What is Salesforce? A Guide to Its Product Suites and Features.

Salesforce is a cloud-based company renowned for its customer relationship management technology. Founded in 1999 with its flagship product, Sales Cloud, the platform has evolved into a comprehensive customer relationship management platform that empowers businesses of all sizes to connect, understand, and engage with their customers more effectively. 

At its core, Salesforce centralizes customer data from sales, service, marketing, and every customer-facing team into a single platform, eliminating silos and delivering actionable insights in real time.    

This is what Salesforce does. Moving forward, this blog will help you with a detailed understanding of Salesforce, its features & product suite.

So, let’s get started. 

Overview of Salesforce Products

Sales Cloud

Sales Cloud CRM is an AI-powered sales management platform built on the Salesforce platform, helping businesses to manage their entire sales processes from lead generation to deal closure. It acts as a single platform for all the information a sales representative might need, such as contracts, accounts, leads, and opportunities. 

Service Cloud

Service Cloud is a customer service platform enabling businesses with AI to deliver positive experiences from the first point to final resolutions across different channels. It helps support agents with a step-by-step guide powered by AI to understand customer queries and resolve issues swiftly.

Marketing Cloud

Marketing Cloud in Salesforce is a complete digital marketing platform that helps businesses manage and optimize marketing campaigns that drive personalized experiences across the customer journey. 

Commerce Cloud 

Commerce Cloud is a complete e-commerce platform for business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses. It helps to build personalized and scalable e-commerce experiences. 

Experience Cloud 

Experience Cloud, previously known as Community Cloud, is a digital experience platform helping businesses to build branded experiences like websites, portals, community forms, and more. It has built-in analytics and reporting capabilities to analyze the performance of digital experiences.

Data Cloud

Data Cloud is a hyperscale data engine that helps businesses to ingest, harmonize, and analyze the data from multiple sources to build a 360-degree view of customers. It can easily ingest data from sources including Salesforce applications, external systems, and third-party applications. 

Agenforce

Agentforce is a digital labour platform that helps businesses to create, and train custom AI agents for performing role-specific tasks across different departments like sales, service, marketing, and more. It is powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine to stimulate human thinking, enabling AI agents to adapt in real-time. 

Slack

Slack is a communication and collaboration tool for workplaces. It facilitates both one-to-one or group conversations to meet all the communication needs of an organization. 

Tableau

Tableau is an end-to-end analytics platform helping businesses to understand and act on the data. It is a low-code platform, so businesses can connect the data from all the sources they work on with no coding required. 

MuleSoft

MulesSoft is a native Salesforce integration platform that has pre-built connectors to allow integrations with applications and databases, whether hosted on the cloud or on-premise. 

Net Zero Cloud

Net Zero Cloud is a unified platform to manage and create disclosure reports of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) initiatives in accordance with the array of frameworks and regulations specific to your organization. 

Heroku

Heroku works as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model, enabling developers to build, deploy, and scale applications, shifting infrastructure responsibilities to Heroku. 

Einstein

Salesforce Einstein brings artificial intelligence capabilities to the customer relationship management platform. It is available across Salesforce products like Sales, Marketing, Commerce, and Salesforce Platform, among others. 

Salesforce Industry Specific Products 

Salesforce has a purpose-built solution called industry-specific clouds tailored to meet the unique needs of various industries. These industry clouds are built on Salesforce Customer 360 platform, using industry-specific workflows, data models, and business processes. 

Here is a list of the Salesforce industry-specific products:

Industry	Product
Healthcare & Life Sciences	Health Cloud
	Life Sciences Cloud
Automotive	Automotive Cloud
Communications	Communications Cloud
Consumer Goods	Consumer Goods Cloud
Education	Education Cloud
Energy & Utilities	Energy & Utilities Cloud
Financial	Financial Services Cloud
Retail	Retail Cloud
Manufacturing	Manufacturing Cloud
Media	Media Cloud
Nonprofit	Nonprofit Cloud
Public Sector	Government Cloud

Key Features of Salesforce: Unlocking the Power of CRM

1. A Single Platform for All Customer Information

Salesforce brings all the customer information from all Salesforce products, like Sales, Service, and Marketing, along with data from third-party platforms. This is how Salesforce works to unify all the customer’s data:

• Customer 360: It connects the data from Salesforce applications like Sales, Service, Marketing, and more using a unique ID. 
• Data Cloud: Data cloud brings all the structured (e.g., customer name, contact information) and unstructured data (e.g., social media posts, customer reviews). 
• Integration tools: Salesforce offers support for APIs, and middleware like MuleSoft facilitating seamless integration with third-party applications. 

2. Omni-Channel Customer Service

Salesforce enables businesses to provide personalized customer service across all preferred channels by giving support agents a unified view of customer interactions. For example, if a customer reports an issue via email and later contacts a support agent by phone, they expect the conversation to continue seamlessly from where they left off.

Salesforce helps the customer service agents with a unified view of all customer interactions across all the channels, like purchase history, conversation history, and more. Additionally, Salesforce CRM is powered by the intelligent routing and prioritization capabilities, enabling the routing of the customer’s inquiries based on the agent’s availability, skills, and workload. This ensures that the right agent is working to solve customer inquiries. 

3. Self-Service Tools 

Self-service capabilities of the Salesforce CRM help customers seek resolution for their low-level queries, such as password resets, independently with the help of the knowledge base. Knowledge base refers to the directory of FAQs, tutorials, articles, and more that can help customers to resolve a query.

Salesforce allows businesses to build customer portals directly into the CRM, enabling customers to track orders, access personal information, and submit service requests. This portal is powered by the CRM data and can surface the relevant content in response to common queries and guide them to solve the customer queries. 

Here is how Salesforce’s self-service capabilities can help you:

• Create a branded help center powered by the knowledge base that is updated regularly in response to the evolving customer challenges.
• AI agents can be embedded in self-service portals and across other platforms like social media, websites, and more to ensure conversational messaging. 

4. Trusted AI

Salesforce CRM is expanding its AI capabilities with products like Agentforce, Prompt Builder, AI for businesses, and more while maintaining the security of the customer’s data. It is driven by the Einstein Trust Layer, a collection of security principals, and protocols like data masking, dynamic grounding, zero-date retention, and more. 

Here is how Salesforce features keep customer information safe while allowing them to leverage generative AI capabilities:

• Zero-data retention: Salesforce partners with LLMs (Open AI and Azure Open AI) to ensure no data is retained once the response is generated by LLMs. All the data is deleted immediately after the response generation. Additionally, Salesforce ensures the privacy of the data sent to LLM, adding a layer of security. 
• Dynamic grounding with secure data retrieval: This ensures the data retrieval based on the permissions specific to the user executing the prompt to ground AI responses. This eliminates the scope of unauthorized access. 
• Data masking: The sensitive customer information, such as the personal information number and more, is masked in the prompt response. Additionally, you can classify the metadata of the fields using Shield Platform Encryption or data classification to instruct Salesforce to consider it as a sensitive field. 
• Prompt defense: It works to reduce the likelihood of harmful prompt responses. 

5. Reports and Data Dashboards Help You Understand and Act on the Data

Salesforce CRM has a suite of customizable reports and dashboard tools enabling businesses to understand and act on customer data. Analytics Home acts as a single location for accessing all your reports and dashboards, and its customizable capabilities can be tailored to meet your specific data needs. 

Here is a detailed overview of the reports and dashboard capabilities:

• Create reports and dashboards with clicks leveraging the Analytics Tab. 
• You can create a collection of analytics to ensure easy access to the information that is specific to your projects. These analytics can be easily shared with the groups, users, roles, or territories to ensure everyone on your team has access to the data needed. 
• You filter the reports according to their values, URL parameters, and more to ensure the swift retrieval of required information. 
• Schedule and Subscribe to Reports feature keeps you informed about the metrics that matter without the need for manually running reports. Additionally, you can set report conditions to get automated notifications when conditions are met. 
• Report data can be exported in the spreadsheets, allowing you to work on them across multiple tools.  
• Einstein Discovery brings AI capabilities to the Salesforce reports to analyze the data and help with easy-to-understand insights. 

6. Automation to Accomplish More With Fewer Resources

From automating repetitive low-touch tasks to executing specific tasks automatically when defined events occur. Salesforce has intelligent automation capabilities powered by Salesforce Flow Builder.

Flow Builder is a declarative automation interface, enabling businesses to apply automation to simple or complex business processes without writing any code. These business processes could be anything from sending follow-up emails, updating records, approval orchestration, and more. 

7. Customization

Salesforce is a highly customizable CRM, enabling organizations to get the capabilities tailored for their organizations. Beyond the Salesforce features, it allows businesses to build custom applications to meet their specific needs. You can hire a Salesforce developer to build customizable applications on the Salesforce platform. 

Salesforce also has a pre-built library of third-party solutions accessible through the Salesforce AppExchange. These solutions can be easily integrated into your Salesforce, expanding its capabilities. 

Final Take

Salesforce is not just a customer relationship management platform,  it is a strategic partner for businesses to navigate today’s digital landscape. It is helping businesses of all sizes, from enterprises to small businesses, to understand their customers and deliver a personalized experience to them. 

Here at Smart IT Staff, we have expertise in Salesforce consulting and staff augmentation services to help businesses understand and implement the use cases of Salesforce in their business operations. Leverage Salesforce experts from our team to guide you through every step. Let’s connect to understand the Salesforce CRM and how it can be tailored to your business operations.