What needs improvement with Salesforce Platform?

Salesforce could improve by offering AI features or functionalities to help business decision-makers analyze business history, suggest forward strategies, and participate in events. The previous version had a complicated interface where multiple pages and data entries were required, which was not pleasant for sales teams or business users. Also, deploying Salesforce took a long time, about four to five months, which is not ideal for any business.

Salesforce could improve by adding more capabilities to the dashboard, such as additional fields for more filters and more control over what I would like to see. More options for the dashboard would be beneficial.

As for improvements, connections could be enhanced. There is a considerable effort required to load the data, involving processes like XML connections. This area could see better integration to avoid headaches.

I would like Salesforce to recommend related opportunities within the organization that have been taken to closure, so we can fast track new opportunities based on past experiences. It could also serve as a comprehensive knowledge management repository for storing technical and commercial proposals.

The product's pricing model could be improved, as some features are only available in paid modules, which can be costly.

The platform allows you to do so many things. It could be easy for people to customize it outside of business models. So, some patterns could be more generally available so that it guides the team to not customize the system on the outside itself. Salesforce could add cognitive functionality. It's still a way to go. There are some particular cognitive functionalities that I've been set up in the market that Salesforce can do in implementing. It could introduce more templates and industry-specific package solutions, particularly emphasizing energy implementation within those industries. This level of granularity within sub-industries would enhance Salesforce's ability to offer plug-and-play solutions rather than solely focusing on customization options.

Salesforce Platform operates as a cloud system, and within our organization, numerous internal systems handle data processing. While real-time data retrieval is feasible through services, achieving real-time communication poses some challenges.

I think the interface should be enhanced and more user-friendly. Right now, it requires a lot of steps to operate it.

Companies prioritize quality execution and user convenience over pricing concerns. Their primary focus is on the platform's effectiveness and the positive impact it can make, as well as the time-saving benefits it offers. It's essentially a blend of both factors, striking a balance between quality and cost. This platform is indeed on the expensive side. One notable aspect is that it offers a comprehensive range of fields and even allows for customization, enabling users to tailor it to their specific tasks and requirements. This flexibility extends to creating customized labels and columns in the backend, making it a highly adaptable and tailored tool. Overall, I haven't encountered any significant challenges. Pricing could potentially be a deciding factor, but I believe it's unlikely to be a major concern for the company behind this widely used CRM platform. Despite the higher pricing, it remains the most popular CRM tool globally due to its extensive features and capabilities.

Salesforce Platform is an evolving product. Salesforce Platform is a bit expensive compared to other CRM products, which is a drawback. Other than that, this product is evolving and adding new features. So they are trying to serve the needs of each and every person. The only thing I consider is that they are a bit expensive compared to other CRMs, so the price needs to be improved.

There are a few functions that I would like to see improved. The solution's rostering and scheduling, and payroll functionality need to improve. We're working with all our vendors on issues that need to be updated and addressed to meet the changing business needs.

They have some limitations as a cloud solution. They need to open it up a bit and remove some restrictions. It's a bit expensive. We are looking forward to seeing more AI in the future.

I think that Salesforce can improve lead management when it comes to B2C. I would like to have more features specifically related to the B2C segment. The current process where you create a lead that's in the B2C segment and it creates an account makes no sense. In the next release, I'd like to see the opportunity to send text messages and actually call customers from Salesforce.

Some business functionalities could be improved.

The back end really isn't user-friendly at all. In terms of data import, migrating data from, for example, a core banking system into Salesforce, we find it very difficult to do the mapping. They need a proprietary tool that would allow for ease of integration into the environment. That's not just for migration. It's mostly for one-time loads when we need to get the deltas in. We need some sort of tool to make this easier. The initial setup is complex. technical support is not very responsive.

The Salesforce team is building some intelligence into the Salesforce Platform, but it needs more automation. In particular, I want more analytics in the platform and the addition of AI-based models, for example, predictive feedback. The Salesforce Platform needs to be more intelligent and intuitive to make it a great solution. What I want to add to the Salesforce Platform is the ability to organize and present information on the dashboards more intelligently, as that would be of great help.

I would like to see the organizational details improved to make it less difficult to bring new clients on board.

What could be improved in the Salesforce Platform is the price. The platform is too expensive. The implementation time for the platform is also longer than expected, so that's another area for improvement.

Salesforce Platform could improve the UI and the responsiveness of their servers. The UI needs to be made user-friendly for all users.

Salesforce needs to be re-platformed, or re-architected, making it lighter. It also needs an easier code to work with. Initial setup should be easier and faster. Personally, I do not see that much value in Salesforce.

The interface could be more user-friendly and offer more customization.

The biggest challenge we had was the cost and the licensing, and we ended up getting an ELA, so enterprise licensing agreement. That took a lot of negotiations and a lot of pressure, however, we were able to get good pricing, the community licensing, and they bundled in Einstein. They bundled a lot of capabilities for us with the ELA.

It may be slow, but that is relative. When compared to Siebel CRM, which was large, clunky, and extremely slow, Salesforce seemed fast to me.

When it switched to lightning, it threw me for a loop. When they changed the look and feel, I had a hard time finding things and doing what I used to do.

There's always room for improvement. Simplification is something it needs for sales. Every time you get the engineers involved, they make things a little too complicated. It might be more beneficial to simplify everything for quick and easy reference. The solution should offer a Salesforce version for individuals. You have a number of people that have independent agencies and other independent workers that are out there that want to be able to track what they're doing and be able to put that into some sort of a schedule that coordinates with their calendar and everything else. When I look at Salesforce and I open Salesforce, it's unique to me as an individual. I've used Salesforce with many different companies. Sometimes you can see the visibility of other accounts, and things of that nature. These platforms can be problematic as you have people that are always looking at your stuff and then trying to work their way around you. With Salesforce, I do feel that I'm doing a lot of repetitive tasks. We're constantly, re-putting in the same thing over and over and over. And that's something that Salesforce should figure out. They need to remove redundancies, as salespeople want to move on to the next deal. Salespeople want to talk and track the initial and primary points of contact. They want to put in a quick note and move on to the next opportunity. For a salesperson, sometimes, you should be able to categorize your opportunities in the vertical markets that can be beneficial as well. I know it makes it a little more complex, however, that way you could see everything at a glance. You could look up which vertical, for example, you are more successful in. You should be able to split those out and dissect everything a bit better. That way, when you're running your campaigns, you could actually have some consistency. For example, as a salesperson, you could say "today I'm going to call logistics companies" or "today I'm going to call finance companies".

I was hoping that with the integration of Tableau that they would have better end-user analytics to play around with. Coming from a MicroStrategy background, I was kind of disappointed. MicroStrategy is actually easier to use than Tableau. It was a function of the license that I was given. Salesforce is incredibly slow. It was difficult to run live sales calls and leverage Salesforce at the same time. You can't ask a customer to hold for 45 seconds while you are looking for information about the account. Salesforce also did not integrate well with some of the other systems that we had. More end-user functionality would be useful. They should have some pre-canned reports that other analysts or salespeople would find valuable. I tried Salesforce Einstein, but that never really worked for me. The PowerSeller tool was just as helpful. We would gather news reports about specific customers and identify if there were any buzzwords attached to it. I was able to create customized daily intelligence reports that would go out directly to my customers. TechnoMile integrated these reports directly into Salesforce allowing every salesperson that had the Archintel module to subscribe to specific reports giving them a compelling reason to reach out to the customer. Salesforce has a news feed function, but it is pretty ugly and very clunky to use. If they leveraged some sort of tool like this one, it would be amazing.

Salesforce Platform has a cumbersome interface when creating reports, dashboards, and those types of things. They could be a little bit more simple. The administration has to be an aficionado to do any sort of administration and maintenance, for example, setting up the way you want to modify the lead tracks or functions. These systems tend to be quite cumbersome.

We have a lot of strategic accounts and large accounts that are tied with all the growth and acquisitions across North America, being able to tag parent-child accounts in an easier fashion would be better. This is the biggest pain point is associating parent to child and being able to align and manage it better. Overall a better parent-child relationship between accounts would be a benefit.

Their reporting needs to be improved. It should be easier. I don't know how, but it needs to be easier.

The UI needs to be improved. As developers, we can manage it, but for end users it's not very attractive in the workshop. It needs to be more user friendly and more intuitive.

Integration with a few of the other products such as Spring Boot is a problem. Integration needs improvement. We have found that there are some issues with integration. DevOps is lagging in Salesforce development practice. We are looking for a better understanding of DevOps for Salesforce. I would like to see automation DevOps in the next release.

Pricing is the biggest factor. The cost right now is too high and I've had a lot of clients leave. Sometimes customers can get annoyed as there are just too many features to understand and work with. They should consider reducing their offering, or work to streamline it so that it is not so overwhelming. There are now many great competitors that offer more streamlined, easy-to-understand services. Customers need accounting, and, right now, they need to go elsewhere, to something like Xero, for example, or QuickBooks. It would be nice to have some kind of accounting available right in Salesforce. The stability could be better. We don't get any leads from Salesforce here in India. It would be helpful if we could use the product to get us leads.

We have yet to encounter any areas of the solution in need of improvement.

The solution doesn't really have any weak areas. overall , It's very good product. but Technical support could be a bit faster. for the standard support , their SLA is about 48 hours which is not that fast if you have a serious issue Based on the platform capabilities . i see the Platform is very, very capable of handling a full ERP, and not only a CRM. may be in the near future , SF will launch their own ERP system :)

In terms of features, for our business needs, we have more than enough right now. There is nothing that we are missing or would like to add. They can maybe share some best practices so that when you are starting, you can stick to a good process, and you don't have to think so much about the process that you want or your CEO or CMO wants. The process should not be based on one person in the company. Having some best practices will make it easier to get started. These best practices can be based on what has worked for others. Its basic version is pretty simple, and the customizations are up to the companies, which can make startups like ours lose a lot of time in figuring out what all stakeholders want rather than what would work.

Getting reports in Salesforce is sometimes a little bit difficult. You need to do a lot of things to get detailed reports. This feature can be improved. Its price can also be improved. It is currently expensive.

It is quite expensive. It has gotten to that point where it is a lot more pricey. It has kind of got its own proprietary language for development. It is probably never going to change, but if it had a more market language for development, it would be easier to find developers. They come at a premium cost, so it is expensive.

The solution should keep adding features. They've continued to develop a lot of functionality over time with their additive approach to developing the product. There needs to be more documentation. They need to make it easier to find what you need in order to get help and solve problems. Technical support could be more responsive. The solution could increase the number of plug-ins on offer. They should have ready-to-go modules that can just be added at any time to increase the capabilities in a number of directions.

The solution is very expensive compared to CRM solutions. It requires a lot of configuration that could make it difficult for some people. We are lucky to have a partner helping us. In addition, the license together with the cost of implementation, makes it very expensive. In some cases it's good to be modular, but in this case each time you want to integrate something, there's an additional cost. If you want to integrate with Office 365 you have to pay; if you want a seamless process with the marketing team or the accounting team, you have to pay. Right now our process is good and we can do anything we need but we may need something more in the future.

It would be better if they can add more from the pricing and functionality perspective. It is very expensive. I would be more than happy if they drop the prices. From the licensing perspective, if they can add more functionality, I would be more than happy.

Although the platform is already set up for you, there's a lot of customization that needs to be done, especially for any new component we start using. For whatever solution we wanted, we had to think for ourselves and design it all on our own. And, unfortunately, there were some components that were not really mature in the beginning, like Tableau for example. I would like to see Salesforce better, or more quickly, integrate the applications that they acquire, like Tableau and Slack. Technologies are changing rapidly nowadays, and customers are requesting all sorts of new integrations. For example, some are asking for WhatsApp integrations, AI and ML integrations, etc. When you're using a single platform such as Salesforce or SAP, your data quality is the one thing that is taken care of, and we would like to continue managing our data across many different integration channels.

We need to do a lot of configurations on the solution in order for it to be set up as we need it. It would be ideal if it didn't require so much effort to tweak everything. The initial setup is rather complex.

At this particular organization, we only just implemented support about six months ago. There are still aspects of the solution we are exploring and we are in the process of looking at some integrations. We're just testing its capabilities, and therefore I can't say there are any features that are missing per se. If you have resellers or distributors, you just need to figure out a way to set up the system in the backend. Since every company is different, it takes a little bit of time to figure that out.

Easier bulk updating would be appreciated. We need more flexibility with building processes and workflow automation. Better flexibility in editing emails created from templates would be great, and being able to add hyperlinks in emails for scheduling meetings would allow us to automate more. I would also like more flexibility in being able to designate both default and override values, as I feel like every time we have a new process, we have to add more fields to accommodate exceptions to the norm.

The marketing automation needs improvement, as it should be easier to use.

If you compare it with Appian, there are business rules that you are dealing with. With less code, we are making a higher standard. So maybe, in the future, Salesforce can make it a more integral part of the application. And they are also strategic partners with multiple companies, so maybe that is the reason they are sustainable and they the four versions every year. These things likely depend upon robotics programming and they use the latest technologies for a more stable portal. So we need to be more cautious about the coding and so data file would be more stable. But as a partner, there will be some time-taking process to make it up in the implementation. When you compare with Appian, they have to improve more on configuration and more systematic care, configuring by itself and if they are making other things in the area that they update. The process should be automatically approved. They should also configure the maps that we initial use. I think the alerts can be used differently, or customize the targeted content mills can also be automated. Those things can also be included in Salesforce. I was looking at this map that needs to be included. Like a world map. An easy way of getting those details and then adding to it and then being able to do it in a more simplified way, visually.

I haven't used that much of the solution, so I can't speak to what would need improvement. For me, for now, I'd say it works pretty seamlessly. There have been some minor issues here and there, but they've gotten them under control. The solution offers upgrades at a slower pace. The solution needs to keep up with competitors.

I would like to see an improvement in the price - it could be cheaper. Also, I would like to have more integration with Google.

The cost of data storage is an issue once the company grows. The last time I checked a Gigabyte of structured data (tables) cost 3000 usd per month.