IT Central Station’s crowdsourced user review platform helps technology decision makers around the world to better connect with peers and other independent experts who provide advice without vendor bias.
You can read user reviews for the top four CRM customer engagement centers of Q1 2017 here, to help you decide which solution is best for you.
In the review excerpts below, our users have ranked their CRM customer engagement centers according to valuable features, and discuss where they see potential for improvement.
#1 Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is ranked as the number one CRM customer engagement center of Q1 2017 by our user community -- but what do they really think about the solution?
Customization Features
“The ability to easily change layouts, create customized fields and customized reports makes my job so much easier”, says Mary Arnold, Sales Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees.
Adding company hierarchy makes it easy for our sales people to identify subsidiaries of existing customers. The Salesforce forums are very responsive when you ask for help.”
Development and Implementation in the Open Source Platform
“Salesforce is itself expanding at a fast pace for all the partner, customer, and developer communities”, finds Vishal Singh, Technical Associate at a Software R&D company with 501-1,000 employees.
But as a Salesforce developer, it would be great if Salesforce could step towards the Open Source platform for development and implementation.”
#2 Salesforce Service Cloud
IT Central Station users rank Salesforce Service Cloud as the number two CRM customer engagement center of Q1 2017.
Flexibility Features
“The flexibility of the platform is what really separates it from the crowd”, finds a Salesforce.com Developer/Administrator at a recruiting/HR firm 1,001-5,000 employees.
“With Salesforce”, he elaborates, the user can:
Use clicks vs. code for automation purposes. Examples of this are workflow rules and visual flows.
Utilize Salesforce's proprietary Java based language to implement more complicated business logic. Additionally, I am able to extend this functionality with their JSP-based visualforce language.
Salesforce has many different ways of accessing their platform with APIs. There is the REST, SOAP, Metadata, connect.
Salesforce also offers a lot of pre-built toolkits (Like Javascript and PHP) which make external connections a snap.
UI/UX Features
Nick Martin, Director of Global Client Services & Platform Education at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees, describes:
“UI/UX has always proven difficult to keep up with. Salesforce, in general, requires a continued training effort to keep people up to speed and to encourage adoption in the tools.
While there have been big improvements to date, simple things like ability to bookmark, right-click or otherwise multi-task panes and articles in Salesforce and the community have been missing.”
#3 Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is ranked by our users as the number three solution of Q1 2017.
Shaiq Ishak, a Business Analyst at StackEdge Consulting, points to two valuable features”
Search Feature
“With the Search feature, we are now able to search in Dynamics CRM 2015 in different records or customized records.”
Mobile Sales Feature
“With the Mobile Sales feature, we can now create drafts in offline mode and sync it later when we are online.”
Enhancing Mobile Usage
“Enhancing mobile usage of the CRM to other vertical would be good” adds Ishak.
“I believe the MS Dynamics CRM app is a great experience for the sales people. With the mobile app, we can nurture with leads, opportunities and accounts.
Although I was looking to get reports, view of all the dashboards and other modules (Settings and Service).”
#4 Freshdesk
IT Central Station users rank Freshdesk as the number four solution of the end of Q1 2017.
“A Great and Flexible Tool”
Bart Glowacki, Operations Manager at a retailer with 51-200 employees, shares:
“Freshdesk works out great for us because it can be accessed from anywhere where there's an internet connection. Because we use it as our own, and our partner's (that we fulfill orders for) customer service help desk, it has been a great and flexible tool.”
Ticketing Features
Glowacki also writes that “Freshdesk has got an option where Facebook and Twitter posts can be transferred into the ticketing system.
At the moment, we do not find it useful because it simply cannot pick the relevant customer service enquiries, it creates a ticket with every post. It could limit it to posts with keywords/sentences.”
Read more CRM Customer Engagement Center reviews by the IT Central Station community.
