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Salesforce.com Suggestion

March 13, 2008

While we are looking into moving from Salesforce.com to Zoho, I thought I would make a suggestion to Marc Benioff and his team at Salesforce.com.  The Architel sales team (five users) have been using Salesforce.com for two years (this would have been our third year).  Last week I contacted our salesperson at Salesforce and talked to him about what it would cost to gain access to the Salesforce.com API so that we could connect the system to Zimbra and our phone system.  Turns out it would be a 10x increase in cost per year.  In the meantime, when I got to the office this morning I was notified by our sales team that they were locked out of the system.  I tried calling Salesforce.com, but since they are located on the west coast they were closed so I told the salespeople to chill out until 9AM (cost to me: 2 hours @ $50/hr x 5 people = $500).

By 9:28AM I was able talk to a salesperson (the billing department doesn’t get in until later) and he explained our credit card had expired and they needed a new one.  He couldn’t take it over the phone, instead he needed to email me a form that I would need to fill out and fax back.  I asked if he could turn on access to the system in the meantime and he agreed he would try.  I just got the email from him and he was able to get someone to restore access.  So, I wanted to thank Dave Heimlicher for all of his help.  The downtime lasted 2 hours and 38 minutes for an estimated cost (assuming our salespeople wouldn’t have sold anything) was $625.

  • Don’t cut businesses off until after you have people available in your billing department to handle the inbound calls.
  • Don’t cut people off before sending an email (they claimed they did in this case) and following up with an outbound call (surely worth one call).
  • Include a counter in the admin account - i.e. at the top of each page, “Reminder: you only have 10 days left to renew.”
  • Accept credit cards via your website (i.e. why should I have to call your billing department to update my credit card info, let me do it on the web).
  • Accept credit cards via your website instead of requiring a printed form to be faxed authorizing the charge (I know you save 1% on the transaction, just upcharge online transactions).

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog, Personal 

Comments

4 Responses to “Salesforce.com Suggestion”

  1. Philippe Creytens Says:
    March 13th, 2008 at 1:47 pm

    Alex, may be you should pitch Salesforce.com for an outbound reminder phone service (that you can provide)?

  2. Alexander Muse Says:
    March 13th, 2008 at 3:14 pm

    Can you call me next week and remind me to do that?

  3. Reuben Brooks Says:
    March 13th, 2008 at 7:52 pm

    I’ve been using SF.com for years and most recently installed an APEX application for project management at a client site (800+ total SF.com users). After visiting with the APEX application vendor he had some very interesting insight into SF.com and while they have built their business on the SF.com platform, they often find themselves in a difficult position with SF. I as well have connected SF directly to request assistance building out custom applications at the client and they have not been very willing to work with me. I also recently installed a copy of SugarCRM and I would highly encourage others to take a look…and ZOHO looks good too.

    I’m not so interested in building future applications on the SF.com platform as I once was.

  4. Adam Says:
    March 14th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

    Sorry to hear that you were having issues, and I’m glad to see your rep was able to help. I know that Zimbra had an integration to salesforce that wouldn’t have required you needing to pay for the API, but I think with their acquisition by Yahoo that product may no longer be in the market.

    W/r/t building out an app on our platform Reuben, feel free to ping me directly (adam dot gross at salesforce) and I’d be happy to see if I can help

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