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SAN FRANCISCO—Salesforce.com continued its effort to expand its product line with the introduction of Customforce.com, an on-demand tool kit that lets companies customize their CRM applications to meet specific industry business processes.
Customforce.com is a free-of-charge add-on that is designed to reduce the time it takes to customize Salesforce.coms online customer relationship management applications. Salesforce.com officials claim that application customization projects that can take weeks or months using traditional methods can be performed in minutes with the Customforce.com tool kit.
Customforce.com is part of the Winter 05 release of Salesforce.coms on-demand CRM subscription service, which also includes the Supportforce.com customer service tool that the company released in September.
The company introduced the new versions during its annual Dreamforce user conference here that was attended by an estimated 2,500 customers and users. This is about two-thirds more than attended the companys first user conference in 2003, company officials said.
Customforce.com is essentially a spinoff of the customization tool kit that Salesforce.com released in April with the Spring 04 version of its on-demand CRM applications, said company Chairman Marc Benioff.
Since then, customers have quickly picked up the tool kit to build custom fields, workflows, pages and other components into their online applications, Benioff said.
Based on customers enthusiasm for the package, “We decided that the [tool kit] should be its own product, its own technology, its own brand” that would evolve and grow with the rest of the Salesforce.com product line, he said.
Benioff said his company was encouraged to do this because “customers are really grabbing the bull by the horns. They are saying they dont want to use Microsoft Access or Filemaker to build on-demand applications. They are saying, We want to build these applications with the objects and widgets” that Salesforce.com is providing, he said.
Salesforce.com is offering the tool kit for free because it is not looking for a new incremental revenue stream, Benioff said. The company is counting on the tool kit to win new customers and to expand the use of Salesforce.com CRM within existing customer sites, he said.
Next page: Why JLG subscribed to Salesforce.com.
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For example, JLG Industries Inc., a manufacturer of aerial lifts and access equipment based in McConnellsburg, Pa., first subscribed to the Salesforce.com CRM applications for its sales, customer service, marketing and executive teams.
Scott Milligan, JLG Industries director of sales process development, said that since that time the company used the customization tool kit in the Spring 04 version to develop a complete sales training program.
This means that the entire training department is working with Salesforce.com and training additional JLG sales staff members to use this software, Benioff said. This will not only help make JLGs sales team more productive, but it will encourage expanded use of the online software throughout the sales organization, he said.
The Winter 05 edition of Salesforce.com also includes new analytical features called historical snapshots and trends to enable sales executives to review historical pipeline data on important data such as cases and opportunities.
An installed products features enables sales representatives to capture information on products and services, including competing products, which were previously purchased by customers.
The latest version also includes features that support multidepartmental administration. This will enable administrators to delegate some of their responsibilities while maintaining control over the companys data.
In addition, the Winter 05 release includes a lot of enhancements to its Very Large Organization architecture that provides a high level of availability and reliability for customers with large numbers of subscribers working on shared systems.
The Supportforce Winter 05 edition includes “solutions categories” that provide an easy way to browse through the CRM knowledge base to quickly get answers to customer questions and solutions to problems.
It also includes a self-service portal that gives customers a way to browse a public knowledge base to give them the means to answer their questions before calling for support.
Salesforce.com said that it has about 185,000 subscribers using its CRM products in about 12,000 organizations of all sizes worldwide.