes very easy to create tables and entry forms to support any custom process not standard in Salesforce.com
  • Analytics: The engine is very powerful and enables the users to create their own reports and dashboards.
  • Price management: The standard module is quite simple and does not allow to track rebates.
  • Salesforce1: The mobile UI is getting better with each release, but it's not there yet in the sense there are things that you cannot do on it.
  • Lightning components: When developing for the browser and using Visualforce, Salesforce.com automatically manage the look and feel of the screens. This is not yet the case when developing mobile applications under the Lightning platform. The styles and style sheets must manually specified for each element.
  • Standardization of processes across regions and divisions: Before Salesforce.com each region/division was running it's own process and it was hard to consolidate reports. After implementing Salesforce.com, we set a consolidated process and it was very easy to bring on additional sites.
  • 360 view of the customer: With Salesforce.com it was very easy to integrate with our legacy systems, and consolidate all the information related to an account in one place.
  • Analytics engine: The engine is very powerful, and empowers users to create their own reports and track their own things.
  • Chatter: It opened new levels for internal communication and decrease usage and dependency on emails.
For some processes you might take into consideration that Salesforce.com requires some time setting and customizing the processes, like i.e. live agent, the chat solution cannot be used out of the box, you need to dedicate some time to the branding and options. The same applies to the customer and partner communities (portals). But on the other hand, I can assure you that the tool is much more powerful and customizable than other third party solutions.

Salesforce Sales Cloud Feature Ratings

8.7
Customer data management / contact management
8
Workflow management
9
Territory management
9
Opportunity management
10
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)
10
Contract management
7
Quote & order management
Not Rated
Interaction tracking
8
Channel / partner relationship management
Not Rated
9.0
Case management
9
Call center management
Not Rated
Help desk management
Not Rated
7.0
Lead management
7
Email marketing
Not Rated
9.5
Task management
9
Reporting
10
9.0
Forecasting
Not Rated
Pipeline visualization
8
Customizable reports
10
10.0
Custom fields
10
Custom objects
10
Scripting environment
10
API for custom integration
10
10.0
Role-based user permissions
10
Single sign-on capability
10
10.0
Social data
10
Social engagement
10
10.0
Marketing automation
10
Compensation management
Not Rated
7.0
Mobile access
7

Using Salesforce.com

1400 - Sales: All our sales people across the globe use opportunities to track the pipeline.
Marketing: They run campaigns and create leads on Salesforce.com
Customer Service, Technical Sales, Inside Sales: They use the information related to our customers (360 view), they also create contacts.
Finance: They are involved in some approval processes, particularly when related to prices.
4 - Business Analyst
Developer
Technical Lead
  • Pipeline tracking
  • Case management
  • Sample requests
  • Market Share: Calculate the market share for our current accounts.
  • Sample Requests: We created a custom process that manages requests from our Customers
  • Customer Scorecard: We created an automated scorecards that calculates metrics based on information coming from legacy systems.
  • Customer service with CTI integration
  • Partner portal
  • Managing of rebate contracts
Right now Salesforce.com is fulfilling our needs and it also has a lot of room for improvements and future enhancements. We also invested a lot of time and resources developing tools for the platform, so we don't see that we're going to move or consider another CRM tool in the near future.

Salesforce.com Support

It usually takes time to get escalated (a couple of days) and the first level of support is not good at all, most of their responses are from a script and sometimes they don't even know what they're saying. We're 3 experienced people supporting our instance, so when we go to support is because we really need it and it's something we cannot take care ourselves.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Support cares about my success
Escalation required
Difficult to get immediate help
Need to explain problems multiple times
No - Frankly, we don't have a good experience with traditional support, so we don't think premium support will do much better. Also premium support is expensive, and the contract has a lot of limitations where the premium support cannot touch your instance or customizations. i.e. they cannot make any modifications to any code you have, even if it's not running well.
Yes - Yes, it took some time so they could understand the bug and I went past the first level of support. Then I worked with an experienced technician and the issue got solved really fast (I was surprised about this because most of the times it takes some time for Salesforce to address things, and this one was a bug on their side)
Usually when the request is simple, like enabling a feature, there's no delay and Salesforce.com addresses the issue really fast.

Using Salesforce.com

Most of our users love the tool, and they are asking to include additional processes and thing into it, even if they currently have another application to fulfill the need, they ask if we can move it to Salesforce.com.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Find things: Salesforce has a global search box that makes it easy to find records and documents.
  • Update information: You can access the system with a browser on any mobile device. It also has its own mobile application that simplifies the task.
  • Run reports and dashboards: Its analytics engine is very powerful and it runs on all platforms as well.
  • Multiple updates: when updating multiple data at once (like prices), the UI seems not to be the best options, but usually its integration features (i.e. with Excel) help a lot on these user cases
  • Some custom features we built (like the generation of a PDF), they need additional effort to make sure they run on the mobile platform, so they are not available (yet) on it.
Yes - The mobile application performs really well, but the thing is that not every feature works on it. Also customized thing you had built, most of the time they need additional work so they can be accessed on the mobile platform. The good thing is that Salesforce.com is continuously updating and improving the mobile applications, so it adds new functionality and enhancements in every release.