Salesforce Clouds Simplified: 4 Critical Types

Despite living in a digital-driven world, establishing real-time and real-world connections with customers is key to business success. Understanding the Customer Queries, Expectations, and Buying Behavior goes a long way in determining what brands need to do to boost their revenue and offer better services. Hence, many companies rely on CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools that help manage all facets of the relationship between customers and enhance the customer journey.

Salesforce is a global and leading Cloud-based CRM Solution platform. Upon a complete walkthrough of this article, you will gain a decent understanding of Salesforce along with the salient features that it offers. You will also learn about different types of Salesforce Clouds and the unique functionalities that they offer.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Introduction to Salesforce
• Key Features of Salesforce
• 4 Key Types of Salesforce Clouds
  • Service Cloud
  • Marketing Cloud
  • Sales Cloud
  • Commerce Cloud
• Conclusion

Prerequisites

• Basic understanding of the SaaS model.

Introduction to Salesforce

To use CRM systems before Salesforce, organizations had to host them on their own servers. Consequently, they had to spend a lot of money and effort to develop their own CRM systems. Nevertheless, with the advent of Salesforce, things began to change. 

Salesforce provides CRM solutions in a diverse range of fields like Sales, Marketing, and a variety of other areas that can be set up quickly and without a detailed understanding of the technology required to develop applications.

Salesforce assists companies in achieving various CRM goals by automating a large portion of their Marketing Efforts and Improving their Sales. Salesforce allows users to collect and monitor customers’ data and purchasing trends. It also offers Email Integration Services as well as helps produce Sales Forecast Reports. Users may also use the Salesforce Application to create Customized Apps that are tailored to the needs of the company.

Key Features of Salesforce

Some of the key features of Salesforce are as follows:

• Easy Setup: Unlike other CRMs, which can take up to a year to set up and deploy, Salesforce can be quickly set up from scratch in only a few weeks.
• User-Friendly Interface: Salesforce’s User Interface and functioning are simple to understand, thereby eliminating the need for training to get started with it.
• Highly Customizable: Companies can easily modify Salesforce features to fit their work style.
• Intelligent Automation: Salesforce’s Intelligent technology automates a variety of business processes, such as Task Assignment and Email Alert Generation. It also has a process builder that enables you to create recommendations with only one click. 
• Lead Nurturing: Its smart Lead Nurturing strategy aids organizations in increasing revenue while also focusing on recruiting and converting customers.
• Dynamic Dashboards: They give a holistic view of how well your business is doing based on important metrics like Market Trends and Customer Behavior. It also makes it easy to construct Dashboards and real-time reporting.
• Multiple Ads: Businesses can operate numerous Ads Campaigns on a single Salesforce platform. They could even use real-time analysis to gain insights into these initiatives.
• Better Collaboration: People from various teams may interact in real-time with the help of Salesforce’s collaboration features. Each team is kept informed about the development of its partner teams through regular communication.
• Email Integration: Calendars and Schedules in Salesforce can be synced with other programs like Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. It also allows you to retrieve critical emails even when you are not connected to the internet and create personalized templates for possible clients.

For further information on Salesforce, click here to check out their official website.

4 Key Types of Salesforce Clouds

Salesforce is divided into several Clouds and Modules that assist with various business sectors such as Sales, Marketing, Customer Acquisition, Service, and more. Following are some of the major types of Salesforce Clouds:

1) Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is one of the major Salesforce Clouds which provides all of the capabilities required to improve Customer Engagement. It enables you to use Intelligent Workflow to Automate Business Processes, Facilitate Customer Interactions across all channels, gain actionable information into every customer interaction, and use Artificial Intelligence to drive revenue.

Some of the key features of this Salesforce Service Cloud are as follows:

• Omni Routing: It can assist in routing the appropriate cases to the appropriate agents. It can also keep track of the average handling time and assist in the diagnosis of problems so that immediate solutions may be provided. It also has an Email-to-Case feature that lets you route emails coming into a specific inbox to Salesforce directly.
• Tracking Support Needs: It supports organizations in keeping track of numerous services their customers are entitled to and defining significant milestones in the process. Business teams may keep track of the instances that require quick attention by defining suitable service levels and specifying phases within a service process using Entitlements and Milestones.
• Live Chat: As Chat and Live Messaging have been a popular form of communication in recent years, Salesforce LiveMessage can be used to send text messages to mobile devices. Even the LiveChat option allows you to connect with consumers in real-time.
• Lightning Console: The agent is given all of the information, including Subjects, Client Profiles, and Knowledge bases so that they can quickly interact with customers and deliver superior solutions with world-class service. The Lightning Console is a portal that provides information to the agent at a precise moment.
• Field Service Lightning: Field Service Lightning enables quicker service from the phone to the field using a single platform. This aids in the management of complicated assets, the management of technicians, and access to information from any mobile device.
• CTI Integration: This enables telephone systems to be integrated with Salesforce, allowing for features like Screen Popping (display of incoming caller information), Automated Dialing, and Phone Control.
• Custom Reports and Dashboards: The Salesforce Service Cloud includes Custom Reports and Dashboards that provide a 360-degree view of Customers, Orders, Customer Service Support History, and all of their activities.

Other key features of Service Cloud include Call Scripting, Einstein Reply Recommendations, Salesforce1 Platform, Asset Management, Service Wave Analytics, Social Customer Service, etc.

2) Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (previously Exact Target) helps Digital Marketers deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. It includes integrated solutions for Customer Journey Management, Email, Web Personalization, Advertising, Content Creation and Management, and Data Analysis. 

Marketing Cloud is a collection of six tools that Digital Marketers may utilize to create efficient Marketing Campaigns across several channels.

• Journey Builder: It enables Digital Marketers to offer a tailored experience at every step of the consumers’ journey across different marketing channels while allowing you to redesign your campaign(s). Regardless of the size of your client base, it allows your team to offer basic to complicated experiences for each consumer.
• Personalization Builder: It includes technologies such as Predictive Analytics and Predictive Modeling, which allow marketers to personalize and understand various customer preferences.
• Analytics Builder: It helps marketers discover new and better insights about their existing and future consumers by combining sophisticated AI technology with a variety of visual tools.
• Audience Builder: It collects and compiles data from all of the linked Salesforce platforms in your CRM system to offer you a bird’s eye perspective of all customer-related actions. Here, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and other data sources are all included.
• Content builder: It gives you full access to a smart dashboard that lets your marketing team produce, distribute, manage, and track content across all of your marketing channels from one place.
• Marketing Cloud Content: It gives digital marketers access to all of the data saved and organized across multiple Salesforce products inside their CRM ecosystem. In this way, Salesforce CRM is able to identify problem areas and take appropriate action.

3) Sales Cloud

Salesforce Clouds for Sales provides an amazing platform for managing the end-to-end operations of a company’s Sales department, including Logging Product information (such as pricing and Order Id), Building Campaigns, maintaining Customer Contacts, Triggering Emails, Reports, and Dashboard features, as well as the generation of orders and opportunities based on advancing sales with customers, among other things.

Some of the features of Salesforce Clouds for Sales are as follows:

• Contact Management: It provides quick access to customer information such as Contacts, Previous Interactions, Promotions, and Engagement Levels. It collects data from consumers’ Social Media profiles in addition to internal data to have a better understanding of their requirements and desires.
• Einstein: Sales Cloud Einstein is an AI tool that helps analyze the Sales data to evaluate the best sales. Salesforce Einstein can convert predictions and forecasts into data that can be utilized to track down and convert the correct leads. Using the power of AI and Machine Learning, Einstein can also assist contact centers in gaining real-time customer information.
• Sales Path: Salesforce Clouds automatically aids Sales Managers in analyzing every single Lead, take further actions on the Leads, and simplify the process by removing needless processes that slow down the Sales process by building up the Sales Path for business teams.
• Quotes: Basic Sales Cloud Quote creation enables the addition of Items, Quantities, Price, and any Discounts. As your Salesperson negotiates the transaction, a single Opportunity may have numerous quotations, but you may always choose which quote will “sync” with pipeline reporting and forecasts.
• Lead Management: Businesses can manage accounts and Campaigns from multiple channels with Sales Cloud’s automated Lead Scoring, ensuring that no Leads are lost. Leaders can make critical choices by monitoring the Sales funnel and developments in real-time.

4) Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a multi-tenant, Cloud-based commerce platform that enables companies to build intelligent, unified purchase experiences across all channels, i.e., Mobile, Social, Online, and Retail — for their customers. It provides a highly customized and strategic approach to online shopping experiences while collaborating on Cloud-based IT solutions. Further, it allows for the integration of stores with better order management and store operation to enable optimized efficiency.

Some of the features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud are as follows:

• Modern Storefront App: It will speed up the development and deployment of E-commerce applications by providing tools for the responsive front-end design, as well as increasing the functionality of current apps.
• Customer Service and Checkout: Assist agents in maximizing conversions and empowering them to connect with consumers more effectively through various communication means. It can also benefit agents by keeping track of clients’ order history and better handling consumer problems.
• Commerce extensions: There are an array of different Extensions, Custom Mobile Applications, In-Store Integration, and other extensions available to enhance the functionality of websites.
• Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud roadmap: It is a great product that provides you with the required guidance when it comes to planning client journeys while also allowing you to focus on Sales and Conversions.

Other exemplary features of Commerce Cloud are Modern Storefront App, Campaign and Content Management, Pricing and Catalog Management, and more.

While the above four are the most popular Salesforce Clouds, the CRM company also offers Salesforce Analytics Cloud, Salesforce Integration Cloud, Experience or Community Cloud, Higher Education Cloud, App Cloud, IoT Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, and more.

Conclusion

In this article, you learned about the available and most popular Salesforce Clouds — each catering to specific business needs. While all of these Salesforce Clouds components work together to provide a more comprehensive set of features that ensure maximum productivity and CRM throughput, it is critical to understand the features and functionalities of any of the above Salesforce Clouds before selecting one.  

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