Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. Verint Channel Automation

It would be very well suited if you have someone with experience with Salesforce as your administrator and someone who can help you set everything up. However, sometimes the integrations and setup can be overly cumbersome. Otherwise, it is functional once you have everything set up and can help with everything outbound (sales and marketing are very well-built).

Incentivized

From experience, you may ask the Conversocial team to make recommendations on licenses for larger vs. smaller social customer service teams. The need for support and the amount of usage you may get from the tool's robust offering may differ as a result of those precedents. The tool is adaptable in both scenarios it would seem.

• Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
• Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
• API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
• Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.

Incentivized

• Previous conversations: This is one of the main reasons why I personally love Conversocial over Hootsuite and other social media engagement tools. Conversocial pulls in all previous interactions we've had with community members and it helps us identify if we've already addressed their problem, if they are a detractor/advocate, and so much more. With other engagement tools, it's frustrating as a community member may repost the same thing over and over again, but at different time periods. If you're unable to see what someone has said in the past, we may waste our time replying to the same thing multiple times, or we also risk responding with the same general advice, when we could try a different approach.
• Tags and filters: Conversocials use of tags and filters are extremely simple to use. They have shortcuts which help you easily assign a tag to an item and then you can easily pull up each of those tags within Conversocial itself or your can open up an external report. If my team is in a hurry and wants to quickly see a certain tag, we can use the filter option and within seconds we have all the information we need.
• Simple shortcuts: Conversocial has several shortcuts that save my team a lot of time. One single button on my keyboard can apply sentiment and archive something so it's out of my way. I can also use shortcuts to apply a tag, assign an item, and do other tasks. It may seem like a small benefit but each second saved really adds up throughout each day and week.
• Communication: As we know, technology has issues and every tech issue Conversocial has experiences has been handled extremely well. I've never encountered any issues contacting Conversocial, we're always notified when they are working on a solution and once the problem has been fixed. We also receive random pop-ups within Conversocial to notify us of known issues before our team experiences them, and when there is a new feature that we should be aware of. Their communication is always on point and it's great to know that we can always rely on them.

Incentivized

• I have hard-coded the auto-update of the phone number format and state format from some codes shared by the community, but I do not know where to do it. I cannot reset it either.
• It is unclear what functionalities each version has. We use the enterprise version, and it seems we can only have one design of the pipeline. But different business segments would have very different sales cycles, and hence, pipeline tracking would be different. It would be nice to have this available in our version.
• It seems I cannot create a report to pull notes logged at the account levels.

Incentivized

• I would like to see an improvement in the reporting dashboard which is something I mentioned to Josh (the CEO) on a call back in April. He said that it is something they are working on but to remember that this is truly a customer service social media platform so some of the features that I would like to see may not fit well with the users of the product.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

The only two reasons we would not continue using Conversocial are it's lack of comprehensive analytics and its lack of Radian6's categorization tools. Tags make up for the categorization pretty well, however, and we're considering switching everything over to this now that we've tested tags for a couple months within Conversocial. (I previously wrote that Conversocial lacks support for some social channels like Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, but they have now added Instagram and YouTube.)

Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.

Incentivized

Because of the number of features it offers and the manner in which they're presented. I've explored a number of other tools that just don't do it as well. When sorting through and responding to hundreds of social media messages each day, the number of clicks it takes to do something really matters. Conversocial does a great job of minimizing clicks and presenting the data we need without having to click to find it

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

Incentivized

Downtime is very rare, and the occasional occurrences are typically a problem with Twitter or FB API.

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

Extremely fast, practically in real time.

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

Our account rep at Conversocial has set up a call with me every two weeks to check in, talk about new features, or answer questions. I know I can email or call her for help anytime. Their support team also responds quickly.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

Comprehensive training in all aspects of the software and general usages (including social media) for both agents and managers. Simulation workshops really made the live deployment process very smooth.

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Outstanding & comprehensive training both on-line and instructor-led. Another crucial differentiator from competitors in our eyes.

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

Without any tech requirement on our end, this was an extraordinarily easy implementation to run, compared to other platforms like live chat or email.

At our company, we use Salesforce and HubSpot. I personally like both for different reasons. Salesforce makes it easy to generate reports, keep track of dealer and customer information, tie customers to dealers, and is easy to use. However, I like HubSpot for the marketing features. I think HubSpot has easier-to-use workflows and email creations.

Incentivized

Early on we did comparisons with Hootsuite and later with Adobe. While they have similarities, the difference at the time and likely currently, was the personal interest and general accessibility of Conversocial's platform and people. The combination of an effective CRM solution and a team that was readily available to help proved to be the winning formula for our business.

Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly scalable and designed to accommodate the needs of businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It offers flexible subscription models and can easily scale up or down based on the organization's requirements. Whether a company is expanding its sales team, increasing its customer base, or adding new features and functionalities, Sales Cloud can adapt to support growth without sacrificing performance or reliability. Additionally, Salesforce's cloud-based architecture ensures that users have access to resources and capabilities as needed, making it a highly scalable solution for organizations looking to automate customer relationship management at scale.

Incentivized

Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.

• All tools we've implemented with Salesforce had a pretty quick positive ROI with the exception of CPQ & Billing. That was a very large project that I would only suggest for businesses with many SKUs that tend to be packaged together.

• One of the biggest benefits we are seeing is that we have reduced the number of post-holiday complaints coming into head office. Since we are responding to issues and concerns as they arise, we can impact overall customer satisfaction.
• The efficiencies gained from using a centralized platform for managing the response process has enabled us to reduce our team by 50%.
• We can track that we are responding to a fan's first message within 30 minutes.
• We can track the number of messages each user engages with.
• We can see the most effective times of day to post and reply.