A report by Salesforce partner Bluewolf has found that up to 80 per cent of Salesforce customers are not achieving maximum return on investment (ROI).
Further reading
Dreamforce 2012: The importance of social in business Dreamforce 2012: Salesforce.com unveils new line of products Case Study: CRM at Threadneedle Investments
Consulting firm Bluewolf's State of Salesforce 2012-2013 annual review report looked at the current trends affecting Salesforce.com customers including areas of growth, and areas of concern.
Bluewolf sourced data from two locations: a survey of 300 global Salesforce customers and the firm's own research into the views of project managers, in addition to using data from completed projects between 2011 and 2012.
The report found that up to 80 per cent of Salesforce customers were not achieving maximum ROI, 15 per cent of which are experiencing diminishing returns by failing to keep their application in line with business changes.
Bluewolf's vice president of marketing, Corinne Sklar, told Computing that this was due to a lack of cloud governance, and failure to establish system stability while ensuring that changes with business benefits are rapidly made.
"Salesforce has three new releases a year but can enterprises take in that change that quickly? What we are seeing is that organisations cannot innovate as fast as innovation is being delivered," Sklar said.
The report also highlighted the issue of hidden cloud costs.
"With Salesforce, a customer may be saving a lot of money on hosting fees, and although they may understand that there are costs with implementation they do not realise that there are additional costs for customisation, training and on-going innovation," Sklar said.
Sklar explained that platforms such as Salesforce.com needed constant updating to gain full value from the licensing fee.
Further reading
The business is moving so rapidly these days – businesses have to react very quickly as speed to market is a differentiator for enterprises today. What many firms have done is implement the cloud but they did not realise that they had to change the way they thought about technology as well – they just implemented the cloud as they did with standard on-premise tools and there is no flexibility with that," she said.
Five post-launch mistakes that the report says many enterprises make are: not gamifying on-going adoption, not giving users a way to provide feedback, not creating a governance board, no on-going training and treating Salesforce.com like an unsophisticated software application.
Bluewolf's research suggests Salesforce customers are primarily focused on internal collaboration, mobile and social media – with many firms already creating plans to incorporate these features within their organisation.
However, a big problem for Salesforce is that many people do not understand what the "social enterprise" is.
Salesforce did attempt to trademark the term social enterprise, before realising that the definition differed across the UK and the US – and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff admitted last week at Dreamforce that the decision "was in the best interests of the business".
According to Bluewolf's Sklar, customers are struggling to understand the business definition of "social".
"When we asked customers what social is, we struggled to get a straight answer. Customers need to understand the business value that is derived from the broad term of social. Bluewolf defines this as a collaborative knowledge – it is about employee engagement and customer engagement. Firms need to know: how can collaborative knowledge drive more business and engage the employees of an organisation?" Sklar said.
