Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. Verint Channel Automation

Salesforce Sales Cloud is great for tracking your dealer (reseller) information, customer information, order information, and generating reports. You would want to use Salesforce as a smaller business because it is easy to use and keeps track of everything. You can also click on the reports tab and quickly generate different reports or save them as an Excel file to share with your team. You can set those reports with desired features and change them to fit your needs. I would say SF is not the best if you are going to send lots of marketing emails, etc, because it is not as visually friendly as HubSpot, for example.

Incentivized

It is well suited for larger organizations that see a lot of content. If you're a very small business with little engagement, Conversocial may not be the most appropriate tool for you. I would ask yourself how much content you see each day/week, is that number going to increase for any reason, and based on that Conversocial may be the perfect fit.

Incentivized

• 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

• Businesses can analyze how long it takes different agents to respond to customer inquiries on social media. This helps them understand staffing, response time, and how to become more efficient with customer care.
• By utilizing the tagging and sentiment features across all conversations, businesses can better understand what their customers are talking most frequently about on social media and whether it's positive or negative. This can help identify frequent product issues that may lead to future design improvements.
• Through the dashboard, customer representatives can also easily assign conversations to the appropriate team member. This makes it more efficient for different managers to handle different conversations related to their product expertise.

Incentivized

• I'd like to see a global roll up, but individual customized versions by team
• Consolidate! Agreements are often found under attachments, contracts, confidential information, cases, and a couple of more places
• Statuses: Make the status, owner, and last touch date/time easier to find

Incentivized

• Determining the sentiment of a social message is something that every predictive modeled Social CRM tool can improve on.
• Mechanism for posting to a native site might be more robust. Although our business did not choose to post through the tool. We did not use any other mechanism to automate our posts.

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

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. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:

Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:

Live and historical data on system performance
Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance
Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats
Best security practices for your organization
Information on how we safeguard your data

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

For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon

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.

Salesforce sales can do everything Front does regarding email integrations and communicating with your peers. Still, it provides even more insight for our salespeople and leadership team. Although Front is cheaper, we decided the added productivity and visibility provided to the team would be well worth the higher price tag.

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 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

• The inbox feature allows me to see when the customer opens my email, and hence a timely follow-up could result in a higher response rate.
• The mobile app allows users to gain access to leads and customer contacts on the go, which increases sales team productivity and enhances customer conversations.
• The reports of the notes on the account level are not working, which is causing manual work in the weekly report to leadership.

Incentivized

• 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.