In the present era, technology has become an integral part of our lives. There have been many revolutions in the technological world. One such revolution is CRM (Customer Relationship Management), a cloud-based platform that helps businesses in sales, marketing, support, and account departments. Customer service has become a vital aspect in the growth of any business, and CRM platforms handle customer relations and management of the organization.
Salesforce and Servicenow are two of the foremost CRM tools that the CRM industry offers. They both are well-known for managing sales and workflow and generating profits for the company. In this blog, we will compare Servicenow vs Salesforce and try to figure out which is better in terms of features, their pros and cons, and the industries that use them.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management tool that helps businesses find more prospects, close more deals and increase their customer base with spectacular services. It is designed by Salesforce, a cloud computing SaaS company. It helps manage all the aspects of the relationship between the customers and the enterprise. It is the most popular AI-powered Customer Relationship Management tool that allows businesses to use cloud technology to connect with partners, existing customers, and potential customers.
Features of Salesforce
• Account Management:
With Salesforce account management, you can centralize all the customer service cases, and customer data, and transmit all primary contacts and reports in one single place. It helps in simplifying your business operations and facilitating your company’s sales process by automating the task of contact organization in a well-categorized manner. It helps create real-time customer accounts and helps maintain your team’s consistency in managing the accounts.
You can store the following information in the system using Salesforce account management:
- You can write the company’s name or the business’s title.
- You can add the sector to which the business or company belongs.
- You can also add the size of the company.
- You can add the website reference and contact details of the company.
- You can add the billing and delivery address for the sales department.
- Adding the account owner’s general information like name and other details will help the account managers with better client interactions.
• Contact Management:
Contact management is a cloud-based feature that helps you to track and store customer data and leads. It includes social profile (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter) information and insights of the customers, activity history of the customers, etc. giving you a head start in the sales meetings. The social media information of the customers helps understand what the consumers are saying or sharing about the products and services on their social media handles. It helps diversify the customer base and helps in improving engagement between the customers and the company.
• Salesforce Engage:
One of the biggest miscommunications happening in a company or an organization is between the sales and marketing departments. The coordination of both sales and marketing departments is crucial for enhancing the selling power of the company. You can achieve this using Salesforce Engage which plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between these two departments by showing real-time sales alerts and sharing the marketing content with the sales department. You can send personalized messages to customers to enhance customer engagement. You can use the interactive dashboard feature for tracking the campaign’s performance.
• Opportunity Management:
Opportunity management is one of the top features of Salesforce. It is described as the process or specific guidelines that help you guide through the sales cycle until its closure. It helps you manage your sales deals, provides insights into sales performance, and guides representatives through the sales deal. You can view products, quotes, competition, stage-related data, customer activity timelines, and business competitors. It provides a hassle-free email service to clients with its ready-made templates.
• Sales Collaboration:
The sales collaboration feature helps the sales team to work together towards a common goal. Sales is not a solo show but the collaboration of the sales team, sales representative, and the customer. Every day team members collaborate with each other and drive sales forward and close deals effectively taking advantage of each member’s skills and expertise. Sales collaboration helps in finding the sales experts, sharing project details, sharing competitive data among the team, etc. for the remote growth of the business.
• Lead Management:
Lead management is a systematic process of acquiring, analyzing, managing, and nurturing the leads so that either they complete a purchase or are transformed into new business opportunities. Leads are a vital component of the Salesforce CRM and are created when the database updates with new contact information. It helps track leads in your emails and assigns potential leads to the sales representatives for converting marketing leads into sales. It helps businesses by providing information on the marketing strategies impacting the sales pipelines. It uses a sales path to understand the crucial documents and provides access to the timeline’s up-to-date contacts.
• Sales Performance Management:
Sales performance management (SPM) is a structured data-informed approach that automates back-office operational sales. It is a vital tool in improving operational effectiveness and efficiency by planning, managing, and analyzing sales performance. You can use the data integration and AI capabilities of Salesforce to understand and improve the sales team’s performance. SPM provides a metric-based environment for team goals that helps improve the execution of the sales process by giving continuous feedback and rewards to the sales teams.
• Partner Management:
Partner management helps develop the partner ecosystem that makes the sales process smooth and fast for partners. According to Salesforce, Partners are the elite community of certified Salesforce professionals who work with you across products, industries, and everything in between. You can boost partner management in your partner ecosystem by managing recruitment, onboarding, and training of partners, and supporting the indirect sales channel. You can create interactive and engaging partner destinations by delivering AI-powered content recommendations. It helps smooth coordination with the partners to build a result-oriented marketing campaign on the cloud. It helps revamp the partner ties and customize the information access.
• Quote Management:
Quote management helps in productivity tracking. It tracks and keeps a record of the products that are part of the sales deal and includes product code, quantity, standard price, and quoted price. It has a built-in quoting mechanism that quotes client data automatically. It also sends the email to the client of the approved template in PDF format.
• Email Integration:
Salesforce lighting syncs your Gmail or Outlook into your Salesforce CRM. It syncs your calendar, contacts, events, and everything for fast working. Salesforce email features help to send emails not only from your personal accounts but also from accessible records like leads, contacts, campaigns, and opportunities. Sales representatives can streamline their workflows by updating the real-time data in the sales pipeline. You can attach bills, encrypt and send sensitive data, or track all your email activity. You can even send scheduled emails to your teams updating them about the tasks, or you can send group emails to the customers or clients. This feature has built-in intelligence that helps users sell their services and products in slicker ways.
• Sales Forecasting:
Sales forecasting is the process of predicting the expected sales revenue on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. This process involves different levels of forecasting within an organization.
- Sales managers estimate the team’s business revenues using the sales forecast of representatives.
- Sales directors estimate department sales revenues using team sales forecast.
- The Vice President of sales projects sales revenue of the organization using forecasts of department sales.
- These reports are shared with the board members, shareholders, and company leaders.
This feature helps the business to get real-time forecasting and observations of the whole team. You can view the top performer in the team by tracking the leaderboard. It will help you predict new opportunities in business and boost sales team productivity.
Industries using Salesforce
- Healthcare: Amgen, Takeda Pharmaceutical, Strive Health, Sanofi.
- Retail Commerce: Adidas, L’Oreal, American Red Cross, Crocs, Fila.
- Financial Services: Accenture, Deloitte, Yodlee, Informatica, U.S. Bank.
- Media and Communication: NY Times, Wall Street Journal, NBC Universal, Bloomberg.
- Manufacturing and Consumer Goods: BlueScope Steel, KONE, The Hershey Company.
What is ServiceNow?
Servicenow is a cloud-based workflow automation platform to help companies and enterprise organizations manage their digital workflows and improve operational efficiencies by automating and streamlining routine work tasks. It has dominated the ITSM domain for many years and excels in tracking workflows through various IT apps and systems. It gives organizations the ability to scale and seamless cloud options by providing services for IT, security, HR, customer service, etc.
Features of Servicenow
• Management of IT Services:
ITSM is a strategic approach showing the management of IT teams delivering end-to-end services to the customers. It is a set of tools and workflows that you can use to determine and analyze IT processes, services, and infrastructure. It helps you to create a roadmap for evaluating the business. It helps in increasing productivity and streamlining IT services.
ITSM helps in improving productivity and response time. It helps increase agility, flexibility, and user satisfaction. Workforce optimization in ITSM helps companies detect and fix IT issues and problems using 24/7 AI modules. The planning flow of Servicenow helps the HR team handle employee shifts and assists them with the work-life balance.
• Operations – IT:
According to ServiceNow, IT operations management (ITOM) is the management and strategic approach to planning, building, and operating digital services, technology, components, and application requirements in organizations. It uses Artificial intelligence and machine learning for automating operations, enhancing IT services availability, and reducing IT costs. It helps detect and identify the root causes of IT problems and issues quickly and accurately and precludes them from happening by proactively initiating action to transpire that minimizes any possible threat or issues. The analytic portfolio of IT business helps focus on the areas that may require eminent attention and gee up a time to build the values.
• Analytics and Reporting:
Natural Language Query (NLQ) empowers the Analytics Q&A app that supports languages like English, Spanish, French, Japanese, and German and helps IT staff members in generating numerous reports (bar reports, tables, etc.) just by typing a query. The predictive analysis can be performed using Machine Learning and statistical algorithms to predict the outcome of an event.
• Field Service Management:
Field service management (FSM) is a system of organizing and optimizing off-site workers and field operations. Initially, it involved field technicians exchanging phone calls and paperwork manually. But after the introduction of FSM, organizations can easily maintain the work or tasks assigned to the field agents or workers. The FSM module provides support for the dispatcher dashboard, full dispatching, and the agent-oriented calendar view that gives dispatchers an overview of the availability of agents, auto-assignment, and manual planning of the tasks. The dispatcher can smoothly monitor the queue and take actions accordingly with the help of virtual assistants like Agent recommendation and the SLA Tracker.
• Mobile Applications:
The Now mobile app is designed with exciting enhancements. The AI-powered advanced search makes the search efficient by auto-correcting the typing errors. There are various functions of the Servicenow Now app:
- The global search option helps to find answers.
- You can submit requests and issues for help.
- You can submit and manage the approvals.
- The customizable dashboard card allows the user to make items, create a contact list, and complete actions on the card.
- You can create or modify the components for use in the mobile app by using the mobile studio feature.
- You can create a structured workflow to solve the higher-dimensional data with the help of the flow-variable feature.
- You can track your location and do offline work from the mobile app.
• Customer Service Management:
Customer Service Management (CSM) is a set of tools and workflows that helps manage the customer experience irrespective of the interaction and the engagement channel. CSM helps solve customer issues by coordinating with the front and back offices together. It helps drive customer loyalty by troubleshooting and resolving complex issues using digital workflows and Artificial Intelligence. Customer service agents use CSM to improve first-call resolutions.
• Change Advisory Board Workbench:
CAB managers schedule, plan, and manage CAB meetings using the automated workflow of the Change Advisory Board Workbench. You can define the CAB meeting schedule and attendees, schedule CAB meetings, record meeting notes, and approve or reject a change request. It increases productivity and automates tasks like attendees lists, meeting agendas, occurrences, invitations, and responses.
• Security Management:
You can find the vulnerabilities in the app and fix the errors and bugs effectively using the security tools of Servicenow. The employees, stakeholders, clients, or managers can raise a ticket or update it and discuss Root Cause Analysis and possible solutions. The user can fix the issue ASAP by knowing the SLA, priority, and impact of the issue from the raised ticket. It helps in reducing IT service monitoring costs by almost 60%.
Industries using Servicenow
- Education: Australian Catholic University, American University, University of Maryland.
- Healthcare: VITAS Healthcare, Community Health Systems, Sanford Health, Oxford Health NHS Foundation.
- Manufacturing: Jabil, Siemens, Owens-Illinois, 3M Company
- Telecommunications, IT and Media: Vodafone, DXC Technology, Orange Business Services.
- Retail: Wayfair, Overstock, 7-Eleven, Walmart.
- Financial Services: Swiss Re, Nomura, ING, Raymond James, Lloyds Banking Group.
- Energy and Utilities: Affinity Water, Engie, National Grid, Nexen Energy.
Pros and Cons of Salesforce
Let’s check out the difference between Salesforce and Servicenow by comparing their pros and cons.
Pros:
- It has an easy set-up procedure and is simple to operate.
- Automation has helped in enhancing efficiency and improving messaging service.
- It is highly customizable and supports 3rd party extensions.
- It is highly scalable.
- Multiple platforms and apps like Google Cloud, Zendesk, Dropbox, and MailChimp easily integrate with the Salesforce using its open API.
- It is mobile-friendly, i.e. you can manage the data easily anytime and anywhere.
- It has a formidable ecosystem and a strong community of developers.
- It has its own Artificial Intelligence for predicting and uncovering insights about the customer.
- It has a simple, robust, and flexible data security model that helps secure your data when using the cloud service.
Cons:
- The setup and configuration are time-consuming and complex.
- It is expensive and has poor customer support.
- The cluttered interface makes navigation complex and has a never-ending learning curve.
- It has limited marketing management functionality and user adoption issues.
- Generating reports feature is not user-friendly.
- Customization toolkits are sometimes clumsy and hard to use.
At times, you may face difficulties with the transitions between transactions
Pros and Cons of Servicenow
Pros:
- It has increased agility and flexibility that helps in rapid innovations.
- It helps in improving efficiency and generating cost savings for the business.
- It helps in increasing the productivity of the company.
- It helps in efficient task management with the help of its multi-instance architecture.
- It helps in saving time by eliminating duplicates by using its Single system of Record feature.
- It helps automate the workflow and has a fast set-up as it requires less configuration for setting up the system.
- It is a robust and powerful platform with an open architecture design that provides an intuitive service experience.
Cons:
- It has a complex module and management of customization is hard for new clients.
- It requires administrator assistance for adding Configuration Items.
- It is challenging to understand Navigation Panel.
- Some of the modules of Servicenow have a steep learning curve.
- There are ample chances that you can miss out on the subtasks.
- It is expensive and has complicated workflows and outdated processes.
- Poor knowledge and lack of expertise of the features may lead to the poor execution of ServiceNow.
The set-up procedure for mobile apps is complex.
Salesforce vs Servicenow Comparison
| Parameters | Salesforce | Servicenow |
| Overview | It is a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that helps track customer activities. | It is the automated cloud computing software that helps in managing the operational workflows of the companies. |
| Language | Apex | JavaScript |
| Integrations | MailChimp, Salesforce Sales Cloud. | Box, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, VMWare, AirWatch. |
| Platforms | Web, Android, iPhone | Windows, online support, video tutorials. |
| Performance | It has high performance with an uptime of 99.9%. | It has slightly low performance with an uptime of 99.8%. |
| Security | Encryption of sensitive data at rest.
HTTP for all pages. Reports/alerts for security breaches. Multi-factor authentication options. |
SSL Security |
| Implementation Time | 3-4 weeks | 4 months |
| Support | Poor customer support. | It has 24/7 customer support. |
| Usability | Flexible and mobile-friendly. | It has limitations as it is a web-based framework. |
| Accessibility Management | It supports accessibility management features. | It does not support this feature. |
| Audit Trails | It supports audit trails. | It does not support audit trails. |
| Pricing Structure | Cheap as compared to Servicenow. | Expensive |
Conclusion
Now it is high time to address the elephant in the room, which is better between Servicenow and Salesforce? We have assessed both systems based on various metrics and it has been quite a roller-coaster ride. Both have their strengths and weaknesses over each other, and it is a close call between the two. Although both are cloud-based platforms, Salesforce is a notch over Servicenow with its cutting-edge platform.
Both Salesforce and Servicenow are the top cloud-based SaaS software in their domains and provide exceptional services. It depends on the organization to decide which software to use depending on prospects whether they need SaaS for customer relationship management services or for managing the workflows within the organization.
