Salesforce Platform Reviews

The Salesforce Platform is a massive-sized solution. It's a vast digital platform that you can place all your business processes on and you can make the best use of your data and your customer data all in one place. The large data that you can take out of it to base your decisions on, to know your customers better, to be more efficient, and grab all opportunities that are in place and have clear visibility. 

The Salesforce Platform can help aid you in making the right decisions at the right time. It's easy to use because everything is in one place. It saves the time of the people working, using it in different processes.

The Salesforce Platform's most valuable features are everything in one place, perfect reporting, highly customizable, and easy to receive information you need.

Salesforce is very fast in acquiring new companies that are good in certain business processes or modules which they update their solutions.

The general reports could be made easier in the Salesforce Platform. Generating needs extensive training to know the exact structure of the design. Whenever you search for something you need to know what are the exact fields that you need to view. It's not an easy process to learn.

We're in the implementation phase with the Salesforce Platform. We've launched one of the modules and we're working on the second one we will be working on the sales module later this year.

The stability of the Salesforce Platform it's very good for what we have used it for. However, I didn't use it extensively yet. I need more time to use it or to see how people are using it to be able to judge and say more details.

Salesforce Platform is scalable.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution and we have plans to increase usage.

I have a vendor on board, and whatever issues we might have they are my reference if I need something. I have not contacted Salesforce directly. 

I'm pushing people in my team to get certified to be administrators. They go on the Salesforce training on their website and they are doing their own training online. This is the only direct contact between my team and Salesforce directly.

Salesforce Platform has been easy to set up.

We are having a vendor do the implementation of the Salesforce Platform. It is not taking too much time as other CRMs do. 

If you have the people with the implementation knowledge they can do it internally, but I don't think this is the right approach. It's very costly to find somebody who's capable and I don't think you would need them as a full-time employee. Once you have your processes set up and ready, you might need only one administrator, you don't need developers or architects. You need only an administrator to sustain and maintain what is already there.

I would recommend Salesforce Platform to others.

I rate Salesforce Platform an eight out of ten.

We originally started using Salesforce Platform for our sales guys who go into the market every day. They wanted a common platform that is scalable and easy to work with, especially for the clients. We took to Salesforce because it filled this need, and because it came with multiple apps from different vendors and partners that could be integrated with it.

The sales team do route planning, meeting planning, and then they take a particular vehicle to particular retailers. Then they talk to them and find out their reason for taking or not taking a particular order, so that my marketing team and other teams can take action.

In 2015, we decided we should be on cloud. That is, we should not build our own infrastructure, hardware, network, database, etc., because then you cannot focus on the business outcomes; you're focusing more on the infrastructure. With Salesforce Platform, we are able to focus on business outcomes and we need not worry about infrastructure at all.

We found that the dashboard creation is very simple, so we got all our data in one place and we told users: now it's your job to create whatever analytics you want on the backend. So instead of generically recreating and redefining everything, what we did is we allowed our users access to all the fields that let them select and define their own graphs and analytics and so on. When used like this, it is very simple for users and doesn't require any technical IT skills from their point of view.

We like that the technology is very agile and flexible in the sense that there's a large partner ecosystem within Salesforce Platform. This enables us to choose from many different partners with different advantages, and all of it can be done in a plug-and-play kind of way.

One other aspect that is very important to us is that Salesforce Platform is a global platform and widely available across all of India.

Although the platform is already set up for you, there's a lot of customization that needs to be done, especially for any new component we start using. For whatever solution we wanted, we had to think for ourselves and design it all on our own. And, unfortunately, there were some components that were not really mature in the beginning, like Tableau for example. I would like to see Salesforce better, or more quickly, integrate the applications that they acquire, like Tableau and Slack.

Technologies are changing rapidly nowadays, and customers are requesting all sorts of new integrations. For example, some are asking for WhatsApp integrations, AI and ML integrations, etc. When you're using a single platform such as Salesforce or SAP, your data quality is the one thing that is taken care of, and we would like to continue managing our data across many different integration channels.

We've been using Salesforce Platform for almost four years. 

It's a very stable solution. We haven't had many issues with stability. 

With our environment of around 1500 users, there have hardly been any performance or scalability issues.

I don't think I have ever called technical support for an explanation or anything. At least not for the solution that we use for our sales staff who visit the markets. 

The setup was really straightforward. The one hitch was that when first setting up our customers, to capture their details and enter them into the system, we found that not all of them had reliable internet access. However, I understand that this is not a product challenge, but rather a practical or technical challenge.

The licensing is per user per month, which we took out a contract on a long time back. It's really an okay price for what solutions are available and for how many features and what kind of functionality you get.

The only thing is that, regarding the pricing contract, if you agree on 2000 users, you have to pay for 2000, even if you only have 1500. An agreement for 2000 users was in our contract, so we had to pay a little bit extra because we only have about 1500 users currently.

I can recommend Salesforce Platform to others with no hesitation. For a PaaS, all the infrastructure was in place. But when you begin with a new platform, you have to start from scratch at level zero and then keep on maturing. Thus, my advice to my team and everyone else is: don't complicate from day one. You start, make it simple, keep on using it, make sure it's working correctly and so on, and from there on out things are very easy for users.

I would rate Salesforce Platform a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for customer invoicing. We also use it for telling the customers about the regional upgrades and patches that we're rolling out.

I'm not sure what the most valuable aspect of the solution is, but I can say that their finance and auditing systems are quite impressive. You can audit in different invoices right to procurement. It's all quite seamless. 

The user interface is very good.

I haven't used that much of the solution, so I can't speak to what would need improvement. For me, for now, I'd say it works pretty seamlessly.

There have been some minor issues here and there, but they've gotten them under control.

The solution offers upgrades at a slower pace. The solution needs to keep up with competitors.

I've been using the solution for nearly nine months.

The solution is quite stable. I haven't faced any issues in relation to the stability of the product.

The scalability is very nice once the solution has been implemented.

Currently, we use our own services for technical support. If a team member from our support needs to contact them, they do.

Our central ID services team handled the implementation of the solution. They'd be better able to discuss what the implementation was like. However, it's my understanding that it was pretty straightforward. I'm not sure how many people were involved in the deployment process.

In terms of maintenance, there's an ICT team that handles not just this tool but several tools for us. I'm not sure how many engineers on that team are dedicated to Salesforce.

The pricing of the solution is fine. The enterprise purchase was for our entire organization.

We're partners with Salesforce.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're currently using.

We're a sizeable company and have 3,000-4,000 people using the solution currently.

We're moving towards a different cloud due to a corporate mandate we'd like to have the opportunity to implement it there.

There's a lot of training that needs to be done to get used to the solution and to get to understand all of the features on offer. To tackle this, we have asked the task force training candidate members to get everyone trained. Getting a good handle on the solution is very important.

Before Salesforce, we used to use four to five disparate systems to manage all the customers. With Salesforce, we have been given one central source of tools. There are several departments that used to target customers separately and each of them was using their own systems for tracking. Now, with this one tool, there's only one type of invoice. It's streamlined everything in terms of billing and customer outreach.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use the Salesforce Platform for quoting, tracking, and updating customer information. We've also had a solution that we've created or built on top of Salesforce. We've recently deployed some native solutions, which I haven't used yet. Our entire project management team has been a recent adoption. There's is another third-party solution called Hot Docs, for reports.  I think you're going to be moving to another application that's even more functional.

The solution has plenty of features that are useful.

We have a lot of strategic accounts and large accounts that are tied with all the growth and acquisitions across North America, being able to tag parent-child accounts in an easier fashion would be better. This is the biggest pain point is associating parent to child and being able to align and manage it better. Overall a better parent-child relationship between accounts would be a benefit.

I have been using Salesforce Platform for approximately seven years.

The solution is stable and reliable.

We have multiple things that we built on top of the Salesforce Platform which our team utilizes. One's called Customer Planning Opportunities, which is about 16 globally. When through an opportunity, a salesperson on the service side can create requests for us for some of my teams, and then it sends out a mass email. 

There are multiple public and private pages that they've developed which we can log activities, such as sales, pre-sales, and pre-sale planning. We can upload documents that everybody can go and gather. If we upload a document in our Customer Planning Opportunity, which is built on top of Salesforce, it doesn't have to send attachments within the CRM. 

There are some places where there are some disconnects

The technical support is responsive. I don't personally call them, but they're very good about if you want to learn or receive additional training within the application. It's pretty good.

We have a technical team that does the implementation, and we hired third-party resources too for the deployment. I wasn't part of the deployment team.

Salesforce does a user capacity analysis on a regular basis. For example, if you're not using certain areas, you may lose access. If you don't go in and quote and edit quotes, all of a sudden you may lose your rights to quote.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Platform an eight out of ten.

Fast speed to delivery of new solutions; fits Agile development model; easy integration and mashup with other SaaS/PaaS offerings; combination of configuration and coding; easy to learn and get up-to-speed quickly for developers; no waiting for hardware & other environments to be ready; scales up immediately

We went from 1 or 2 CRM enhancement releases per year to a minimum of 8 per year by moving from on premise CRM to cloud CRM. Automation of process steps have saved us millions of dollars by removing manual steps/activities. We have reduced our average speed to respond to customers by >4000% through automated routing/workflow. Most importantly, our users actually love the system (how many times have you heard that?).

We have also built custom applications on the platform for such things as faculty attendance tracking, HR compensation review and exception processing, and text based poling for use in meetings or classroom settings. These were all relatively small applications that never seemed to be "big enough" or "prioritized enough" to get IT resource dedication. However, with the ease of the salesforce platform, IT was able to quickly and cheaply build these applications. Without such a flexible and easy to configure/code platform, I'm not sure these would have gotten attention.

Hard to negotiate ability to scale down; integrations with back-office systems is still complex unless you have robust SOA platform already in place at your organization; doesn't fit for heavy graphics or multimedia apps; could benefit from other than per-user pricing; reporting tools are not great and you usually have to use a 3rd party reporting tool for any complex report or reports which also need to source data from outside your CRM (which many of ours do), and to get any historical data analysis (e.g. need data warehouse).

Managing test and dev environments is certainly easier than on-premise, but there still are challenges synching changes between environments and synching data. Additionally you will have to negotiate for multiple "full data" environments if you have multiple parallel path releases going since salesforce usually only gives you one of these environments.

Since 2009

We did with reporting. We did not sufficiently test our reporting tools, built with a combination of salesforce and cognos reporting, and there were too many discrepancies in the numbers being reported such that we had to immediately put a tiger team together to address. This had nothing to do with the platform, and more to do with our process for adequately testing large scale reporting before rolling out to 4,000 people.

Having said that, the reporting tools are still just ok. We usually end up extracting data out of salesforce to report on elsewhere, primarily because it's easier to extract salesforce data and merge with data from other systems as opposed to putting data from other systems into salesforce just for reporting. The good news is each year the reporting/analytic platform gets bettter.

Nope, it's been more stable than any on premise software we've ever had.

We did have issues when we originally launched, due to us exceeding certain API thresholds that exist by default by salesforce.com. The good news is they were able to increase them for us relatively quickly.

Solid. No issues. They really try and work with you to ensure you know how/where/why you are using or not using all aspects of the platform. No, of course, they do this level of reporting to you so that you use more, but it's still good data to inform where you have opportunity to better leverage what you are already paying for.

Very good. As usual, if you run into anything serious, escalate quickly. They have channels for escalating, so use them. Don't let your technical teams try to solve themselves for too long.

We previously used Oracle CRM on premise. We switched because we spent too much time applying patches and upgrades and regression testing such that we were unable to respond to changing business conditions and put in enhancements. Now we never deal with patches and upgrades and we only focus on enhancements.

Much of it was straightforward, with the only complex areas being areas that we wanted to customize for items like inquiry routing (our rules were very complex) and analyzing how we wanted to configure the data best to allow us to also report they way we wanted to for operations, executive and historical comparison reporting. Thinking those concepts through was difficult and I'd suggest spending more time on those activities than anything else during design, and test your design concepts early so you can adjust if it turns out your assumptions don't work out the way you thought they would when you see real data being put through the system.

We used Appirio as our implementation vendor. They did a solid job. As usual, with consulting, it's the strength of the team they field for you, so that is what you should evaluate the most.

We have a case study on our implementation on salesforce.com website that you can read, under DeVry.

Negotiate HARD on ability to reduce licenses if business conditions dictate you have to shrink or divest yourself of divisions/departments. They won't want to do this, but that should not stop you for negotiating what's right for your business.

If you desire, you can get them to agree to create custom types of licenses that are specific to the way you plan to use the platform or the tools (sfa, crm, marketing), so this might be worth exploring if you have unique business requirements that don't fit the standard pricing model.

Yes, we also looked at RightNow Technologies, which was later bought by Oracle. We actually used RightNow and Oracle CRM, so we had experience with both.

The hardest part of using the system is finding the technical resources to do the customization and configuration. I'd recommend getting going with a good contracting firm, but make sure you interview and lock in the resources. After that, I'd recommend you find internal business people who know your processes and happen to have a technical aptitude and get them trained up to be admins and developers. We did that and it worked out great...but be prepared to give them significant raises, promotions, and/or long term incentives to keep them with your company.

There are various modules available, and not all of them are fully utilized or engaged extensively. Some modules serve internal purposes, such as tracking employee efforts and utilization. This relates to our customer support services. When you input something, you need to adhere to your specified timelines.

I find the user interface to be excellently crafted. It's user-friendly, and intuitive, with a minimalistic design, making it straightforward to navigate. The presentation is clear and easy to comprehend. Overall, it's quite satisfactory.    

Companies prioritize quality execution and user convenience over pricing concerns. Their primary focus is on the platform's effectiveness and the positive impact it can make, as well as the time-saving benefits it offers. It's essentially a blend of both factors, striking a balance between quality and cost.

This platform is indeed on the expensive side. One notable aspect is that it offers a comprehensive range of fields and even allows for customization, enabling users to tailor it to their specific tasks and requirements. This flexibility extends to creating customized labels and columns in the backend, making it a highly adaptable and tailored tool. Overall, I haven't encountered any significant challenges.

Pricing could potentially be a deciding factor, but I believe it's unlikely to be a major concern for the company behind this widely used CRM platform. Despite the higher pricing, it remains the most popular CRM tool globally due to its extensive features and capabilities.

I have been using Salesforce Platform for the past year.

It is a stable solution. 

It offers high scalability and is easier to scale and navigate.

I am not a part of the internal team. They are mainly responsible for the deployment.

From a pricing perspective, I believe it's safe to say that this platform ranks as the top choice globally. It offers an incredibly user-friendly experience and provides efficient storage solutions, albeit at a relatively higher cost. Nevertheless, it's also the most widely adopted platform worldwide, owing to its comprehensive set of features and capabilities that cater to organizations of all sizes, particularly larger IT firms. Whether it's big IT companies or any other industry, this platform stands out as a CRM tool for internal purposes, mainly due to its cost-effectiveness.

We use Salesforce Platform for marketing, opportunity tracking, and account management within the sales element.

Coming into the early 21st century, actually automating a number of processes and work activities were done with legacy tools like Excel, Word, and so on. It's really just bringing everything into a modern integrated platform.

I like the reports and the dashboards. Since I'm a managing partner, I use the reports and dashboards to understand my team's contact management, opportunity management, and account management activities. We use Pardot for marketing campaigns.

Reporting could be better. Reporting is Excel-based, and it has sucked since the inception of the company. That's why I was excited about the fact of them bringing MuleSoft into the fold and Tableau.

I have been using Salesforce Platform since the late 90s.

The Salesforce Platform is very stable.

The Salesforce Platform is scalable. In consulting work, about four years ago, I did some work for GE. GE then consolidated 80 different Salesforce instances into either two or three instances. That's a company of 300,000 people globally at that point. Today, my business has a hundred partners, of which probably 60 or 70 partners use Salesforce.

My admin has used Salesforce technical support, and to my knowledge, everything has been very positive and very successful.

Over the years, we've created our own custom objects in fields. We try to keep the applications as standard or vanilla as possible, but we've tailored them to our business model and processes. The product is used moderately, and we have one Salesforce administrator to manage it.

I've been against Salesforce for many years, and even today, with Lightning, they haven't migrated everything that the platform did within Classic to Lightning. It's just continuing to improve the user interface and the integration capabilities with other non-Salesforce applications.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Salesforce Platform an eight.

We primarily use Salesforce to manage pipeline opportunities. We are customers of Salesforce and I'm a senior enterprise multicloud strategist.

Salesforce enables us to track the percentage of opportunities that progress, the percentage that don't, and the reasons why.

This solution gives us a great platform to import and save customer data from various sources, and then manage them using outreach and various plugins to keep activity up. The dashboards are great, I can see lost or suspended accounts, year to day, total opportunities either as owner or team member, team pipelines, etc. It's very modular, so I don't have to continue to run reports and then track them myself. They have third-party plugins which are basically the same as features that enable you to get whatever functionality you need. It's fast and it works well, it's easy to aggregate information from multiple sources and all in all, I feel like it makes us a lot more productive as opposed to having to go to multiple websites. Here you can pull up an account, see all the tabs for that account without the need to have seven different tabs open on your browser.

The reporting functionality is very granular and you can do a lot with it, but unfortunately, it's not very intuitive. It's hard to get the report to show exactly what you want. It works if you turn it into a tile in the dashboard but working through it and creating the report is a little cumbersome, it's terrible. It's not super user-friendly, it takes time and some fiddling around. Simplified reporting would be great, but perhaps I don't have enough experience. I could spend some time figuring it out but for now, I create a report that I never have to create again. It's in a dashboard, so I don't get the opportunity to create much. With some training, I'd likely be better at creating reports. 

I've been using this solution for six months. 

The solution is stable. 

I've been able to scale very easily. We've doubled the size of our team in the last year and it's really easy to add new users and with a couple of minutes of training they've pretty much got it down. For that kind of internal growth and for everyone to be using it relatively well in such a short period of time, is great.

We have an internal technical resource that's able to assist on the Salesforce side. One of the things we've added recently is a button where you can essentially open a ticket for questions related to the use of Salesforce. In the past, I would reach out to our internal support team to help me build a report. Now, we simply have a request button that gets us to Salesforce.com support. I open the ticket and get a very quick response which is really great. 

From my perspective, they need to incorporate plugins. Salesforce is a great platform. It's like being able to use the apps on an iPhone. It looks good, you can make calls and it's easy to use but it's the ability to add apps which makes it great. In Salesforce terms, the value lies in the modular solutions through the plugins.

In terms of rating, the solution loses points because of the non-intuitive reporting. On the other hand, it provides many benefits. I would therefore rate the solution eight out of 10.