Salesforce slaps UK Enterprise customers with 40% price hike British Salesforce customers have been disproportionately hit by a price hike of the cloudy business' enterprise CRM system. The price for its Lightning Enterprise Edition software in the US increased by 20 per cent to $150 (£103) per month, while in Blighty prices rose 41 per cent to £120. One customer got in touch with The …
If only there was some alternative. Oh, hang on ...
I like keeping it Open Source. And closer to home - the software that was forked from had gone native in the US, so that was becoming less and less interesting.
The only pain is that it is exceptionally sensitive to ad blockers and things like noscript - as a matter of fact, it's pretty much impossible to administer because of all the cross scripting alerts you trigger. Once you've worked that out and use a clean browser for admin you're OK (I use Vivaldi).
Yep. Plenty of alternatives and they are bearing down on Salesforce right now and SF knows it. So, now, just try getting off of SF to one of those alternatives. Makes the price hike look paltry by comparison. Today, no potential customer that is just coming into the CRM space should use SF. Too costly and there are too many other good choices for newbies. SF has reached the point where they now have to squeeze existing customers for real growth. Tough times ahead. They are being surrounded by some orgs with deep pockets and big CRM ambitions.
WTF does this really mean? "In this new era, customer service reigns supreme, and your agents need shareable, omnichannel, 360-degree views of every single customer. Service Cloud Lightning empowers your agents to make your customers love you, and Field Service Lightning expands this power to your field service technicians."
Omnichannel 360-degree views? Do that mean you have access to all of the data?
In the joyous world of SaaS customer experience* which I inhabit we love these kind of buzzwords, here is a short glossary:
omnichannel - basically a list of all the ways the customer can contact you eg phone, live chat, email, facebork, twatter, Google + (yes I know), Instagram, viber and which ever shiny new insecure upstart pops up to "disrupt" the world of comms.
360 degree view - hoping you have pulled all the data into one place so when the client says "my sales rep said......" the agent has a vague hope of finding the email or call notes. And if you have outsourced the operation more stuff for them to steal and sell on.
Empower your agents - give them a tool with a better uptime than sex panther in the vague hope they can find the answer to the obscure question from the anorak on the freemium package.
*in the good old days it was service but now we want it to be an experience........
"Service Cloud Lightning empowers your agents to make your customers love you."
"Hi Customer. Meet Mr Cloud Lightning Tazer. Do you love us?"
"Ow! Bastard!"
"Hi Customer. Meet Mr Cloud Lightning Tazer. Do you love us?"
"Ow! Bastard!"
-
-
"Hi Customer. Meet...."
"Yes! Yes! I love you. Sell me something. Anything. Just sell me something now!"
"Wanna buy some more socks?"
Oh I do like the smell of Customer Rehabilitation Management in the morning.
As neither Safe Harbor or Privacy Shield presently exist, data of EU clients hosted in the US could give you all sorts of fun headaches with Data Protection laws if permission wasn't sought for it (after all, permission was only ever sought for hosting it in an environment with comparable protection. In reality, that was a big fat lie too, but at least there was some political cover for that. Now there's nowt.
Thus, I think they're merely fleecing their customers for all they can right now until someone wakes up to that problem and EU sales drop off the map. Not that EU companies will walk away willingly, but it only takes one customer addressing this in a way that hits the press and all hell could break loose ..
.. in which case I'll need quite a lot of popcorn.
So UK prices have gone from being 6% higher than the US (which is probably about right) to being 17% higher which isn't really justifiable. If you are an SFC customer the question to ask your rep is what value-add has SFC in the UK added to make the software more expensive? Then ask for a bigger discount to offset the effect of the UK's larger increase. At least make them squirm. And let them know that you know that they're full of crap.
This is the same sort of "logic" that VMware used when they started this trend of having higher list prices in selected countries, like the UK, Eurozone, Australia, etc. I say "logic" because they - VMware, SFC.com - don't know how exchange rates work. I think they actually believe what they are saying. However they don't know that most people outside the US understand exchange rates better than nearly everyone in the US. They don't know that their customers know that they are being ripped off. But they do know that they're making more money after the change so everything's OK from their perspective.
Every SFC.com (and VMware) customer in the UK (and the EU and Australia) should think about switching to a vendor who doesn't employ this approach.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
