There is a lot of hype in the market about Salesforce.com and
its many products, so what exactly is it and how can it benefit you?
Salesforce.com is a company based out of San Francisco,
California. They are the leaders in cloud technology.
Salesforce.com is
also the name of their flagship product, which is a highly customizable CRM
with attractive out of the box features like Web to Lead, Weeding out
duplicate leads, Opportunity Forecasting, Email and Campaign management, Google
Apps Integration etc… All this along with the standard CRM features
like Lead, Contact, Account, and Opportunity Management.
Salesforce.com is a multi-tenant
Environment which means we get an environment that
suits our business needs. This is where the confusion begins! So let’s start
off by listing some of the most important of Salesforce.com’s products and
what they focus on. Things to keep in mind – whatever edition/ Product you
purchase, you can upgrade to a higher product without migration or any related
problems, which plays well with their pay as you grow policy.
This blog post will shed some light on Sales
cloud and Service Cloud. Each one deserves an article on its own, but let’s treats
this as an appetizer!
·
Sales Cloud : As the name suggests, this package of Salesforce.com
contains the tools your sales team is going to use - contact/Account
management, Opportunity tracking, Lead Management, Products,
Quotes / Contract management etc. – To primarily focus on sales needs.
Recently this feature also supports social contacts that enable
you to have social network integration for your contacts/Leads. This does not
restrict you to a single package, there are different editions
(features) you can opt for based on your requirement and on your budget
·
Service Cloud : This edition primarily focuses on Service wing or customer
support side of your company – case management , knowledge base
management, KB article creation, single window console management where
the support executive can get all the details on single window, Call
center integration with CTI, SLA management, Escalation Rules based on your
business workflow.
With
the onset of social media, most of the customers have a social presence, and
most of the complaints are now via twitter handles and facebook page posts. So
Sales cloud also provides application to track those cases and raise them to
your support engineers.
This
is a perfect support management tool. Salesforce.com recently partnered with
the Social media monitoring Giant Radian6 and
provides in depth monitoring of your brand providing you very high flexibility
and dashboard of statistics, but more about Radian6 later!
Salesforce.com has grown its platform to support
some of the most complex business scenarios and has
proved in the market that it just needs one fifth the development effort and
cost when compared to a normal application.
