Why Salesforce is not just “CRM”
Customer Relationship Management is not a new concept but is started in the early 1970s, when customer satisfaction was evaluated using annual surveys or by front-line asking. At that time, businesses had to rely on standalone mainframe systems to automate sales, but the extent of technology allowed them to categorize customers in spreadsheets and lists. Innovators tried to bring various solutions over the time and finally, in 1993 Tom Siebel (founder of Siebel) designed the first CRM product “Siebel Systems”
Salesforce is often referred to as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool but it’s full tools suite with various capabilities. CRM typically intends to keep the customer’s historical data in one place, and it makes it easier to manage customer relations. Now, if we combine Salesforce capability in combination with various Clouds then it enables the best customer-focused experience resulting in outcomes like:
· Customer 360 — A single view of data to enable cross-functional insights and reporting
· Actionable data on Dashboard — Leveraging platform and external data Salesforce can generate various actionable insights which can help users to take prompt actions instead of following standard operating procedures.
· Customer-centric automation — One of the examples is to send personalized messaging that is tailored to the unique needs of each customer.
Salesforce Clouds provides unique capabilities based on business capabilities-
Sales Cloud empowers businesses to manage leads, track progress, and automate sales processes with ease. It also helps sales managers in highlighting team-wide insights that can guide the overall sales strategy. The result is a holistic view of the individual and team performance that managers can use to plan and optimize sales resources and processes.
Service Cloud provides key features like –
· Agent workspace which provides a comprehensive and customizable user interface (UI) for customer service agents that offers various productivity tools, analytics, and customer views.
· Case management to handle multiple cases across channels
· Knowledge management to create and access resources within the company’s knowledge base.
· Omnichannel routing to automatically direct leads and cases to specific employees based on criteria such as employee skillset and availability.
· Service analytics — Dashboards give employees easy access to reporting and key CRM data, such as backlog analysis, chatbot performance, case history and volume, and agent productivity and activity.
· Out of the box Computer telephony integration (CTI) for handling inbound and outbound calls.
Marketing Cloud is a provider of digital marketing automation and analytics software and services. Marketing Cloud gives the opportunity to leverage data properly to launch a series of campaigns in a timely manner and measure those campaign results. It was originally founded in 2000 under the name ExactTarget.
Analytics Cloud is a business intelligence (BI) platform that provides an interactive platform to access and share business trends. The software provides data insights and helps to uncover new business opportunities.
Integration Cloud is responsible to integrate Salesforce with external data regardless of where it resides. MuleSoft plays a key role in the integration Cloud as it provides OOTB connectivity across the platforms which really helps in improving developer productivity and time to market
Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based commerce platform with various out-of-the-box features, useful tools, and commerce portals for growing your online business. It allows you to streamline the purchasing process, personalized buying experience, and create a mobile-friendly shopping experience. In 2016 Salesforce acquired Demandware, an eCommerce cloud-based provider for big and small businesses.
As per research “In 2021 over 2.14 billion people are expected to buy goods and services online, and in 2023 digital sales are projected to reach 22% of all retail sales worldwide. Considering the fast development of the eCommerce market and interest in online shopping, more and more retailers use the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform for running their online stores”
Financial Services Cloud is a relatively new offering by Salesforce and was launched in August 2015 and is the most suited Salesforce Cloud product for the Financial Services industry. It is a managed package that enhances and extends the functionality of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud combined to better meet the needs of wealth management firms, insurance companies, and banks. Financial Advisors and Bankers can take advantage of FSC to have a holistic view of their clients and adapt their sales strategy to best serve their clients.
Higher Education Cloud was introduced in 2018 and Education Cloud is a leading platform that empowers your institution to become a Connected Campus, so you can transform the student journey.
Non-Profit Cloud Non is an end-to-end platform that helps break down silos between your fundraising, program management, marketing, and technology teams.
Einstein Cloud is artificial intelligence (AI) built into the core of the Salesforce Platform where it powers the world’s smartest CRM. When combined with Sales Cloud, Einstein helps reps win more deals with intelligent automation, smarter scoring, actionable insights, and predictive forecasting.
In terms of development and implementation, Salesforce really offers to click vs code capability and can greatly improve time to market. Additionally, Salesforce is ensuring to upgrade its Frameworks earlier it used to provide Visual Force then it migrated to Auto Lightning for improved user experience. Recently, Salesforce released a powerful framework “Lightning Web Component” which is based on the modern Java Script framework and is helping any Frontend developers to easily adapt to Salesforce.
In addition to OOTB components, Salesforce is completely customizable to meet any business need, and of course, with various available clouds, it always helps to get desired functionality easily. Salesforce also provides capabilities like Lightning Message Service, Lightning Data Service, API Callouts for communication purposes which are easy to use.
Salesforce also provides App Exchange the leading enterprise cloud marketplace which can help to accelerate the development and enhance capability by installing any Salesforce or vendor-provided native manage packages. Few popular apps are DocuSign, Amazon Connect, Open Text eXstream.
Now, after reading all the content anyone can easily interpret that Salesforce is not just a CRM solution but it’s clearly an undisputed leader in the world of customer relationship management software, but thinking of it as only a system for managing leads and sales pipelines is a mistake. At last, Salesforce is not just a SaaS platform but it can also be considered as a PaaS platform too where you can deploy apps in the cloud environment, like AWS or any other cloud platform.