Salesforce Platform

"Flexible development platform on the cloud"

Commentaires: The Product is very powerful. It provides flexibility to build almost any kind of applications. Business users can build useful apps without taking help from developers. Extensive set of resources are available to build expertise on the platform. Also customers/partners are always available to answer to queries.

Avantages: Force.com platform (Lightning) is very powerful development platform on the browser. It can be used to build applications for any industry. The pricing is on per user per month basis. Many tools like Validation rules, Workflows, process builder are available for business users. These tools allow business users to build apps on the platform with fairly complex logic. For additional functionality, developers are needed. Developers can build more advanced features using Apex, Visualforce and Lightning Communities. Trailhead and developer account are free resources available to build expertise on the product. Excellent community of customers/partners is available to support queries.

Inconvénients: Like any complex software there is a steep learning curve. Hiring developers in the US on the platform can be expensive. The license pricing may also be expensive for small businesses.

"Everything in one place"

Commentaires: Before lightning, we had 2 software, one for chat and email, another one where we create the cases and logs, now everything is in one place.

Avantages: Email, chat and logs platform in one place, you can chat with your customer, sent emails and reply, attach files in the logs (cases), this software have embedded the ScreenMeet software and works great, you can have remote connection.

Inconvénients: In the start some bugs and errors, they were fixed couple months after.
Chat: no timer added yet, you don't know how long is the current chat.
If you have 2 chats, they are open in 2 tabs, if one customer close the chat, you don't know it until open the tab, should be great if there is an alarm or sound.

"The gold standard for CRM"

Avantages: It's the best CRM out there. So long as you have a salesforce guru on your team, anything can be built or accomplished.

Inconvénients: It can be glitchy and slow. I know it's processing a ton of information, but it is very frustrating writing a bunch of notes out, going to save, then it doesn't do so and having to start over.

"Powerful Once You Learn How to Use It (But Expensive)"

Avantages: Salesforce is the backbone of our company. It is tied into everything and used by every team. It is incredibly customizable and it seems they have a way to do almost anything you need. We use it for Sales, Support, Marketing, and product feature usage. We have it hooked into other apps and other saas products. This is the product that will scale with your business and can support a company at any stage of growth. There are a ton of integrations out of the box (on their salesforce exchange) and their APIs allow savvy developers to build custom integrations that aren't available.

Inconvénients: When the company initially implemented it, they tried to "wing it" and it was a complete mess. You really need someone who knows what they are doing to setup, administer, and maintain the software. It is also expensive. We got grandfathered into some great pricing, but if we weren't, we're not sure we would be able to continue to use SFDC as we grow. SFDC also loves to gobble up other apps and brand them with the SFDC name. So they have become a jack of all trades - however, some of the things you can't do are surprising (just go check out their community page for all of the list of enhancements that haven't been implemented). For example, we use cases for our help desk, but there is a lot of functionality missing compared to a best in breed help desk software like ZenDesk. Support is terrible here by the way. They really push you toward self-service or community based service. You're lucky if you ever get a response.

"Great platform for managing your business and a fantastic UI upgrade from Classic"

Commentaires: Lightning is definitely the future of Salesforce and the vast majority of their new features and resources seem to be going towards Lightning. If you have not yet made the switch from Classic to Lightning, I would recommend doing it soon. And if you are getting into Salesforce for the first time, start with Lightning so you don't have to switch later.

Avantages: A lot more user friendly and a much better UI than Salesforce Classic. It came out with a lot less features than classic, but in the past few months and years they have dedicated a lot of resources to improving Lightning to not only compare to Classic, but I think it now has even more features.

Inconvénients: There is a learning curve to getting Lightning up and running. I would definitely recommend spending some time in the SF trailheads to get the ins and outs of Lightning before you switch from classic or sign up to start.