The salesforce.com CRM Service
We provide a comprehensive array of on-demand CRM services, which enable customers
and subscribers to systematically record, store, analyze and act upon business
data, and to help businesses manage customer accounts, track sales leads, evaluate
marketing campaigns, and provide post-sales service. We also enable companies
to generate reports and summaries of this data and share them with authorized
individuals across functional areas. Most of the features of our service can
be accessed through a variety of devices, including laptop computers and mobile
devices. For example, we offer a mobile version of our service that is accessed
by the leading wireless devices. Additionally, our service is highly configurable
in a short amount of time, enabling our customers to tailor its appearance,
policy settings, language, workflow, reports, and other characteristics without
the use of significant IT resources or consultants. Our services mainly focus
on the following functional areas within CRM:
• Sales force automation, which is marketed under our brand Salesforce
SFA, enables salespeople to be more productive by automating manual and repetitive
tasks and by providing them with better, more organized data about current and
prospective customers. Salesforce SFA helps companies establish a system and
process for recording, tracking, and sharing information about sales opportunities,
sales leads, sales forecasts, the sales process, and closed business, as well
as managing sales territories.
• Partner relationship management, which is marketed under our brand
Salesforce PRM, provides channel managers with complete visibility into their
company’s entire sales pipeline for direct and indirect channels. Salesforce
PRM makes it easy for partners to access leads, collaborate on deals, and locate
all the information they need in order to be successful.
• Marketing automation, which is marketed under our brand Salesforce
Marketing, enables companies to manage marketing campaigns from initiation through
the development of leads that are passed to the sales team and enables them
to determine the effectiveness of each campaign by quantifying the revenue generated
as a result of specific marketing activities.
• Customer service and support automation, which is marketed under our
brand Salesforce Service & Support allows companies to interact better and
more efficiently with their existing customers for a variety of service and
support needs, such as requests for repairs, advice about products and services,
complaints about faulty goods, and the need for additional goods and services.
Using Salesforce Service & Support, customers can create a comprehensive,
fully integrated virtual contact center to support a wide range of customer
interactions that occur through voice, chat, email, and in-person interactions.
Force.com Platform
The Force.com platform enhances the attractiveness of our service, particularly
to enterprise customers. The Force.com platform provides a feature set and technology
environment for building business applications, including data models and objects
to manage data, a workflow engine for managing collaboration of data between
users, a user interface model to handle forms and other interactions, and a
Web services API for programmatic access and integration. The Force.com platform
provides the tools and infrastructure required to:
• Deploy our application service for CRM
• Customize and integrate existing enterprise software applications
• Create and deploy new business applications that are pre-integrated
with our service and leverage the same user interface
• Sample and deploy applications built by third parties from the AppExchange
directory, our marketplace for on-demand business applications