Salesforce Service Cloud Review

• Reporting
• Forecasting
• Adding document templates
• Email tracking
• Integration with Marketo

Salesforce provides a really good overview of the pipeline and the stages of each sale. This allows management to make accurate forecasts in terms of what will come in by the end of the month/quarter/year.

They need to improve the email integration with Outlook. At the moment the plugin is very unstable, and crashes from time to time. The only other option is to include a Salesforce email address into BCC, which isn't convenient.

Also, I’ve not checked for a while, but for a long time Salesforce didn’t have a very good mobile app, at least not for Android. If they could build a proper one with the same functions as the desktop version, that would be really cool!

I've used it for four years in total.

No, but I wasn’t the one conducting the deployment.

Other than the occasional slow response, which was probably caused by bandwidth problems on our end, the system was always robust and stable.

Not really. As our organization grew, we were able to add more users to the system without any issues.

I’ve never had to use it, so I couldn’t tell you.

It’s pretty good. I’ve not had to use tech support as such, as I’ve found all of the answers to my questions on the Salesforce community forum.

Previously we used a very old CRM system called Goldmine. We switched because Goldmine offered no reporting tools whatsoever. The managers, to get an overview of the deals that were due to close that month, had to have a daily check with every member of the sales team, and then compile a list of deals closing that month. Also, the interface of Goldmine wasn’t really that great. The entire system was becoming too primitive for our organization as it grew.

No, nothing complex about the initial setup. I registered the account, and started using it.

We had an in-house consultant who did all of the implementation, and customization of Salesforce for us.

It's hard to tell, as the biggest ROI was the time saved in terms of reporting, ease of creating views and reports, generating quotes, and monitoring the progress of every sales cycle.

We had an enterprise site license, so it covered all of the users.

No, not really. We had known about Salesforce for while, so when the question was raised that we needed a new CRM system, Salesforce was chosen by default.

It’s a great product, highly customizable and flexible. My advice is do it, but make sure there is someone either from Salesforce or one of your own IT guys, who can customize the system for you.