Schools, universities and other educational institutions have one challenge in common. They need to constantly communicate with their students and often the parents as well.

Obviously, the students and their parents are different generations; and guess what, that means they have different communication styles, prefer different communications channels and are on different timeframes. They also have different information needs.

What they have in common is that they do have a smartphone and do not necessarily want to see yet another app on their phones’ home screens, or anywhere at all on their phones. They want and need timely information and an easy and simple way to supply information or, in the case of the students, work results. It is a valid assumption that the members of both stakeholder groups also have and use services like text and one or more messengers. Naturally, they all have email addresses. An increasing number of people also use unified communications software like MS Teams or Slack.

And, let us not forget about the personnel on the other side, the teachers, assistants, or members of the school boards.

Outbound use cases include attracting new students, ongoing information on offers and events to parents and students alike, requests for information, work assignments to students, notifications about upcoming deadlines for pending work, and many more.

On the inbound side we have requests for information, submission of information and work results, again amongst many other use cases.

And then, there is collaboration; virtual “classroom” education, townhall meetings, briefings, etc.

Given all this, how can an educational institution effectively and efficiently communicate with its two main external stakeholder groups, the students and their parents?

Without spilling the beans, the solution lies in using a CRM type of system in combination with a communications platform that can combine CTI, SMS, and other channels. There are a number of CRM systems that address education needs, but with Salesforce being the best known, let me use their education cloud as an example to start with. From here most, if not all, communication needs with the stakeholders can get organized and maintained. This provides staff with a single consolidated view on communications and interactions that happened with parents and students.

Which leaves the communications channels open, although Salesforce owns with Slack one of the prime unified communication tools. But as said, not everyone has Slack on the smartphone, so the ability to communicate by text and voice via phone that is directly integrated with and embedded into Salesforce is important. This is where ecosystem partners like Fastcall come into the picture to add the missing pieces. 

Fastcall is a communications solution that is natively built on and exclusively available for Salesforce. Fastcall allows to actively call or text stakeholders from within Salesforce as well as enabling video conferencing and screen sharing.

Incoming calls can be routed to the right recipients and callers are immediately identified. Inbound as well as outbound calls are captured by the built-in interaction logging. 

The combination of Salesforce and Fastcall allows the educational institution to reach out to registered prospects for follow-up purposes and “close the deal” by taking advantage of Salesforce’s segmentation, marketing and sales functionality and Fastcall’s communication abilities. Parents of students can be supplied with current information, reminders and status updates as these become available while students can be informed about assignments and reminded about approaching deadlines.

Classes, parent groups, meetings, events and so on could still be implemented using Salesforce owned functionality like Slack, or alternatively other tools like MS Teams or even Zoom.

Still, this way it is possible to accommodate many of the communications needs and wants of all three involved parties, the educational institution, the students and their parents, without forcing anyone to install an additional app on their smartphones. 

Lately, we have talked a lot about ecosystems, in particular business ecosystems. Normally, business ecosystems follow a hub and spoke model rather than a network approach; one major player sets it up, and then adds customers and partners like independent software vendors, systems integrators, analysts, consultants, suppliers, or other similar entities. Good examples of successful ecosystems are the ones around the big four enterprise software vendors: Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. Sure, there are other ones, but these are easy reference examples.

In theory, ecosystems shall provide more value to customers, better serving their needs by making it easier for them to get access to information, knowledge, skills and productized enhancements to the core solution that they chose to implement. They also get a broader choice of possible enhancements, provided by different vendors in the ecosystem. Of course, this also benefits the other participating stakeholders.

Customers are, of course, an important group of every ecosystem. Treating them as partners helps the platform company to create a transparent prioritization process for delivering requested new functionalities that extend the own solution in an optimal way. Not all customers provide the necessary input, though.

For the platform provider, the ecosystem creates stickiness. Still, this company cannot develop and provide all the functionality that is ever needed by its customers. Nor can it provide sufficient implementation services.

And it does not want to, either.

So, it needs ISVs and SIs as members of its ecosystem to provide this functionality, either as products, or as consulting solutions. What these companies deliver on top of the core solution also increases the attractiveness of the ecosystem. 

ISVs and SIs are often smaller ecosystem participants. They get access to customers and other participants of the ecosystem that complement their expertise. They might also see themselves merge with the platform provider. Worst case, the platform provider sees an opportunity and provides functionality that is similar to the one provided by one or more smaller partners. In this case, the platform provider becomes a competitor. We all have seen this.

Of course, there are also situations where partners compete with each other. The ecosystem is a place where coopetition happens, which is something that is mostly healthy.

The question that arises is how can small companies, especially ISVs, thrive and grow as part of an ecosystem. After all, it is the platform company that makes the rules and that has all the data while the other ecosystem players only have a partial view on it. For these smaller ISVs, this inherently bears the risk of becoming a commodity, which is not a desirable  position to be in, as commodity providers can be exchanged for each other.

This means that the  providers in an ecosystem need to be distinguishable from their  competition. In addition to the diminishing importance of product, price and promotion, another key factor is the experience that the company does provide, how hard (or rather easy) it is to work with the company, how easy its solution is to implement, and how well it fits into the core software that is provided by the controlling company, to name a few relevant points.

This ties back to the pyramid of customer expectations.

On an individual level

• Information about the solution must be readily and easily available, accurate, and the solution itself must work as advertised, i.e. solve the customers’ problem
• The solution must be easy to implement and efficient to use, which works best, if it is fully developed in the platform’s software stack, because that way the installation will be  smooth and users do see a user interface that they are used to
  
• And it needs to be fun to use, which is a bit harder but goes in line with making life for the user easy by working like the users and not as if designed by someone who never did the job it shall help the user perform. Ideally, it is possible to work with the company to implement missing or additional functionality fast

And then, there is an additional stage that successful small ecosystem players master: They are capable of building temporary ecosystems, temporary partnerships with other ecosystem members to provide more value to customers. These partnerships may be limited to a single project but also involve joint product development and go-to-market. The important aspect is that these temporary ecosystems can generate further synergies

To give a concrete example, this is exactly what an ISV like Fastcall successfully does. Fastcall is a part of the Salesforce ecosystem. The company provides efficient CTI solutions that extend the Salesforce solution. The software seamlessly extends the Salesforce stack as it is a native app, which also makes it easy to install. Because of being a native app, it also seamlessly integrates into the Salesforce UI. The company uses the AppExchange, which makes it easy to find. The company is also very customer driven. This is shown, e.g. when it comes to implementing new requirements in a swift way, as Marshall Lager has recently described in his article Rising to Swift Challenges in App Development.

It is not that uncommon that a software company creates new software based upon customer requirements. Actually, this is the way things should be done; not exclusively, but to quite an extent.

Now, there are few software vendors who are truly independent. Most vendors are, and need to be, part of one or more other vendor ecosystems. This is simply a matter of scale, as there are only a few vendors who have the size and market power that are necessary to surround themselves with a good number of customers, ISVs, system integrators and other partners. And the number of these ecosystems is rather shrinking than growing. 

What this means is not that these few companies can implement and deliver what they want, but that the other ones need to carefully check two things.

First, which ecosystem(s) to belong to, be it one or more than one. And as the CEO of 3CLogic, Denis Seynhaeve in a recent CRMKonvo said: It is important to choose wisely, which ecosystem to commit to.

One of the fundamental consequences of this decision is the degree of dependency on other vendors that the smaller vendor has. This degree naturally decreases with the number of ecosystems it participates in, although they can never be truly independent - which is also not wanted when playing the ecosystem game. Conversely, participating in more than one ecosystem increases options and the potential reach.

On the other hand, there are some other factors that come into play. The software architecture and the software itself will become more complicated when different vendors’ systems shall get augmented. Deep knowledge in different technologies is required, if deep integrations are necessary. As a consequence of all that, the implementation and maintenance become more expensive. This has an adverse impact on pricing.

Different vendors at the core of an ecosystem prioritize the functionalities they deliver differently. This means a vendor that engages into enhancing core solutions cannot necessarily guarantee an equivalence of functionality across platforms, unless extending it outside the platform and integrating via APIs. While this is a viable option, it increases the complexity of the system architecture at the customer.

This is precisely where the wise choice that Denis spoke of comes into picture.

The choice is about which ecosystem or ecosystems to join.

And there is definitely a value in focusing on one ecosystem. One of these values is time to value for customers.

Let me provide you with an example of a company I regularly interact with at this point. The company is called Fastcall and builds CTI solutions that extend Salesforce. Fastcall is a so-called ISV (independent software vendor) and has fully committed to the Salesforce stack. Being a Salesforce-only provider, the company is by definition dependent on Salesforce but tied its success to the success of the Salesforce platform. Its management pays particular attention to Salesforce’s new feature releases. Those that show promise to add value to their customers then may be adopted in their solution. This can be started as early as the new feature is in a Salesforce beta program.

For Fastcall, this has several advantages. These range from being able to work within the Salesforce stack to being able to quickly leverage new features that are offered by Salesforce and to turn them into more value for mutual customers. One of these features being the Einstein Conversation Insights, which got released at the end of March 2021.

Einstein Conversation Insights is a framework that can be used to analyze call recordings to find predefined keywords and to obtain some metrics. One of the important aspects of this framework is that it is agnostic to the source of the call recordings. This means that it can be easily used by partners like Fastcall by simply uploading a call recording and getting results in return.

Well, this somewhat simplifies things.

Still, looking at the example of Einstein Conversation Insights, Fastcall was able to build, QA and deliver an integration with this new Salesforce functionality in less than a month. Fastcall recordings are made available to Einstein Conversation Insights in real time, which in turn delivers useful insights into the recorded conversation.

The message here is that partners who focus on one particular ecosystem, in this example Salesforce, can react with tremendous speed to offer more value to their customers. Especially, if these partners are smaller, they can, and usually do, prioritize their developments closer to the needs of their customers, which are often smaller in nature, too.

Earlier, we spoke of wise choices. What could be wiser than aligning product development to the needs of one’s customers?

Work from Anywhere needs the right culture and the right tools

The pandemic has taught us through the past year that it becomes urgent for businesses to adequately deal with the need for new working models that help employees to become as productive when working from any place as when working from an office.

This is all the more important as research indicates that the change that we are undergoing now is going to stay at least to some extent. And that is reasonable, as with all the investments made by businesses it is possible to combine the best of both worlds. Many, if not most of us, will be able to truly work from anywhere. After all, some activities are better done in office spaces, others work better in a remote setting. And then there is a good chance that travel will increase again. Travel time often is unproductive time. And with all the infrastructure that is now in place, travel time can get brought to more productive use - if not driving a car, that is.

But what does it take to be able to work efficiently from anywhere?

The answer is: More than just technology. It is equally, if not more, important to have a corporate culture in place and to credibly send the message to employees that makes them truly believe that it is their choice from where they work. A good part of this is that managers rather look at results than monitoring time spent. While the latter cannot be ignored, at the end of the day it is about achieving results. This is also what motivates people. Seeing that they achieve results and that this gets rewarded or at least recognized. It is important that management walks the talk here. Without management’s credible endorsement of a culture that promotes work from anywhere, nothing will work.

The other part is, of course, technology. Key here is having a communication and collaboration system that tightly integrates with business systems and that is easily accessible to employees for internal as well as external communication.

Testament to this are e.g. findings of the fourth edition of Salesforce’s State of Service report. Customer service agents who can say that they have access to all relevant information and have the tools that enable them to work remotely report a far higher level of ability to make an excellent job for their customers than their colleagues who do not have the technology at hand.

Of the enterprise software vendors, Microsoft, Salesforce or Zoho have their own fully integrated communication systems. SAP deeply integrates with Microsoft Teams. Oracle has a strategic partnership with Zoom. 

Rich Rosen, CEO of Fastcall, says, “Salesforce has embraced work from home for its 52,000 employees across 160 offices worldwide, suggesting that remote workforces open up incredible business opportunities. They have reported many work from home (#WFH) benefits, including increased productivity and recommend video conferencing as a vital tool. Salesforce recommends that companies take the time to employ effective management strategies to maximize productivity and collaboration.”

The examples of SAP and Oracle already indicate that it is not always necessary to use the vendors’ own solutions, but that it is on the contrary possible to work with ecosystem partners, especially with ones that focus on extending the solutions provided by the owner of the ecosystem itself. And there are a number of companies that provide these services to a different degree, from Atlassian, via Facebook and Fastcall to Zoho. All of these are able to connect to one or more ecosystems, sometimes including their own.

Still, sometimes it is not necessary to move away from the tools that are provided by the vendor. This might be, because they are perceived as very good for the additional price - this is for example what can become an argument for Slack as part of Salesforce - or because they are good and already part of the existing subscription - e.g. when having a Zoho One subscription. 

In other cases, e.g. when there is a major main player with many smaller ecosystem partners, there may be a higher confidence level with smaller partners. These are simply more eye-to-eye with SMB customers. Imagine an 800 pound gorilla like Salesforce vs. a small but healthy $50 - 100m business. It can be beneficial to work with smaller ecosystem partners for specific solutions in this case. This is something that I also described in my recent article “We all want to be recognized”. These smaller partners often show more interest in and responsiveness to the needs of smaller companies. These smaller partners often also know more about the needs of small companies, such as a higher necessity for plug’n’play, lower IT demands, simplicity etc. And will you be able to call Marc Benioff when a problem arises? Surely not as a small business. Will you be able to call the CEO of a smaller player? Very likely.

So, what to do?

There is no way around enabling the company and with that the people for a future that entails significant times of work outside the confines of an office. This needs to be done on a cultural/organizational and a technological level. Culturally, make sure that people confidently can and want to work from outside the office. There are ways to do this and it is paramount that management walks the talk, too.

This walking the talk does not only consist of giving the freedom to do and to empower people as necessary, but also of providing the right technology.

To quote Rich Rosen of Fastcall again “Software is in the cloud - so that is anywhere. Employees are now more mobile so this argues for an accelerated mobile strategy. Laptops, iPads, devices. And then there is the office phone. the last vestige of hardware that is hardwired to the office”.

Being in the cloud, the right technology enables close collaboration and communication with colleagues and customers from anywhere. It is connected to and integrated into the business systems. This makes sure that all persons have access to the same information (in the limits of authorizations, of course), wherever they are. The office phone as a telephone has become irrelevant. It is just another front end of the integrated, collaborative, business software.

Integrated also means that the collaboration and communication software needs to be developed to be a native part of the business software and not attached to it, as for instance Slack is to Salesforce. This reduces complexities, downtime risk and therefore increases productivity.

Now, who to choose as a supplier?

Based upon the company’s size and infrastructure, this technology may very well (or even should) come from a company that is dedicated to this platform, a company that is of a suitable size and that convincingly demonstrates a desire to deliver what is right for customers. 

Abraham Lincoln reportedly said “Don't worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition.” I am wondering how this applies to the companies we interact with. I would worry if I was not recognizing my customers, and I work to be recognized by them. Recognition is a concept that goes both ways. And as a customer, I worry when I am not recognized, or no longer recognized. 
Technology has enabled amazing one-to-one marketing for businesses selling to consumers (B2C). But how effective is this marketing in reality? I am always shocked that I can walk into a car dealership and not be recognized. When I am shopping for a car I always point out what I have leased in the past. I am trying to help the car salesman recognize me. Another example might be Nordstrom. You could expect a shopping experience where you only see clothes in your size or even style. “Hey Rich - we know you - here is what we suggest.” Shoppers want to be recognized but it just hasn’t happened yet.
Companies selling to business customers (B2B) will find these in many different sizes, from small businesses to the Fortune 500. Very large customers are easy to recognize.There is complexity in selling to the company and its many divisions or departments, but you know they are large and important, because the deals tend to be bigger than deals with SMBs. Ford, General Electric, Starbucks - when selling to a big account the seller certainly recognizes the opportunity and treats the account accordingly by offering solutions to their needs.  
Selling to small businesses is more like selling to consumers. To succeed sellers must sell in volume. In enterprise software most start here. Selling to a very large company is not always an initial strategy for a software company. We call this B2C2B (business to consumer to business). Start with smaller businesses and work up in account size. Nearly every software as a service company (SaaS) started selling to small and medium size companies. 
As SaaS sales teams work into larger and larger accounts, what happens to the small business customers that were their foundation? Are they still recognized? 
20 years ago when Salesforce was just starting the large competitors were SAP and Oracle. And 20 years ago a Fortune 500 company was not leaving SAP for Salesforce. Salesforce worked from the bottom and edges to build into the current market leader. Salesforce tries to recognize its smaller customers as it has moved up the market from a base of small business customers. The Salesforce IdeaExchange is where small business customers with a need not currently served post their requests. Salesforce small business customers can vote on these because they match their own. Salesforce product managers can use this website to know what customers are asking for. This is how Salesforce recognizes some of the needs of smaller customers.  
Truth is, if you are a smaller customer - not a “logo” and not Fortune 500 - your needs may not be prioritized. 
How does this impact your research for business software? You have  a list of needed capabilities and are reviewing vendors. As you check off the boxes what is important to know is not just if the current needs are fulfilled. These boxes are checked, but you also need to know if your future needs will be fulfilled. Will you be recognized as important when you learn next quarter that your software needs have evolved? Will the software you chose also evolve with you? Do they offer custom solutions? Will they grow with you? Do they strive to be worthy of your recognition?
I am not a Salesforce developer but the company makes a great example, as it grew so fast. So I just talk about partnering with Salesforce here, especially since I regularly speak with a Salesforce partner, Rich Rosen, CEO of Fastcall. However, the same principles apply elsewhere. And as we can see in the example above Salesforce has become a very large company serving the largest of the Fortune 500 as well as many small businesses down to the single-user realtor or mortgage broker. It is truly remarkable to see a software company service such a wide variety of customers. 
As a small company dealing with a very large company, Salesforce, you may want to think about the advantage of partnering with smaller companies as found in the AppExchange. The smaller Salesforce partners offset the largeness of Salesforce. Salesforce itself is not able to recognize and be very high touch with the smallest accounts, but smaller Salesforce partners are equipped to do so. You also have the choice of partners who are more experienced in your vertical or in a more convenient regional office. 

For a few months now I have the pleasure of frequently interacting with Richard Rosen of Fastcall, a company that exclusively focuses on extending Salesforce with CTI software. Rich is a firm advocate of focusing on one ecosystem and to not serving multiple ones. As such he is a friend of Salesforce. Still, he makes some astute critical and important observations about the market place and the customer experience that it offers. He also has some suggestions. Here is what he has to say. 

It’s been a few months since I walked into Nordstrom but I do remember the experience. The store is nicely curated with classic brands I recognize and a few emerging brands. Nordstrom keeps their stores fresh and well designed. While our experience has moved more and more online the idea of merchandising has not changed.

Amazon on the other hand does a very bad job merchandising fashion. E.g. tThe search “shirts for men” results in “more than 30,000” results. When shopping I may be looking for one or two new shirts. Nordstrom does a great job suggesting a few ideas. I do not want to see or look at “more than 30,000” shirts. Amazon offers a few options to narrow down my search. There is a definite benefit in curation. 

How does consumer software deal with curation? There are approximately 2.87 million apps in the Play Store (Android) and 1.96 million in the Apple App Store. The strategy in the consumer app marketplace is “more is more.” They give top lists in many categories. These consumer apps’ Top n lists are not well curated; the consumer app marketplace relies almost entirely on reviews.  

The Salesforce AppExchange is the leading business app market, with over 6,000 enterprise applications and components. Salesforce also includes reviews, gives the app’s listing date, date of the last update and lists basic information about the application architecture. For example, is the application native to Salesforce? Salesforce requires these applications to pass a security review and has a growing team tasked with helping developers—Salesforce partners—optimize their application listing in the AppExchange. The AppExchange is organized into categories and there is a search function. 

It is a total mess. 

Think back to my Nordstrom example. I walk into the store and there are thousands of shirts. Some are mispriced—just as the AppExchange has apps with misleading pricing. Some shirts are years out of style—just as Salesforce lists applications that have not been updated in years. But then Nordstrom moves out-of-fashion items into its Nordstrom Rack stores, to save space for current fashion in the Nordstrom stores. The AppExchange marketplace does not. And in the software industry current “fashion”, achieved via frequent updates, is critical. 

Search results are not really in any specific order, other than “Popularity”. Some apps are native on the platform, others loosely integrated. But it's hard for the searching admin to know without looking at the app listing itself; and they cannot search for this important criterion but need to use the sidebar to filter after searching for solutions. There is no curation to drill into a specific solution. Let’s narrow the search for paid 5-star apps that are native by filtering. This narrows the results down to roughly 200. But then what?   

Salesforce wants a marketplace where more is more because—let’s be honest—vanity metrics drive enterprise software. 

I am here to tell you that this is going to end. 

When Salesforce first launched the AppExchange they wanted to fill the shelves and recruit developers. The keys with a marketplace are the balance between supply and demand and the creation of value for all three involved parties: The marketplace owner, the vendors (developers) and their customers. Too much supply (competition) combined with a too noisy and poorly organized environment and developers will not see the value anymore. They will leave the marketplace to focus elsewhere. To reduce the risk of this happening, Salesforce needs to reward its most aligned partners and kindly let the lesser aligned partners move on.

Back at Nordstrom there are category managers who are experts in their department. Shoes, of course—it’s Nordstrom. There is a category manager for accessories, as well as for men’s wear, women’s wear, home and gifts, beauty, and so on. This is what a maturing enterprise marketplace needs. They need to know their partner solutions beyond “paid, five stars, native = 200 apps. Go find the one that works for you.” No, no, no. Enterprise software buyers want curation. Help them find the right solution for their problem. Salesforce needs to identify the top 10 or 20 categories in the AppExchange and assign category managers. These managers will know their categories and the associated partners. When a Salesforce admin is looking for a CTI app, for example, the category manager can guide them through the options.  

Ten years ago, when I was first thinking about Fastcall, I met with a few Venture Capitalists (VCs). I told them Fastcall would only work in Salesforce. They said, “Good luck with that.” In 2021, if a start-up Zooms into a VC pitch with a plan to integrate with 20 APIs I bet they’ll hear, “Good luck with that.” Times have changed, and so has demand.

Enterprise Software is moving toward platform alignment. The days of plugins and integration to a ton of APIs will wane. Like so many trends in Silicon Valley, software APIs will give way to platform alignment. 

Salesforce will focus on solving business problems with its own solutions and a smaller number of highly curated partner solutions. The essence of Salesforce 360 is solving the customer’s problem. In an ecosystem-led growth model, there is Salesforce and closely aligned partners; the less aligned partners will have only a limited role as they add less value to the ecosystem. And Salesforce will have a more closely aligned relationship with a smaller set of partners. They will more intimately know the partner solution and therefore jointly deliver more value to Salesforce subscribers.    

What does this mean for software buyers in the Salesforce ecosystem? VPs of Sales Operations and Salesforce admins looking to solve current problems? They need to consider platform alignment when making buying decisions. If the software on your short list is not aligned with Salesforce it may not be around next year. 

In my recent article on how to improve collaboration with Fastcall CTI I summarized a number of requirements that need to be fulfilled by a solution. A good vendor needs to fulfil at least this set of requirements.

·  First and foremost: The software needs to do the job of making life for the employees easier

·  It needs to be embedded into the host software, and not run side by side

·  Ideally, the vendor is specialized on the software stack that your employees use and the software uses the same UI as the host software

·  The software needs to share information and data with the host software and write into the same database

·  The vendor needs to offer good support and regular, frequent updates to the software

The article was deliberately abstract and not dealing with any platform, as I wanted to make a general point. The way to do this is to keep it independent of any major (or minor) platform.

But what does it mean, specifically, to work with these criteria?

Let’s get our hands dirty

Imagine that you are a Salesforce customer and are looking for a matching CTI app to extend the footprint of your implementation with the goal of better and more efficient availability.

Then Salesforce AppExchange is your first point to start the search, as this is just the kind of use case that it has been built for. Still, there are some pitfalls to observe. Not whatever is on top of the list, is best for you. Salesforce AppExchange ranks and lists by popularity.

Popularity is calculated by how users interact with a listing i.e., whether they interact with the information available on a listing. AppExchange weighs the user activity according to a level of importance as indications of interest. It also tries to filter out attempts to abuse the system.

When looking at the criteria catalog above, what you want is a native Salesforce app. A Salesforce app is called native when it resides completely within the Salesforce platform, including all data, metadata, security, authentication, custom code etc. This essentially means that it is specifically built for the Salesforce platform and therefore does not need an API-based integration into Salesforce.

Why a native app? Because this is an app that is built by a Salesforce specialist and uses the Salesforce UI. This avoids a break in the user experience and avoids or at least reduces the amount of training necessary. Native also means that the data resides in the Salesforce database and does not need to be replicated anywhere else. On top of this, the customization effort goes down and is done in an environment that Salesforce admins are used to.

So, let us have a look at Salesforce AppExchange to find one or more apps that do the job. Salesforce AppExchange, at the time of this writing, hosts and offers around 3,800 free and paid apps that extend the Salesforce capabilities. Roughly one third of this are paid apps with a five-star rating and 216 of them are native to Salesforce.

Limiting this to CTI software the AppExchange search comes up with a selection of a little more than thirty apps, with five of them being native to Salesforce and three of them having a five-star rating. With Fastcall and Intercall, two of these three are implemented by Fastcall. The other five-star app has not been updated since 2011, while Fastcall supplies regular and frequent updates to its software.

Interestingly, with MaxCredible one of the five apps that are presented to the user, is not even a CTI app but a credit management app.

Figure 1: Salesforce Native CTI apps

Another interesting observation is that the two five-star apps by Fastcall are not the ones that appear topmost amongst the thirty-plus five-star CTI apps

Still, looking for CTI apps that are tightly integrated into, native to, Salesforce, leaves you with one single viable vendor, Fastcall, which is dedicated to both, the Salesforce infrastructure, and CTI solutions.

 What does this mean?

First of all, this exercise shows that the rankings that are provided by app marketplaces can be very intransparent. Although Salesforce gives an explanation of what goes into a ranking, the ranking itself is created within a black box and does not utilize crucial information. Users need to remember that marketplaces often are not curated, and the algorithm is probably opened to be gamed, in spite of measures to avoid this.

This does not only hurt important marketplace members, but in the long run also Salesforce as the owner of the marketplace. Software vendors, participants in the marketplace are likely to expect some better support. And from a customer point of view, it is not obvious that an app that has not been updated in nearly a decade ranks high.

The people that are responsible for the Salesforce AppExchange might want to have a look at this issue.

Second, it is really important to use your own set of criteria instead of blindly trusting a rating. Even in this simple example it becomes obvious that using your own criteria helps to significantly narrow down the list of possible candidates.

What do you think?

Since February or March of Anno Domini 2020, the Corona pandemic is making the headlines and is driving digital transformation, or at least the digitalization of businesses.

For sure, this crisis has forced and is continuing to force many a company into enabling its employees to work remotely. This has accelerated an already ongoing fundamental change of the way people work.

It has also had an impact on work culture.

People can no more just drop by a colleague to ask a question, but need to pick up a phone. Meetings do not happen in the meeting room around the corner anymore but by utilizing technology – virtual meeting rooms – voice and video. Salespeople can no more travel to their customers for face-to-face meetings. Instead they were forced to adopt and master virtual meetings, something they didn’t believe they could possibly do in 2019. It seemed far too alien.

Many of us have learned that this change is rather an opportunity than a threat. We needed to, and did adapt, on a business- and a personal level. In doing so, we realized that many things that we thought of “will never work” actually work quite well.

This adaption happened and happens in three distinct steps. We first used any available technology, just to keep the lights on. Then we started to put processes around them to become more effective and now we are looking at improving efficiencies. These efficiencies, that we look for, will be achieved by the harmonization and reduction of the number of the used tools and their deep integration into each other and essential business systems.

And make no error, the change we have done will stick to quite an extent as a recent Stanford study, that surveyed 15,000 Americans, found. The survey evidence suggests, that more than twenty percent of all full work days will be supplied from home or distributed offices even after the pandemic ends.

This jibes with results of the fourth editions of the Salesforce State of Service and State of the Connected Customer surveys. According to the State of the Connected Customer report, the phone is customers’ second-most preferred communication channel (up from place three in 2019).  According to the State of Service report, It is also the communication channel that is most widely supported by service organizations.

In addition, the report finds that “agents also prefer the phone for complex issues that require two-way conversation, and don’t see the phone being replaced any time soon. However, how agents answer and process phone calls is evolving. The majority of service agents – aside from those on underperforming teams – are more likely to handle voice calls through a computer than a desk phone.”

Figure 1: Service Organizations that report using the following channels; source Salesforce State of Service 4th edition

What is also notable is the strong growth of online chat, messenger apps, and video support between 2018 and 2020.

By extension, the same preferences apply to colleagues cooperating on any given topic. They, too, need and want to communicate using phone, chat, or video.

In addition, they want to use this without hassle, anytime, from everywhere, and with any device.

So, there is certainly a necessity for businesses to enable their workforce for efficient digital communication. This can be done using standalone specialized tools, integrated and embedded tools, up to and until full communications suites like Slack or Microsoft Teams, which are mainly run standalone and in parallel to business systems.

From an efficiency and user experience point of view, integration is key. Employees need to be able to stay within the frame of the business applications they use rather than switching between applications and changing contexts. The communication tool needs to share data and information that is created directly with the business applications it is integrated into. Only then is the tool of maximum help for the people and hence gets best acceptance.

From an IT point of view, installation and configuration must be smooth and simple, done without a major project or cost, which means that they need to be built into the business application, rather than attached to it.

This is where vendors like e.g. Ringcentral, Aircall or Fastcall come into the picture. Searching for CTI on Salesforce AppExchange reveals many options. These vendors offer the tools that extend Salesforce to enable CTI. The differences between the former two and Fastcall are that Fastcall is specialized on, built exclusively for one vendor – Salesforce – and made part of the Salesforce code stack, whereas the others are not. Hence Fastcall is best suited to fulfil the needs of Salesforce users, including a seamless UX.

And for the geeks amongst us: without API calls, which reduces the complexity of the IT landscape and therefore increases the RoI.

Summarizing, if business leaders are looking out for a strong, integrated toolset for internal as well as external communication to gain the efficiencies they want, they need to look out for the following traits offered by the software:

• First and foremost: The software needs to do the job of making life for the employees easier
• It needs to be embedded into the host software, and not run side by side
• Ideally, the vendor is specialized on the software stack that your employees use and the software uses the same UI as the host software
• The software needs to share information and data with the host software and write into the same database
• The vendor needs to offer good support and regular, frequent updates to the software

That’s it. This catalogue will point you into the right direction for finding a well-integrated solution for your CTI needs.

Smaller enterprise software vendors today operate in a world where their fortunes may rise and fall on their ability to integrate with one or more cloud computing platforms. In many cases, having a connector or API for multiple platforms is a great means to survive and thrive. But it’s not the only way.

Versatility has always been one of the watch words of cloud computing. The ease of adding and updating functions, or of moving to a new platform entirely, created an incentive for vendors to embrace that versatility. The CEO or CFO who is looking out for their company’s future would thus rarely be faulted for trusting vendors whose products work on as many platforms as possible.

The CTO, on the other hand, might not share that view. While that role has to allow for future moves their company might make, they are also the person who is most responsible for choosing the best tools for the job and making sure they keep working. For the CTO, a vendor’s ability to serve across multiple platforms is far less relevant than the quality, usability, and robustness of their product for the platform being used right now.

Disclosure: The inspiration for this article comes from working with FastCall (www.fastcall.com), a business communications system vendor that works exclusively with Salesforce. FastCall is my client; the words and thoughts presented here are my own. 

Is This A Game?

Think of it this way: Let’s say you have a Playstation gaming console. Does it matter if your favorite game is also available for XBox, Nintendo Switch, and PC? You can only use one system at a time, and you might not even own any of the others. A game developer that has to patch and create new content on multiple platforms will probably have a longer release schedule, introduce relatively more bugs with each update, and might not focus on issues specific to the Playstation if the XBox is a squeakier wheel.

A multiplatform business software vendor, likewise, has to retain staff for support and updates for every version of the product. This, when added to development and marketing of new products for those platforms, means greater overhead, and probably higher prices passed to the customer. Specialist vendors like FastCall can run very lean and still deliver an excellent product for their chosen environment.

The video game analogy maps well to enterprise software, but here’s another one to consider: mobile apps. When you browse for apps to add to your phone (as opposed to looking for a specific one), you are presented with a list of possibilities that can be very hard to distinguish. The main differentiator is their rating, and those are known to be skewed toward the extreme ends of the scale. It can be hard to tell, and somewhat time consuming, to figure out which of them have been updated regularly—or ever. Is the app that hasn’t been touched since 2014 flawless, or did the developer stick it on the list because it was good enough and would earn some money without intervention? You might—might—be able to filter by most recently added, but newness is no guarantee of maintenance.

Users run into the same issue with third-party applications that run alongside their cloud business software. The app marketplaces are geared to show the best rated and the newest applications, not the ones that are most thoroughly maintained. Yet maintenance is an important sign of quality, because it means the developer is still listening, still actively updating their apps, doing more than the minimum required to stay listed. 

The Updates Must Flow

Large vendors will have the resources to keep the updates flowing, but if a small vendor is doing it, that’s a sign of commitment. Their app isn’t an ancillary revenue stream, it’s their livelihood. FastCall is its product. A company that exists to create high quality apps for a software platform will cease to exist if it stops making apps, but also if it stops delivering quality.
It makes perfect sense to engage a big software brand to provide your business computing platform—the bigger the platform, the more it can hold. What you put on that platform doesn’t have to come from big vendors. For major, mission-critical applications, sure, go with a top seller. But for all the things those products don’t do, and for anything new you want to try, bigger isn’t always better. For specific functions, your best bet is often a small vendor that only develops for this one platform. They will put in the work, and they will be there for their customers, because their existence literally depends on it.

The News

Fastcall, a renowned developer of CTI solutions that are exclusively dedicated to Salesforce, recently announced the release of its Intercall solution. Intercall helps teams to communicate and interact internally from within Salesforce. The app allows phone and video communication. Using Intercall, an employee can call coworkers via their Salesforce user profile instead of using a particular phone number, making it unnecessary to know the current location of the coworker or to perform repeat calls due to unavailability.

It is a first-of-its-kind Salesforce app and offers video and screen sharing within an integrated Salesforce phone application by leveraging Salesforce and Twilio.

Intercall is the latest addition to Fastcall’s suite of applications and is designed to enhance work-from-home productivity for Salesforce users.

Phone applications found in the Salesforce AppExchange today, including Fastcall’s namesake application, enable companies to increase productivity by empowering sales and service team members to communicate quickly and effectively with clients and prospects via phone. Intercall allows companies to streamline their internal telephone and video conversations whether within or between departments, therefore complementing Fastcall’s capabilities.

Main benefits of Intercall include:

• Screen sharing and video conferencing in virtual meetings while working within Salesforce instead of an external application. Intercall also creates Salesforce activities for every Intercall call.
• Replacement of phone directories that are more often than not outdated while enabling a centralized phone directory with data that is already in Salesforce.
• Calling coworkers via multiple endpoints at the same time with ringing the softphone, mobile phone, and desk phone all at the same time, Intercall prevents wasting time by dialing multiple numbers until you connect to a teammate and the hassle of leaving, listening to, and deleting numerous voicemails.
• Building transparency and accountability via automated call logging within Salesforce. Just like an external dialer automatically records external communications with customers in Salesforce, Intercall enables greater accountability, tracking, and transparency in the work-at-home environment and empowers managers to get a comprehensive view of team interactions and collaboration.
• Call recording for future reference, training or to share directly with team members for easy information sharing.
• Easy and efficient one-click information distribution of voicemail messages to team members or the whole company via voicemail drop.

Richard Rosen, CEO of Fastcall says “Success doesn’t depend solely on interactions with clients. A business is only as strong as how its teammates interact with each other. Intercall makes it easier for colleagues to collaborate and communicate. Imagine a work environment where you could reach a teammate on the very first try, without having to dial their office and mobile phone, with the click of one button. I am excited about the efficiencies Intercall creates and what we have planned. Intercall transparently extends the range of products that are offered by Fastcall by offering an intra team facility in addition to the outbound and inbound services that are already available”.

The Bigger Picture

With growing office campuses and team members working more and more from home it becomes increasingly important to provide employees with an easy and efficient way to collaborate with each other and to communicate and share information with their customers. 

Businesses are looking for solutions that fix their problem fast. This can be seen by the revenues of Zoom nearly quadrupling or the usage of Microsoft Teams skyrocketing from 13 million daily active users in July 2019 to 75 million daily active users in April 2020. At the same time Slack grew its paying customers between February and July 2020 by more than 20 percent, too.

Because of this, vendors of CRM solutions have increasingly been strengthening their built-in collaboration suites or forming partnerships with these companies or specialists like Fastcall, which usually is the faster way of achieving this objective.

My Analysis and PoV

The Corona crisis has increased the demand for online meeting solutions, which has caused a growth spurt for companies like Zoom, Webex and co, but also for collaboration services like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or telephony solutions like simplii that integrate with various applications.

With the exception of Microsoft Teams, none of these solutions are services that are natively embedded into business applications, but are either standalone or integrated via APIs. At minimum, this causes some additional integration labor and often leads to double maintenance of valuable information, with the corresponding risk of information loss or ambiguity and a reduction of user satisfaction. In addition, the user interface of the collaboration solution normally differs, which further deteriorates the user experience as the communication software does not follow the UI style guidelines of the surrounding software.

Then there are a few solutions that are built directly into the application stack of the solution that hosts them. They specialize in optimally supporting this single platform and are built directly into the application stack of the solution that hosts them. One example for these is service providers is Fastcall.

Most businesses are already sold on one CRM solution or another, or have even committed to a platform. Especially for these businesses, solutions that integrate directly with them are the first consideration.

In the case of a business committed to using Salesforce, it should have a deep and hard look at what is available via AppExchange. 

Intercall certainly fits the bill here; although it is still a young product and might miss some sought-after features, like virtual backgrounds, or scrapbooks etc., the combination of features is already giving considerable value to corporate users.