Value Assessment

For IVK, a CRM like Salesforce.com is an inevitable expense due to its size and needs. However, it is an equivalent trade-off that IVK can gain many more benefits and features to enable the customer service department, loan operations department and any other department to acquire and keep customers.  

Salesforce.com offers different levels or editions of their products and services with an annual billing cycle.  Each business can choose to either be a subscriber or an owner of the content. For salescloud, there are editions of group, professional, enterprise and unlimited. All editions have the common benefits as following:

·         Accounts & contacts

·         Task & event tracking

·         Outlook sync

·         Salesforce1 Mobile App

·         Content library

·         Customizable reports

·         Chatter — company social network

Group is for basic sales & marketing for up to 5 users, it costs $25/user/month. In addition, it provides opportunity tracking, lead scoring, routing and assignment, email templates and tracking, case management, standard dashboards, and web-to-lead capture. The Professional level, which we recommend IVK to choose; enables complete CRM for whatever size team. It costs $65/user/month, has more features of Mass email, Campaigns, Customizable dashboards, Outlook Side Panel, Collaborative, forecasting, Real-time quotes, Role permissions. ("salesforce.com," 2000-2014)

Since IVK is a big company, we did not choose the standard level of desk.com, which is designed for small business.  We chose the enterprise level of the SalesCloud for its extensive benefits, although it costs more ($135/user/month). The features we have at the professional level include: Case management, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), Web and email capture, Salesforce1 Mobile App, Reports & analytics, Customizable dashboards, Sales features such as opportunities & customizable forecasting. The plus enterprise features are: Service Cloud Console, Service contracts and entitlements, Knowledge base, Web chat, Salesforce Communities for Service, Social customer service, Salesforce Identity, Salesforce Private AppExchange. ("salesforce.com," 2000-2014)

There are many intangible benefits that IVK could get if they are buying, leasing or subscribing to SalesForce. And we can do a qualitative estimate about that.

1. They can save a lot of money and just hire a few employees to manage all kinds of resources. Also they don’t need to buy any hardware. For example, IVK’s customer service department may need many employees to manage  their business and customers without SalesForce. But if they use the Sales Cloud, they could accomplish the same work with fewer employees.

2. Dispense with any upfront input, which means they can just use SalesForce after paying. In consideration of IVK’s IT budget, it could reduce their risk in this project.

3. The useful functions will improve their working efficiency so that they can complete more tasks during the designated time, while simultaneously earning more benefits for IVK.

4. Web chat and web customer service strengthen the internal communication and also get connected with customers. It will bring about two benefits, the first one will let them acquire  more business opportunities. Another one is making business units get more syncronized.

5. The last intangible benefit is that it could be a director; SalesForce will make a decision for IVK’s market strategy. Marketing Cloud could do an intelligent prediction according to their data or chart, and then provide the best solutions.

Despite the high overall costs to implement Salesforce at the IVK company, it does prove to be very beneficial to the firm in the long run. Given all the direct benefits, as outlined above combined with all of the intangible benefits, the company will be more successful in the future with this new and improved Customer Resource Management. The overall benefits of Salesforce both tangible and intangible will certainly outweigh the costs, and for a large company such as that of IVK, half a million dollars will certainly not hurt the company financially. Instead it will be a long lasting investment for their continuous expansion in the future.

In this day in age, Social Media can tell companies like IVK so much about their clients.  As we see in the TED Talk video by Jennifer Golbeck, “The curly fry conundrum: Why social media “likes” say more than you might think,” companies can hire analysts who can ”quite accurately predict things like your political preference, your personality score, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, intelligence, along with things like how much you trust the people you know and how strong those relationships are.” (Golbeck, 2013)  Companies like Saleforce.com can use this data along with their internal analytics to determine if a client should recieve the loan that they have applied for.  They can create more personal touches when they answer a clients customer service call (no matter who answers the phone). They can create a customer for life by personalizing the clients experience through their shared information in Salesforce and from the data salesforce can gather for them.  This is an invaluable tool in this day in age and would also allow them to connect with their clients through social media in new ways and to generate new customer bases.  Using analytics they can figure out if they are reaching their target markets effectively and if their clients are satisfied.

Companies interested in using Salesforce.com are able to see their extimated Return on Investment (ROI) by usings Salesforce’s CRM Value Calculator which can be found at: http://www.salesforce.com/roi/.

References:

salesforce.com. (2000-2014). Retrieved from http://www.salesforce.com/service-cloud/overview/

Golbeck, J. (2013, Sept). The curly fry conundrum: Why social media “likes” say more than you might think. [Video File] Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_golbeck_the_curly_fry_conundrum_why_social_media_likes_say_more_than_you_might_think/transcript?language=en#t-145382