As reported in the latest report published by Nucleus Research last week, as many as 51% of Salesforce customers would switch to a different CRM solution if the opportunity arose. There are many objections from users, and each of them only intensifies the impression that Salesforce sat comfortably in the leader seat and did not even notice when the competition took the lead.
Costs are rising, but quality froze
According to the report, as many as 23% of customers say that the value provided by Salesforce decreases in relation to the cost and lags behind the value provided by competitors. And this is not only an objection to the constant price increases served by Salesforce, but mainly to the growing dissonance between the quality provided and the price dictated. As noted by Nucleus, the supplier shifts the developer costs to the customer. Salesforce users interviewed by Nucleus reported that they lacked guidance and support from the vendor, and expressed concerns about the solution’s rising cost versus value.
Customers feel that the support has not kept pace. Often, questions go unanswered for weeks or months, and assistance is relatively limited. Users are left to navigate pain points on their own or pay an external consulting group a considerable fee to set up or manage Salesforce for them – reads the report.
According to Nucleus, the reason for this may be Salesforce’s approach to developing its CRM capabilities. Development of new features and extensions is mostly accomplished through acquisitions and external ecosystems rather than organic product development. This strategy causes data integration problems across multiple applications, leading to duplicate or invalid data sources. Ultimately, these challenges increase end-user frustration.
Anything but Salesforce
Particularly noteworthy is the information that more than half of Salesforce customers would switch to a different CRM solution if such an opportunity arose. In addition, Nucleus examined the rate of return on investment of companies that decided to abandon the existing system in favor of competition.
“On average, they (companies) achieved a positive ROI within 12 months, making the cost of switching from Salesforce far lower than most customers anticipated”.
In the surveys that were carried out in the study, users rated the implementation process with lowest score among all market leaders. The main contributing factors, according to respondents, were the unnecessary complexity of the process that increased user training costs, and integration issues that increased the application management expenses.
“Compared to other leading vendors, the cost to implement Salesforce is notably higher, and Nucleus estimates that greater than 95 percent of Salesforce functionality is achievable through alternative vendors at fractions of the cost. In addition, Salesforce customers must regularly resort to purchasing higher subscription tiers just to access one or two additional features and end up paying a high cost for capabilities that go unused”.
The opinion of as much as 43% of customers who said that Salesforce is definitely more focused on the success and PR of their own company than on the success of their customers is definitely devastating.
Source: Nucleus Report “Salesforce wanders off the trail“, 2022-04-12, https://nucleusresearch.com/salesforce-wanders-off-the-trail/