For years, organisations have been devising new methods and technologies to keep strengthening the customer relationship. The concept of SaaS-based Customer Service Management (CRM) solution has been championed by Salesforce, and the reason why there are many cloud-based solutions in the market today is because of them.
What Is Customer Service Management (CRM)?
In essence, CRM is any tool or technique used to gather customer data, and to provide a better user client experience. It refers to practices, strategies, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with them, assisting in customer retention, and driving sales growth.
What Salesforce Offer, How It Mastered The Craft?
Salesforce engages in the design and development of cloud-based enterprise software for CRM. Its solutions include sales force automation, customer service and support, marketing automation, digital commerce, community management, collaboration, industry-specific solutions, and salesforce platform.
Salesforce was the first company to sell a CRM in the cloud. It had set out to make a product that was simpler and easier to use than the bulky products that were available.
Instead of adopting a hostile attitude toward its competitors, Salesforce leaned in. They built a platform where developers could build custom applications on top of Salesforce, and created a central community where Salesforce users could build and sell their apps.
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Salesforce has focused on improving their CRM by quickly adopting and integrating the newest technology and making it available to customers of all sizes.
Integrating Solutions
Salesforce has focused on improving their CRM by quickly adopting and integrating the newest technology and making it available to customers of all sizes. At the same time, they keep adding new cloud services to serve a wide breadth of use cases and compete with other enterprise providers, like Microsoft and Oracle. For instance, the Salesforce CRM has an interesting marketplace – AppExchange which has many scalable pre-integrated apps. Based on the size of your company, you can select the application usage and payment.
Manifold Business Activities
Salesforce CRM services are not only meant for customer relations and management. They enable better improvement of sales, revenues, collaboration means, marketing deals, customer support services, and so on. They play a great role in marketing, HR, sales, customer support, management, application integration, and many other departments of a business. This innovation helps organisations in enhancing all the business segments.
Why is Salesforce in a Better Position Than Peers?
The company’s leadership in the CRM market is a product of its foresight and commitment to innovation. The company leads in exploring newly-opened frontiers like AI, cloud computing, and mobile technology which puts the company in an advanced position compared to its competitors.
As Salesforce faces competition from other CRMs and other business software, they keep creating more ‘clouds’, or products that serve specific functions, to get users into the Salesforce suite. Once they start using one product, it’s easier to cross-sell them on others. The product sprawl has helped the company compete with other large cloud CRMs.
What’s in it for me ?
For a developer/start-up, there are four key takeaways from Salesforce’s CRM story:
Develop something that is easy to navigate. People love using Salesforce because it is easy to customise.
Keep striving to make your product better. Even after 21 years, Salesforce has not stopped innovating, experimenting and focussing aggressively on new technologies to keep their customer happy.
Experiment with free tools. Free tools, or free tiers like Salesforce’s very first CRM, can help get your product in front of a wide audience and allow users to explore the value of your product for themselves. Keep pruning. It’s important to evaluate and remove any features that add more difficulty for your users—even if you are attached to them.
