It's hard to know when annual CRM system upgrades wear out their worth
due to perpetual costs associated with consultation, implementation,
hardware and software upgrades, additional storage space, redundancy, fault
tolerance provisioning (the list goes on), and when it becomes time to cut
company losses and dump legacy systems in favor of a new solution.
Conversely, if you're a smaller company about to step into the CRM game,
even basic functionality can induce sticker-shock while lagging with long
ramp-up periods that will probably require dedicated resources to manage
operations and maintenance.
Salesforce.com provides an alternative approach to in-house CRM solutions
by offering a hosted CRM service. They outsource the hardware and software
and provide companies with CRM services via a browser, to target sales,
marketing and customer service offerings for a per-person monthly charge.
To provide our readers with a 'Quick Tour' of Salesforce's
Enterprise Editon product, I was issued a Salesforce.com account to a faux
company called GenWatt Corp. and allowed access to its services as an
employee. I was also granted permissions to the self-service area of
GenWatt's Web site, allowing me to query the knowledge base posing as a
customer of GenWatt. Both of these are considered accounts; as such, they
were both linked to my e-mail address so I could receive any automatic
communication triggered by the system.
Using Internet Explorer 6, I logged onto my GenWatt account through the
Salesforce.com home page. I was impressed when facing the GUI for the first
time (see Figure 1). The GUI was broken down into separate tabs which
delineated the critical areas staff members need to keep organized:
Campaigns, Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Forecasts, Cases,
Solutions and Reports. What's interesting about Salesforce.com is that in
addition to providing a 360-degree view for all marketing, sales and
customer support communication with a particular individual, an account or
company, it also provisions for different languages. This renders account
updates in English readable by Japanese counterparts, for example, without
laboring over the formality of translation.
Contacts
Salesforce.com associates key contacts with their respective account.
Entering a contact without linking it to an account is considered private by
the system and is therefore not viewable by other associates. For each
contact, I was able to store staple information about the individual such as
name, e-mail address and phone number, account, lead source, etc., in
addition to creating custom fields. The inclusion of a Lookup button next to
appropriate fields for reference of existing information was provisioned
for, which helped curtail the pain usually experienced when entering new
contact information. Additionally, Intellisync, a small download (obtainable
from your account home page) synchronizes data input from your
Salesforce.com interface with your choice of Outlook or Palm Pilot Tasks,
Contacts or Appointments on your desktop.
Marketing Automation Campaigns And Leads
The Campaign tab allows companies to store important information about
marketing campaigns such as costs, expected and actual response rates, and
other custom data to plan the campaign and analyze its performance. Each
Campaign page tracks the sales opportunities and revenue generated from the
particular marketing campaign to help companies measure ROI through metrics
such as hit rates and actual revenue. Prevalent throughout the interface,
Enterprise Edition seems to be very tightly knit, meaning that all data are
seemingly linked in one way or another. Considering leads to be 'people
who have expressed an interest in the company's products or services,'
Salesforce.com allows lead generation through one or multiple conduits such
as a corporate Web site, an industry trade show or a response to a marketing
campaign. For each lead, users can store important information such as name,
phone number, lead source, product interest and other custom data. Leads can
be converted into accounts and contacts and can be segmented by creating
lead queues to separate inquiries from prospects, for example. Skills-based
routing can then be applied to automatically route inquiries to specific
company representatives directly, or to a queue of specialists.
Sales Force Automation Opportunities And Forecasts
Opportunities are categorized as sales deals. The idea is to
differentiate between multiple opportunities within a certain account, for
example. I was able to log different sales opportunities with United Oil and
Gas, Singapore; beginning the process for selling two generators to
different departments within the company, both with separate leads and
contacts, but within the same account. I was able to log important
information such as deal amount, expected close date, likelihood of winning
the deal and other custom data to track the sales pipeline. Each Opportunity
page tracks all meetings, tasks and customer communication related to the
particular deal. The Enterprise Edition also allows users to set up Product
Revenue Tracking and Annuity Revenue Tracking. All types of opportunities
can be tallied to create forecasts. Quarterly projections can be created
based on timeline, territory or individual.
Customer Support Cases And Solutions
Salesforce.com supports service organizations through a number of tools
engineered to standardize business processes and foster efficiency. Cases
and Solutions are tools designed for customer service representatives to
accommodate product or service users after the sale. Current users of a
product or products are assigned an individual case in which all critical
information is stored about the customer: case owner, inquiry time and date,
reason/type of inquiry, etc. Using the Cases and Solutions toolbox, queues
for skills-based routing can be defined; I was also easily able to set up,
route, reroute and escalate inbound customer inquiry rules.
To answer customer inquires uniformly and efficiently, Salesforce.com has
developed Solutions: approved responses to company/product-related questions
stored in a knowledge base. Salesforce.com includes an embedded,
customizable review process provisioned to route employee answers to the
appropriate approval personnel. Setting up a knowledge base is easier than
you might think, at least in theory. Although time constraints prevented me
from testing setup, Salesforce.com says the HTML for the log-in page is
automatically generated by Salesforce.com, and all the company has to do is
insert this code into the Customer Support page on its Web site. All
self-service requests are then directed to Salesforce.com servers.
From my experience, Salesforce.com provides a compelling, customizable
and attractive CRM solution. At $65 per Professional Edition user and $125
per Enterprise User, this ASP goes beyond being merely a salesforce tool by
providing all the aforementioned functionality in addition to administration
and report capabilities. Salesforce.com also offers multiple levels of
training and support for its Offline, Enterprise, Professional and
E-Business editions.
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June 2002 Table Of Contents ]
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