Having the right information in front of the right person at the right time is critical in providing customer support.  Customers expect to have most of their questions answered instantly and increasingly get frustrated if an answer is not available within minutes. Being able to provide this information to your customers in real time used to be a hallmark of superior customer service, but now is expected as standard customer service.

Salesforce.com has several options available to you to ensure that you’re keeping every customer satisfied.

Over the past 10+ years, we have had an opportunity to install, test, use (and often uninstall) countless AppExchange applications that extend and enhance the Salesforce CRM experience. We've done this in the context of our own internal instance of Salesforce as well as to support client needs. This posting lists some of our favorite AppExchange applications (click on the name to see the AppExchange listing).  Please note the cost (if any) and editions supported at the end of each review.  If you would like help or have questions on any of these, feel free to contact us.

Unless you have all the customers you need, some level of marketing is necessary and important. Despite the proliferation of spam, email marketing continues to be a key weapon in the marketer's arsenal. For our clients which use Salesforce CRM as their enterprise CRM system, we often have the conversation about the extent of the native capabilities of Salesforce CRM as it relates to email marketing, mass email, email tracking, etc. The goal of this article is to provide a high-level look at the difference between using the native capabilities of Salesforce CRM vs using a specialized email marketing or marketing automation application. We also highlight a number of third-party Email Marketing and Marketing Automation applications that are pre-integrated with salesforce.com.