Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Salesforce Performance Edition Offers Cornucopia of Apps

By Jennifer LeClaire

"This allows Salesforce to further disrupt the traditional morays of enterprise purchasing. One question comes to mind: Are all the services going to be consumed by the same user? Some of the services are geared toward sales and others are geared toward service and support, like Live Agent," asked Brad Shimmin, a principal analyst at Current Analysis. 

 The new Performance Edition from Salesforce .com combines its customer relationship management apps  and platform with targeted lead and customer data from Data.com, coaching and feedback tools from Work.com, and trusted identity services from Salesforce Identity, among other tools.

The idea behind Performance Edition is to bring together tools companies need to drive growth, improve customer satisfaction, and maximize sales and service success in what Salesforce calls a "social and mobile  world." Although this bundle is new, the company said the likes of Facebook, Kelly Services, Schumacher Group and Varsity Brands have already been using these tools in combination with success.



"Over the years, we've combined several Salesforce.com innovations to create a holistic sales and service solution. As a result, we've been able to drive new levels of performance across every aspect of Enterasys' business," said Dan Petlon, CIO of Enterasys.
 "Salesforce Performance Edition is a one-stop shop for customer success. It will put everything we need to drive performance into a single solution." 

A Holistic Approach 


According to Salesforce, Performance Edition is based on the feedback and best practices of its most successful customers. The bundle serves as the CRM provider's most comprehensive solution for sales and service, combining Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Salesforce Platform with all of the additional capabilities in the company's Unlimited Edition.

Beyond the apps and platforms already mentioned, Performance Edition will also offer Live Agent, a web chat solution integrated into the Service Cloud that includes mobile capabilities to connect customers with service agents to get answers in real time, from any device .

Then there's Knowledge, which provides a single place for service agents and customers to access knowledge articles and find solutions, directly from the Service Cloud console or on any mobile device via the company's public communities or web portals. Sandbox Functionality, which creates a "sandbox" of an organization's production environment for integrating code, testing and user training to build and deploy customization and apps faster, is also part of the mix.

"Successful companies approach their sales and service strategy holistically," said Michael Fauscette, group vice president of software business solutions at IDC. "With Performance Edition, Salesforce.com is making it easier for companies to grow pipeline, shorten sales cycles and improve sales performance while delivering a consistent customer service experience across every channel -- all in a single solution."

Does the Solution Provide Value? 


We caught up with Brad Shimmin, a principal analyst at Current Analysis, to get his take on the new bundle. He told us Performance Edition is a logical evolution of the integration  work Salesforce has been doing on the back end.

"This leverages what is already a powerful unified back end set of services and allows Salesforce to further disrupt the traditional morays of enterprise  purchasing," Shimmin said. "One question comes to mind: Are all the services going to be consumed by the same user? Some of the services are geared toward sales and others are geared toward service and support, like Live Agent."

Performance Edition is scheduled to be available starting November 4 at the price of $300 per user, per month. So Shimmin is questioning how much value there truly is in the bundle for each and every user and how the pricing plays out compared to tapping into the services individually.

"By combining all of these different products across sales and support, Salesforce is enabling the enterprise to move away from segmented islands of knowledge and into a much more transparent, horizontal, and nimble organization," Shimmin concluded. "For example, the company is using its Service Cloud console to allow you to quickly find answers to questions that have been already answered by other agents or problems sales has resolved that might be applicable to a customer that is calling in."

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