Ultimate Guide to Salesforce and its Features
Salesforce is the most popular search keyword online. With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and integration of social media platforms for customer engagements to leverage brand creation and amplification, Salesforce has proven a credible IT solution.
Over 150,000 companies of different sizes and industry types are growing their business with this high-end innovative technology. Let us get a detailed knowledge of this powerful term that has left its impact on organizations in the past few decades.
Salesforce – an introduction and more
Salesforce is a cloud-centered computer technology available on a global platform for customer relationship management (CRM). Although Salesforce released its pilot version on the CRM platform, it soon migrated to Application Programming Interface (API). This helped in exposing the data on the server using protocols to the clients. Many upgrades and versions were released in the past few years, and finally, Salesforce launched its proprietary language called Apex.
The amplification Salesforce CRM tool offered software, platforms, and infrastructure as a complete solution. You can term Salesforce.com as a Salesforce automation tool that caters to the development of several applications, websites applying drag and drop functionalities.
Utility of Salesforce – beyond customer service
- Engage clients and customers with relevant and updated digital marketing globally.
- Smarter tools for sales, hassle-free customer support, and growth of the business from anywhere.
- Scale-up e-commerce solutions with a quick release of upgraded tools from online platforms.
- Credible and empathic customer service 24/7.
- Adapt to faster digital approaches to empower the business to work globally.
Salesforce provides through major cloud platforms:
- Sales cloud – It is the top customer relationship management where automation started with different features. It supports the sales tools to pace up the process and streamline the cash transactions. The sales process includes various steps, viz. Presentation, Prospecting, Preparations, Approach, Handling objects, Closure, Follow-ups under one sales cloud. Here are some of the major features of the sales cloud:
- Accounts
- Contacts and leads
- Marketing
- Quotations
- Approval and workflows
- Emails and Chatter
- Content library
- Partners and Productivity
- Mobile and Data.com
- Analytics and forecasting
- Service cloud – The advancement of technology results in significant changes to CRM tools. Therefore, it uses platforms like messaging, mobile and computer-based communications. In the past few years, social media played a key role in service cloud features. It is remarkable for customer satisfaction as; it supports individual customer needs for taking pre-emptive measures for any consumer issues. The main features are:
- Case management
- Call centers
- Emails and messaging services
- Contracts and prerogatives
- Salesforce knowledge and Chatter
- Salesforce analytics
- Customer portals and partners
- Approval and workflow
- AppExchange
- Community cloud – This is the most popular and ideal salesforce cloud platform in the current scenario. You get the best connectivity with the clients, employees, strategic partners, and customers through social media. It extends to business integration by personalized brand creation. You can promise a state-of-the-art brand experience with mobile applications. Lightning Bolt is another additional plus point to go for community salesforce cloud. It uses various templates and themes to create brand engagements. The main features are:
- Portal creation
- Customer help centers
- Forms
- Mobile applications
- Content management
- Wave analytics cloud – The Salesforce that uses innovative business solutions is Wave analytics cloud. The primary sourcing is from mobile applications and data visualization. For larger and bulky data files, this is ideal as it also integrates all the customer details. You can generate pictorial presentations, graphical representations, and charts of the data. This is the famous Salesforce Einstein AI model, which is the next big technological revolution.
- App Cloud – This helps the user to create new apps using the Salesforce platform. This includes not just computer but also mobile applications for quicker customer interactions. It is a mix of different tools to build applications faster, more effective, user-friendly, and cost-effective. It encourages the business to engage directly with the customers and clients for faster communications. It also uses phoning and testing services for data sharing. AI is a significant part of App Salesforce Cloud as it also involves social media.
- Other than these, there are different cloud platforms of Salesforce, Financial Service Cloud, Integration Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Marketing Cloud. The information is like the ocean; the more you dig deeper, the more you explore information.
Salesforce recovery is imperative – Business savior
Salesforce works on real-time reproduction of data and records to disk from different sources. This is a major disaster management solution that integrates customer relations management. The production data center and recovery center work closely to get the backup of data lost. However, there are other reasons why data recovery is a must for any business –
- Data recovery from unintended errors and corruption from malicious activities
- Data migration preparations for major rollbacks
- Archive for bulky data to reduce the volume on the current system
- Replication of data to a data warehouse
- Snapshots creation for development versions
Salesforce data backup and recovery utilizes different tools and applications to ensure 100% IT solutions to all the customers. There are two types of data that call for recovery:
Salesforce Data and Metadata Salesforce
Salesforce backup provides 4 APIs backup of data and metadata information from the various applications viz. REST API, SOAP API, Bulk API, and Metadata API. These are routine health check setups for full, incremental, or partial backup recovery. You can either set up weekly full backups or daily incremental backups. Monthly partial backups are suited for archives and deletion of irrelevant records.
In complete data recovery, the speed will depend on many other factors like the number of lines, the number of records, number of fields, customization of fields, type of fields, Salesforce API, the network capacity of the organization, and degree of parallelization.
It is advisable to perform the salesforce data recovery during non-working hours to prevent any changes. However, it is possible to back up the records when it is currently in use by the modifiers and admin. The recovery process will take a longer time in such scenarios and will result in discrepancies of records at the end.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
