Improving business relationships with customers is the primary objective of every profit-driven business, especially in today’s highly-intense business environment. The best thing is that this objective can easily be achieved with an effective Customer relationship management on your side.
The main goals of implementing Customer relationship management (CRM) systems in the business are to streamline the sales and marketing processes, increase customer revenue, enhance customer satisfaction, and discover new customers. CRM acts as a bridge between customers, organizations, and prospects. The best CRM platform can help you manage and grow your business by keeping data organized in a systematic way and providing you with clear and deep insights analytics.
A big name in the CRM world is Salesforce, which is currently one of the world’s leading CRM platforms for businesses of all sizes. There are many pretty reasons to consider Salesforce a customer success platform as it is robust, flexible, and interactive in nature that holds all the information required to maintain a strong and effective relationship with customers.
Salesforce is a powerful CRM platform for businesses. It is highly configurable and can be easily customized to meet different and specific business requirements. While both the terms Salesforce customization and Salesforce configuration are often used interchangeably, both these terms carry different meanings.
Let’s deep dive into understanding the differences between these two concepts and determining the best way to proceed with for the growth of your business.
Salesforce Customization
Salesforce Customization refers to the process of adding new features or functionalities that are unavailable or not accessible in the default application environment. It deals with the custom development of code and encompasses outside tools to develop features that fit the business needs. Salesforce may be more beneficial wherever the original configuration doesn’t serve the purpose.
Few examples of Salesforce Customization
- Apex triggers: Automate complex business actions to be executed upon certain operations.
- Visualforce pages: Display information in a different way on the screen.
- Real-time integration: Transfer your information to another system each and every you update a record.
- vCard: Generates from a given contact through the addition of Apex code.
Advantages of Salesforce Customization
- Easy to build everything and anything that the customers ask for
- Offering a wide variety of functionalities
- Higher customer satisfaction and retention
- Doesn’t affect the rest of the structure of the application
- Targeted on Single customer base
Disadvantages of Salesforce Customization
- Difficult to maintain
- Might be a risk for the future scalability of the application
- Could get into unnecessary customization even if not required
Salesforce Configuration
Salesforce Configuration focuses on utilizing its built-in tools, functionality, tools, and components to create the best strategies for your business. Basically, it means facilitating user-defined functions that will empower certain features to start business operations.
Salesforce offers a wide range of configuration tools such as:
- Creating custom fields on an object
- Enforcing data quality through validation rules
- Creating formula fields
- Crafting data reports with few clicks
- Configuring workflows to automate operations like emails, field value updates, managing security, and data sharing.
Advantages of Salesforce configuration
- Support different kinds of customers and users
- Provide high-end flexibility
- Can be reused for the better development and operations by customers
- Prevents duplication of code
- Can manage all the logic at one place effectively
Disadvantages of Salesforce Configuration
- Very Complex to build
- Requires inter option dependency
- Difficult to test stability due to multiple chosen paths
- Testing becomes complicated as each component needs to be considered
Items that can be configured and customized in a Salesforce Platform
What your business needs: Salesforce customization or configuration?
Before you decide what you need to consider Salesforce customization or configuration, you need to first seek whether the additional business function you wish to add is available in the configuration tools or not.
Salesforce provides point and clicks tools and modules for configuration.
You can choose configuration when you have:
- Multiple customers and multiple options for them.
- A variety of user segments that will be accessing the system for a long time.
- A limited time, budget, and expertise.
You can consider Salesforce customization when:
- Business operations cannot be followed through workflows and validation rules.
- You need a 3rd party integration.
- Standard reports are not enough to acquire the required information.
- End users are uncomfortable with the configured platform.
- You have to cater to one client with strict deadlines.
- Highly skilled expertise, dedicated timelines, and budget.
Final Words
Both Salesforce customization and configuration have equal importance for organizations to achieve their business objectives. Consider all the above parameters and circumstances to decide which one is best to opt for.
I’m sure that you might have an idea by now that configuration alone is not enough in some cases and customization serves various benefits. Using customization or configuration depends upon the business processes, technical skills of the professionals, and what you wish to accomplish.
Cloud Analogy – A Salesforce development and consulting company that can help you from scratch to finish evaluating on how you can get the most out of Salesforce and what you need to customize or configure for the growth of your business. Consult our certified Salesforce experts to achieve your business goals and stay ahead of the competition.
