There had been a significant surge in Cloud Computing based technologies in recent years. Among many such technologies available lately, Salesforce has created an immense impact in the information technology world. Salesforce (SF) is one of the largest technology companies in the world now. There is a chance that you may not have heard of it as a beginner. But, think of the major technology giants you heard of, i.e., Apple, Facebook, Uber, right? Salesforce is the one powering them.
CRM or customer relationship management solutions were simply hosted on own-premise servers before Salesforce. Companies had a huge spent and need for high-end technical expertise to operate CRM solutions. Salesforce came up with a one-stop-shop solution to all these problems by offering an affordable CRM as a service, delivered online. Being a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider, Salesforce is now the fifth-biggest software services company in the globe.
A bit of corporate history
Salesforce was started in 1999 as a cloud computing services company. Marc Benioff, who was the founder of Salesforce, initiated with a vision to build a CRM software which can be easily used as like how Amazon platform works. Now, 21 years later, Salesforce is leading the CRM software market by dominating about 20% of it. Since 1999, Salesforce came up with a wide range of products for enterprises to connect with their customers more and more effectively.
Why choose Salesforce?
The major thing which makes Salesforce the favorite choice of many is the fact that it provides you with the fastest path to convert your ideas into an app. Salesforce tools help you to build applications without maintaining any own infrastructure or tools. For individual developers and enterprise development teams of varying sizes, this will save years of their time and millions of dollars in terms of infrastructure cost. Salesforce is:
- Faster: When traditional CRM applications may take many months or years to deploy, Salesforce can do it in weeks.
- Easier: With less- or no-code development platforms like Salesforce DX or SF DevOps, you can directly put them into use than spending more time to figure it out.
- Cloud Computing: As it is so simple to use and customize to meet the needs of various businesses, customers also find Salesforce-based applications more effective and friendly.
Above all, Salesforce is a cloud-based application, so your team members can access it from anywhere at any time over the internet like a web service. Salesforce is also largely scalable based on your growing needs and can easily integrate with other third-party applications.
Salesforce Products
Salesforce covers all the bases of information technology application development and services with their unique range of products. This is called a 360° customer view, which means an enterprise can manage every aspect of their customer relationship through Salesforce system where various SF products seamlessly integrate. Let us now look into the major Salesforce products.
Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud is a customer relationship management platform which supports the sales team. Initially, it was built for B2B businesses to help them process prospective leads and guide a customer through the sales funnel. However, now many B2C sales teams also use this for its advanced opportunity management, lead management, forecasting, and quoting features.
Service Cloud
Service Cloud is aiming to assist the customer support team. It helps the customers to communicate with the support teams through the mail, chat, or phone. In B2C providers, Salesforce Service Cloud helps to handle a big number of supporting queries by helping customer support agents to process resolutions to customers issues instantly. Major features of service cloud are queue management, ticket assignment, live chat, product/service knowledge base.
Marketing Cloud
It is a digital marketing cloud platform for marketers to reach to potential customers. A range of modern marketing avenues is available on it as call, SMS, email, social, and digital advertising platforms. Marketing Cloud can integrate with Service and Sales Cloud to seamlessly process the operations.
Community Cloud
For businesses which need a platform to enable instant communication with internal employees, stakeholders, and customers, SF Community Cloud helps to exchange information and data in real-time.
Commerce Cloud
Commerce cloud offers enterprises the ability to provide seamless customer experience both online and in-store. It provides real-time customer data integration to offer a more personalized user experience.
Analytics Cloud
Offer innovative business intelligence for enterprises to work with big data by creating interpret able charts and graphs and other graphical representations of data for decision making. Analytics cloud is also optimized for mobile for anytime access, and it can also integrate with other clouds.
App Cloud
Helps enterprise application developers to build custom apps to run on the Salesforce ecosystem. App cloud comes with a set of development tools to develop enterprise-level mobile applications. Some top App Cloud tools are Force.com to develop websites and application, AppExchange as an online application marketplace of third-party apps, Heroku Enterprise for developers to make applications in their preferred languages, Salesforce Thunder as an engine for big data processing, Salesforce Sandbox for developers to develop and test their ideas in an isolated and safe environment.
IoT Cloud
For organizations dealing with Internet of Things (IoT) and data related to it, Salesforce IoT cloud is a platform which can handle massive data volumes from different input devices, sensors, social media, websites, applications, and from customers. IoT cloud can receive this data and process it instantly to give real-time responses.
Health Cloud
For healthcare IT services, health cloud CRM will help better incorporates the provider-patient relationship as well as health records management.
AppExchange
Another big thing about Salesforce, which beginners should know and access are AppExchange. Similar to Apple App Store or Google Play Store, you can find myriad of third-party applications in AppExchange, which help to extend Salesforce functionality. Developers can use these third-party apps to create any imaginable Apps for CRM by ensuring seamless integration with other services.
Hope the above information helped to give a primary insight for beginners as to what Salesforce is and its basic components. Once you jump into it, you can find plenty of related articles and Salesforce trail heads to dig deeper into numerous Salesforce features and functions.