We’ve been using Salesforce.com‘s on demand customer relationship management (CRM) here at Nexus451 for 5 years now, mainly for sales management – tracking lead generation, contact manager, building business intelligence (BI) – and evolving our business process management (BPM). As an on demand, software as a service (SaaS), CRM solution it makes perfect sense for us to choose the Salesforce cloud because we can scale according to our sales team’s requirements. As we grow our professional services offerings – more hosted solutions will be announced in the coming months – and social media strategy we can rapidly develop and integrate Salesforce with other in-house software requirements.
What we’ve found, and are more than happy to educate our clients about, is the potential for enhancing the basic Salesforce offering. More often than not an initial set-up of the Salesforce CRM for companies is only the tip of the iceberg, and we’re lucky to have clients who are eager to explore not only how it can help them as a piece of customer management software but also help them revolutionise their business process management structures.
Naturally, companies might already have legacy data and systems in place that they don’t necessarily want to replace – it might not be cost-effective to do so, or they simply might not want all data to be transferred to the cloud. The simplest, and cleanest, solution is a hybrid one: integrating the relevant data via secure information pathways between Salesforce and other systems using sControls, XML gateways and Apex code.
Salesforce’s AppXchange – with over 1,000 business apps available – provides plenty of pre-packaged integration tools that suit a lot of our customer service software SaaS requirements. As an accredited Magic Software iBolt partner Nexus451 is also able to offer greater Salesforce CRM integration with business systems such as Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP Business One, Oracle’s JD Edwards and many others.
Of course, being a Cloud Services and Web Development company we can also develop bespoke business application systems within the Force.com cloud development platform. Creating these seamless, branded, integrated solutions is where we get our kicks – building intelligent solutions that give our clients greater data transparency and business insight is great fun. Sad, but true. 
We chose to develop on the Salesforce.com platform simply because it leads the way in terms of robust scalability, which for a hosted on demand business CRM is hugely important to our clients. It’s flexibility also allows use to quickly develop customer portals for clients, which is especially useful because these portals can be branded to fit in with our clients existing online presence – an important visual factor in reassuring customers who are logging in to interact with a company. This is possible due to the VisualForce infrastructure Salesforce have implemented, which makes it possibly to incorporate additional technologies and functionality into the Salesforce Cloud. Sales automation, customer service alerts and feedback, two way sms integration, social media, etc, can all be part of the one business application which allows our clients the freedom to reallocate in-house resources and respond more effectively to market drivers.
By working with our clients Nexus451 helps them strategically define a coherent architecture which allows them to control information flow between data eco-systems, maintain system integrity, while removing the need for duplicate data input and manual intervention.
If you’d like to find out more about moving your business into the cloud, or extending your Salesforce CRM functionality, just get in contact with us and we’ll arrange a free initial consultation at our offices.