Hi there,
This is the first article of this series and my first article on the community (please be kind :p) called “All about FSO”. In this series, I will try to do a nuanced analysis of this wonderful application from ServiceNow. In this article, I will try to understand the strengths and weaknesses of ServiceNow FSO when compared with its real-time competitor known as ‘SalesForce Financial Cloud’. So, let’s start this roller coaster ride with an overview of Salesforce offerings.
About
- Company summary: Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) service and a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. They positioned their suite of products as the Customer Success Platform as depicted below:
- Products vs. Platform: Salesforce’s products align to the various stage of the customer journey as well as integration, management (e.g. analytics), collaboration (e.g. productivity, communities), and enablement capabilities. Platform capabilities allow customers to extend sales and service capabilities through custom apps or through third-party apps
Products SalesForce Offer
- Products – collectively referred to as the Customer Success Platform
- Products that customer the journey: Sales (Sales Cloud), Marketing (Marketing Cloud), Commerce (Commerce Cloud), Engagement (Heroku), Communities
- Industries – Industry-aligned instances of the Customer Success Platform
- Productivity (Quip)
- Enablement (Trailhead)
- Analytics (Tableau)
- Integration (MuleSoft) – ability to integrate Salesforce and non-Salesforce applications
- Platform
- capabilities allow customers to integrate Salesforce and non-Salesforce applications (via MuleSoft) and extend sales and service capabilities through custom apps built on their Lightning Platform or through third-party apps offered in their AppExchange.
Let’s have a look at some strengths and weaknesses of Salesforce Offering.
Strengths
- The leading CRM platform in the industry and particularly with their acquisition of MuleSoft leading to the launch of their Customer 360 product, they have solidified their position as the customer master from a data and service perspective.
- Efficient front office experience leveraging agent console with omnichannel engagement, macros for repetitive tasks, a single integrated pane of glass.
- Full-featured industry-specific demo template enabling highly customized and branded demos.
- Strong implementation partner ecosystem plus robust AppExchange store for partner apps.
Weaknesses
- SFDC also has workflows. However, their workflows only work within the SFDC “bubble”. In other words, the data must persist in SFDC objects (tables). This implies more investment by the customers to integrate with numerous, disparate systems. Costly and lengthy time to market. Hence this is why SFDC has purchased MuleSoft. Also, this requires a specific skillset a customer would need to hire to administer which means more cost.
- Lack of workflow and task management for assigning issues to non-customer-facing employees and departments for resolution.
- Hard to build and manage complex workflows (e.g. parallel tasks), many components, no overall visual workflow.
- No visibility for sales and customer services teams to complete customer history and current account status, including real-time product and service information and configuration, open issues, or impending SLA breaches.
- Difficult to create personalized and automated self-service; no service catalog or automation hub.
Some Key Differentiators:
- Ability to provide a complete end to end view of actions needed to serve the customer so that customers have complete visibility of their service requests and all employees across middle, front, back-office teams and relevant corporate functions can collaborate effectively.
- Ability to map scale case management and workflows across the entire organization for any function in parallel to improve employee experiences at scale. Processes can be mapped down to individual employees, so managers have a complete view of their talent.
- Ability to embed security, risk, and compliance management controls into any process and overlay a comprehensive dashboard for real-time monitoring and remediation.
- Ability to directly map customer service issues to specific IT assets on the back end and thus be able to embed remediation plans in case of outages, performance issues, and/or other triggers (e.g. exceeding risk tolerance thresholds, etc.).
- Ability to aggregate and link data across the entire platform for a powerful, real-time view of the overall health of the business; can be viewed through different lenses for different audiences for which managers can embed appropriate responses to key indicators to drive operational resiliency.
My take:
- Workflows: SFDC also has workflows. Reiterating that their workflows only work within the SFDC “bubble”. It requires a costly and lengthy time to market.
Whereas Servicenow workflows are the foundation of our platform, so they work outside of a firms’ systems of record. They are the system of action that can be the connective tissue across those systems. The platform of platforms. Less-costly, faster time to market, less of a specific skill-set to implement and administer.
- Front-to-Back: Again, SFDC focuses mostly on the front office (engagement layer). Whereas Servicenow can pick it up from there and connect the front, middle, and back offices. Their architecture is specifically designed for that without having to be the system of record. SFDC does not provide the same.
Whereas Salesforce’s software is centered around the customer while ServiceNow is centered around the action. Therefore, Servicenow FSO is inherently built to unite across front- middle- and back-offices to actually deliver on front-to-back offices.
- Employee experience:
Again, since SFDC primarily plays in the front office (engagement layer), inherently they don’t provide a better employee experience within the middle and back offices, whereby Servicenow does. Servicenow can streamline, automate, and lessen the administrative burden on those sectors. Giving employees the right tools to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively leads, by extension, to a better customer experience. That’s natural.
Whereas, Salesforce does not have anything to offer in the middle/back offices or corporate functions (e.g. compliance, HR, finance). They launched Lightning Flows (Platform) to enable that but it is still front office-driven. There is also a working norm that does not work in Salesforce's favor. If you were in the credit card team, do you start your team in Salesforce? No. A middle-back office employee won’t start their day in Salesforce; they start in email or Fiserv or another banking system. Same with employees who sit in corporate/support functions (e.g. IT, Finance, HR, etc.). ServiceNow provides a workspace where all employees can start and end their day.
That's all for today. Thanks for reading!
