Salesforce is the leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform used by businesses to manage customer data, connect across a variety of channels, streamline customer support, and provide a better, more personalized customer service and experience. In addition to being a leading platform itself, there are thousands of Salesforce apps and integrations in its AppExchange that extend Salesforce’s benefits to meet the expectations of today’s modern customer for effortless, personal and quick support.
Why is Salesforce so popular?
Over 150,000 companies use Salesforce today to manage their customer relationships – from small businesses to the largest enterprises in the world like NBCUniversal, Siemens and Bentley. One of the reasons why Salesforce is so popular is because they make it easy for other companies to build integrations that further enhance Salesforce’s capabilities. Companies that have built sophisticated CX, engagement, support, analytics and other tools have apps in the Salesforce AppExchange, a marketplace with ready-to-install free and paid apps.
What are the top benefits of using Salesforce?
For customer service teams, the Salesforce Service Cloud gives agents a holistic view of the customer and enables companies to offer support across many channels, creating an omnichannel experience. The agent console is an intuitive workspace where agents can manage and close tickets from a single screen. Other productivity tools include automation, knowledge base suggestions to agents, omnichannel routing so a case is managed by the agent who has the most relevant skills, and real-time analytics on key customer service KPIs.
What apps does Salesforce integrate with?
Salesforce integrates with other business software to extend the power of the platform. All in all, Salesforce now has over 3,400 apps since the Salesforce AppExchange launched back in 2006. These apps help sales, marketing, and customer support leaders manage customer relationships, drive loyalty and unlock new revenue.
With thousands of apps to choose from, we wanted to gather up our picks for the most powerful tools to help customer experience and support leaders scale customer happiness and effectively compete on CX.
Here are the 5 best apps in the Salesforce AppExchange:
This 100% native Salesforce app gets your customer service tickets into the right agent’s hand. It’s an advanced routing and assignment system that allows you to match tickets to the best or first available agent across multiple channels, not simply round-robin assigning. You can also update agent skills and attributes, and schedule work shifts and office hours. Beyond ticket handling, Ortoo also has a powerful function used for sales teams. From a sales scope, Ortoo can route leads and opportunities to the right sales rep.
Featured Highlights
- Lead Assignment: Companies can end cherry-picking and enjoy load-balanced lead routing.
- Case Routing: Assign cases to the first available or best agent.
- Task Assignments: Assign tasks or any work item to agents and create customer case management.
Customer Reviews
Nearly every reviewer has given it five stars. One reviewer writes: “The solution has met all of our needs and has exceeded some too. We are able to use the round-robin beyond our expectations; the system has allowed us to implement a loaded balance that means our Agents do not unfairly have cases distributed.”
Hearing how your company is delivering against your customers expectations is a key way to identify areas for improvement. With the Survey Vista for Salesforce App, you can build branded, mobile-friendly, dynamic surveys and forms for email, websites, communities and SMS to send at key customer touchpoints to gather feedback like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Performer Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES). Other key features include multilingual support so you can serve surveys in your customers’ native languages, the ability to set conditions to show or hide certain questions dynamically, and ability to map your survey responses to create & update Salesforce records.
Featured Highlights
- Native Salesforce Surveys & Forms
- Unlimited Paid Starting at US $999 per year
- Agile startup and new features quickly added to make your life easier achieving business goals
Customer Reviews
***** Rating by most of the customers on Salesforce AppExchange. According to one reviewer: “This product is a great solution, super easy and fast to set up, and their customer support is fantastic and very responsive.”
The Qualtrics app for Salesforce allows you to combine customer experience data with operational data to better understand customer behavior and build strong relationships. It allows you to set up feedback requests using SMS customer service, easily export customer profiles, and create / update tickets based on customer feedback.
Featured Highlights
- Embed Qualtrics’ advanced customer feedback analytics in Salesforce to surface customer insights and take action.
- Automate feedback requests in Salesforce based on account milestones to understand customer behavior.
- Show customers you’re listening by taking personalized actions to address experience gaps and delight each customer contact in your database.
Customer Reviews
One customer sums up their experience nicely: “The integration is simple, especially taking advantage of a walkthrough with their helpful Salesforce integration experts. The UI is neat and elegant and simple to find what you need to get a complex integration setup in no time. Support page is also a huge help, very intuitive… and did I mention that the Support people are great as well :).”
The companies that use Salesforce Service Cloud to manage customer support need to leverage the Netomi Virtual Agent app. This app enables companies to use a Salesforce chatbot to automatically resolve customer service tickets in seconds across a variety of channels including email, Web chat and social. The Netomi Virtual Agent can interact directly with customers to fully resolve tickets without human intervention or work behind the scenes recommending responses to human agents. You can also integrate with your other back-end systems to provide fully personalized resolutions. By using the Netomi Virtual Agent app for Salesforce, resolution time for customer service tickets will decrease significantly which results in higher customer satisfaction.
Featured Highlights
- Significantly reduce response and resolution times.
- Leverage AI-powered recommended replies to help your agents work faster. Boost agent productivity and give them time back to focus on more complex cases.
- Train from historic case data or select from our pre-trained AI conversational and industry-specific skills. Launch quickly and see value sooner.
Customer Reviews
Netomi has a five-star rating on G2 Crowd. One happy customer says: “The team is awesome – very knowledgeable and quick to respond and help, they also try to think outside of the box and suggest a solution that might not be immediately available.”
Learn more about the Netomi Salesforce App and the benefits of integrating a powerful AI solution natively into Salesforce.
The Natterbox CTI app, dubbed the Salesforce voice solution, allows you to bring the power of telephony into Salesforce. The computer telephony integration (CTI) automatically captures activity, sets dynamic call queues, routes calls based on skills and can integrate call data in Salesforce reports. What’s more, the company uses AI to analyze phone conversations including sentiment and intent analysis.
Featured Highlights
- Fully integrated and managed in Salesforce, Natterbox delivers key CTI and contact center features directly in Salesforce.
- Experience smoother, more personalized inbound caller journeys, higher customer satisfaction, improved user productivity, and greater operational flexibility — all of which contribute to a stronger bottom line for your organization.
- Capture all your telephony data in Salesforce with 60+ out-of-the-box Salesforce reports included. Use Salesforce dashboards and other reporting objects to make strategic decisions, whilst never leaving the platform.
Customer Reviews
One happy customer says: “I’ve worked in contact centers for over 5 years now, and this is by far the best phone system I have ever used. The integration with Service Cloud is seamless, making reporting a breeze! I’ll never willingly use anything else!”.
What are the biggest Salesforce Service Cloud competitors?
While Salesforce might be one of the most well-known customer relationship management platforms, it faces stiff competition from other established and emerging brands. Here’s a roundup of the top five biggest competitors to Salesforce Service Cloud:
- Zendesk: The Zendesk platform is easily the biggest competitor to Salesforce. It enables teams to provide support across email, social media, voice, and mobile and has robust analytics. It’s flexible and customizable and has more than 800 apps and integrations available.
- Gladly: As one of the newer platforms, Gladly has quickly gained a reputation for empowering companies to deliver incredibly personal customer service. The people-centered platform has scored 4.5 stars on G2 as it enables companies to create a single conversation timeline with all customer communications, across all channels, which in turn decreases duplicate tickets and agent workload.
- Freshdesk: Over 40,000 companies like American Express and Panasonic use Freshdesk to seamlessly manage omnichannel customer support. In Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant, Freshworks is the only “visionary” for the CRM Customer Engagement Center.
- Zoho Desk: Zoho chatbot enables teams to use the power of customer context to improve agent productivity, promote self-service and increase customer happiness. Reviewers mention it’s easier to set up and manage as compared to Salesforce. Clients include RentersWarehouse, LycaMobile, Daimler and Cummins.
- LiveAgent: Used by over 30,000 companies worldwide including BMW, Yamaha and Nascar, LigeAgent is used to manage customer support across email, phone and chat in a single inbox. The platform is rated at 99% in user satisfaction, perhaps due to its commitment to simplicity.
Conclusion
In summary, Salesforce is a trusted partner to help companies deliver exceptional customer support. As consumers demand faster, more convenient and cross-channel support, it’s important for companies of all sizes to use a CRM platform like Salesforce and powerful integrations and apps to provide the support that customers expect.
Can we tell you more about how to amplify the power of Salesforce Service Cloud with customer support AI and automation? Let’s chat.
To learn more about improving the customer experience, visit:
- How a SaaS Chatbot Can Reduce Churn Rates
- The Top 11 Zendesk Alternatives