by twieberneit | Aug 1, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
On July 27, 2017 Salesforce announced the availability of an update to their customer service platform Service Cloud. According to Keith Pearce, VP Marketing, Service Cloud, differentiation in customer service is no more a topic within industries, but across industries. Today, customer service in companies competes against the impression gained in another industry, telco vs. banking, vs airline, vs. … you get the picture. Consequently, winning organizations are concentrating on three areas: platform productivity mobile However, this focus can potentially slow down these organizations because they normally come with trade-offs, like scalability vs. speed of deployment, ease of use vs. complete information, or mobility for customers vs. mobility for agents. Salesforce wants to address these trade-offs with this release by making the solution very easy to set up, easier to customize and enhance, easier to use and finally by offering a new mobile app for agents and supervisors. There is a scripted set up that lets admins deploy a usable application in a short time; Salesforce speaks of less than one day. A component library helps in easily adding relevant functionality via drag and drop in a simple application builder. Of course there are additional components and applications available via the AppExchange market place. Agents shall be made more productive by a clean Kanban-style UI, a tool called Community360 that helps in surfacing community content that a user reviewed before logging an incident, a federated search that is capable of searching across open search compatible providers, and the ability for agents to script tasks. Lastly, there is a new mobile app for agents and supervisors. Here is the complete...
by twieberneit | Jul 13, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
On July 12, 2017 Salesforce announced its new, Einstein-enhanced version of Field Service. This release brings mainly three innovations to the already strong Service Cloud, which is the leading Customer Service solution according to Gartner Group. Here the complete wording of the press release, in case you did not want to follow the link but still are interested in it: Salesforce Delivers Einstein AI and Analytics For Field Service Lightning Built on the Service Cloud Platform, new innovations for Field Service Lightning arm the mobile workforce with image recognition technology, smart equipment management and deep analytics to bolster productivity and efficiency Companies including Atlantic Energy are harnessing the power of Field Service Lightning to deliver insight, onsite SAN FRANCISCO—July 12, 2017—Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, today introduced Einstein AI and Analytics for Field Service Lightning, empowering companies to deliver a smarter onsite customer experience that is built on the world’s #1 customer service platform. Field Service Lightning now brings together the insights and intelligence mobile workers need to increase productivity, boost onsite efficiency and drive revenue. The Salesforce Service Cloud has redefined customer service across every major technological shift—cloud, mobile, social, messaging and more. And last year with the introduction of Field Service Lightning, Salesforce extended the power of Service Cloud to create a full service platform for managers, dispatchers and mobile workers. However, as the multi-billion dollar field service market expands into new industries—including finance, healthcare, manufacturing and retail—there is even more demand to deliver onsite service. Field service technicians have to deal with complicated equipment, don’t always have the right parts and often lack...
by twieberneit | Jan 25, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
On January 24, 2017 SAP released its results of their fiscal year 2016 – and the fourth quarter thereof. In a nutshell SAP: Delivered to its increased 2020 guidance Had an increase of 31 per cent in cloud subscription and support revenue, while still being able to increase the software license and support revenue. Cloud revenue increased especially in Q4 and promises to stay at a high level with a very healthy backlog Increased its full year operating profit by 20 per cent to 5.12 Billion Euro (IFRS) Has a strong backlog of cloud bookings This success has a slightly negative effect on the company profitability while it negotiates the shift from license revenue to subscription revenue while being in an investment mode. It, however, seems to be driven by an increasing adoption of S/4HANA, a strong increase of the Hybris set of CEC solutions, including e-commerce and increasing traction in the HCM space. So it is broad. Based upon the strong delivery of 2016 SAP expects the cloud business to increase by up to 34 per cent in 2017 (all numbers of course at constant currencies) and increases its guidance of revenue and profit for 2017. In line with this the company is also bullish in its mid term outlook to 2020, which it increases, too. My Take Of course the big increase in revenues, expressed as a percentage, is partly owed to the fairly low number. In comparison Salesforce reported 2.14 Billion dollar for their third quarter alone, as opposed to 2.99 Billion Euro for SAP’s fiscal year. Oracle reported 798 million dollars in their FY Q1...
by twieberneit | Jan 10, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
Last week Freshdesk announced the acquisition of Bengaluru based SaaS data integration company Pipemonk, the seventh acquisition since mid of 2015. Pipemonk has been launched in 2014 and since has implemented integrations between many leading e-commerce-, accounting-, CRM-, Marketing-, and Billing applications, including Amazon, Shopify, Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Stripe. So far Freshdesk was not on their list. Pipemonk’s promise and objective is to deliver easy-to-setup, pre-built bi-directional integrations between SaaS applications. On their web site they reported to have more than 2,000 customers acquired in the short life span, with a seed capital of only 2 million dollar. So one can say that they delivered successfully. Freshdesk itself has its roots in customer service and since increased its portfolio to include help desk (hotline), a sales application (Freshsales), chat (Freshchat) and social testimonials using acquisitions and own developments. My Take I think that this was an important step for Freshdesk. It enables Freshdesk to easily expand its reach to integrate with a raft of SaaS applications in different business domains, prebuilt or custom. Further, I was wondering for a while whether and how Freshdesk would go on integrating their own application stack, which as per my understanding so far consists of different, only lightly (if at all) integrated applications – although my understanding may be wrong. Assuming that Freshdesk intends to continue their aggressive growth trajectory with this acquisition the team also has the foundation to integrate new and newly acquired functionality fast, based upon an established architecture. Overall, congratulations to both...
