TMC(TM) Labs Review

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Feb 2005

Editor's note: For the purpose of differentiating the company and the product, Salesforce.com uses a capital letter to begin the name of the company, and a lower-case spelling for the product, salesforce.com.

Hosted CRM solutions aim to reduce the complexity of running CRM software. The on-demand CRM market has, as of late, acquired several competitors, but Salesforce.com is still considered the market leader with 195,000 subscribers in a combination of small, medium and large enterprises. Salesforce.com told us: "We are democratizing CRM. Anybody can use our system at any time, and it doesn't matter what the complexity is. It can be used by a small company with complex needs or a large company with simple needs, or vice versa. Everyone is going to be running on the same system."

TMC Labs had the opportunity to take a look at the company's recently launched Winter '05 edition. Most of us know hosted CRM has faced criticism that its applications are difficult for customers to customize. Salesforce.com heard these cries and launched a customization application called Customforce.com. This tool allows users to extend salesforce.corn's applications without any programming. Customforce.com is available to salesforce.com customers at no additional charge. Customers can modify user interfaces, workflows, tabs and fields to suit their personal preferences; adding tabs and hiding tabs were remarkably easy to do, considering we have seen competing packages that make it extremely difficult to perform these tasks. Additionally, Salesforce.com recently introduced Supportforce.com, an on-demand customer service and support application perfectly suited for help desk environments.

We asked Salesforce.com about some of their differentiators, and they told us that their key differentiator is the architecture: "Our founders looked at a couple of options. We could have set up individual databases on separate hardware for each customer, but you'd quickly run out of colocation real estate. We didn't want to be supporting 1,000 or 2,000 servers. Some of the competition have done that. Instead, our architecture is one system, one database - our intellectual property is all in this architecture with the database and metadata. Everybody is on the same system, whether it's a huge company or a momand-pop shop." They also informed us that they utilize very high-end Sun boxes, along with clustering technology for the database, and that the processing is performed on a single server. Amazingly, Salesforce.com doesn't use multiple servers for offloading the host processing, yet their hosted CRM service is still very scalable with exceptionally fast performance, which we saw for ourselves when we tested the system.

We asked Salesforce.com to describe some of the driving factors for hosted CRM, and why customers would want to use their system. Their response: "One of the major reasons for the failure of CRM systems is that they were too expensive. No one was using them. They took a couple of years to implement, and were a philosophical change from being individual producers. When a vendor came in and said, 'You are doing it THIS way! You have to work with our system/ there was a rejection. The users' rejection was the result of a few different factors - the software didn't work; it wasn't easy to use; users couldn't take it on the road; it didn't work with their mobile devices; and the people who championed it in the first place were CIOs, on 18-month tenures, who were no longer with the company."

Features

salesforce.com has some nifty VoIP integration with Cisco IP phones. For example, you can get screen-pops on your Cisco IP phone, and you can view the actual salesforce.com application within the Cisco IP phone's browser. When you end the call, salesforce.com will automatically log the incoming call to the record.

Navigating the salesforce.com Web interface to add leads (Figure 1) and contacts was very easy to do, as the company seems to have spent a lot of time optimizing the layout of the interface. Customizing salesforce.com was a quick process. Adding custom tabs was very easy, and capturing data from external sources, such as a Web site lead-capture form, was also very simple to do.

One important item of note is that salesforce.com has its own framework for its reporting engine rather than use third-party reporting solutions such as Crystal Reports; this results in a powerful, real-time dashboard (Figure 2) for viewing important stats from within the browser without having to export to Crystal Reports.

The dashboard offers a quick glance at some charts. You can easily customize it to display the information you want to see. These charts have complete drill-down capability: If you click on one of the dashboard charts, you can drill down and run the reporting engine to generate a real-time report, which also has complete drill-down to view individual accounts or opportunities. If you want to do some customized reporting, you can use the Office Edition option to pull information into an Excel pivot table. Pivot tables are popular with many companies, as is creating reports and customized charts in Excel, so we certainly liked this option.