Salesforce Ninja: An Elite Blog about Salesforce.com

Whenever you join a new company, there is a common problem that is seen everywhere. It is getting oriented with the company processes. If the company has more number of employees that can be counted on the fingers, then it is obvious that the newbie will be ragged and bullied by the gazillion computer systems that smash him on the face everyday. One of the most common phrase you hear on an enterprise level application, "No it won't work on Chrome or Firefox, install Internet Explorer 6" (I am not making this up). I often wonder if microsoft pays these IT guys to promote them or why this uncanny love with Internet Explorer but whatever the fact is, these system are. The systems are almost always slow, require some amount of dexterous skill and are working just because they are. Just like the governance in India these systems are working on some ancient wizardry. But the problem is, these enterprise system are necessary for governance. When we fill out a time sheet o...

Have you ever felt neglected in a shop? Companies spend billions and trillions on implementing a CRM system and the system fails miserably and come back to us, saying that CRM implementation failed. CRM is not a computer system, it is a methodology that comes from the brain, from the courtesy, from the manners. If you have no manners before implementation of CRM, chances are your CRM is going to fail, become annoying for your customer and you will lose thousands of them. But a effective CRM is going to give you 119% ROI, yes you heard me right, 119% and without spending a single dollar. I walked into Dominoes, Wakad, with intentions of eating a cheese burst pizza. As this dominoes was closed by to my office, it was good idea to step in for a Friday evening. That day as luck would have it, their computer system were facing some problems. (As a computer engineer, I should say, computer systems follow the 50-50-90 rule, if there is 50-50 chances of getting a thing right, there is 90% ...

CRM is probably one of the most risky business strategies evolved in the modern times. True, many customers would want to buy things from you, if they feel comfortable with your brand, but also true that most of the value the customer gets to you is when he purchases the product and not exactly the customer relation. Will you care about a customer if he really has no chance of buying a product from you? An 80 year old man walks into the clothes store looking for a good tie for his (probably) last high-school reunion. Helping it out will lose your brownie points for any up-selling opportunity, but might as well score well in the humanitarian department. What would you prefer? The most important malfunction of a CRM system is removal of the human touch from the whole system. We all detest system, we are born into one and have no choice but to choose and all humans avoid the system since then. You have a billion dollars and you set up a great call center, with a SLA...