We are happy to share some insights about Salesforce drawn from our latest market research, Ventana Research Buyers Guide: Contact Center Suites, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.
We recently published three Ventana Research 2023 Contact Center Suites Buyers Guides, an assessment of technology vendors and products that provide individual and combined 
contact center and agent management platform support. We developed three technology assessment and buyers guides to focus on overall Contact Center Suites requirements as well as specific Agent Management and Contact Center use-cases.
In all of our Buyers Guides we utilize a structured research methodology called the Value Index that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for contact center suites. We evaluated Salesforce and 21 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our benchmark research on contact center suites and agent management.
In the overall Contact Center Suites Buyers Guide, our analysis classified Salesforce as Exemplary, ranking eighth in the overall research with a 67.1% performance. Salesforce’s best performance came in Customer Experience at 
68.4%, ranking eighth, due in part to its seventh-place ranking in Validation. In Product Experience, Salesforce placed eighth at 66.8% due to low performance in Capability. Salesforce partially participated in the RFI process.
Salesforce’s Product Experience was impacted by its 68.8% performance in Reliability, where it could further develop the processes and procedures that ensure business continuity. Customer Experience was impacted by its 67.0% performance in TCO/ROI, where it could include better documentation for identifying and quantifying achievable cost savings.
Salesforce performed best in Customer Experience, notably in Validation, where its 69.8% performance was due to its large profile in the market and the considerable resources it has. In addition, the large amount of integration Salesforce has with a variety of tools led to its eighth-place performance in Capability.
In the Contact Centers Buyers Guide, our analysis classified Salesforce as Exemplary, ranking seventh in the overall research with a 67.5% performance. Salesforce’s best performance came in Customer Experience at 68.4%, 
ranking seventh, due in part to its sixth-place ranking in Validation. In Product Experience, Salesforce placed seventh at 67.3%.
Salesforce’s Product Experience was impacted by its 68.8% performance in Reliability, where it could look to better support users managing the performance and scalability of their deployment. Customer Experience was impacted by its 67.0% performance in TCO/ROI, where it could improve the documentation to assist buyers in calculating TCO.
Salesforce performed best in Customer Experience, notably in Validation, where its 69.8% performance was due to the large number of services and support it makes available to customers. In addition, Salesforce’s vast integration capabilities led to its 66.1% performance in Capability.
Salesforce did not meet the inclusion criteria for the Agent Management Buyers Guide and thus was not included.
This assessment was based on Salesforce Service Cloud, v. Summer ‘23, and was available in June 2023.
This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of contact center suites software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Buyers Guide by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Click below to read the individual reports:
Ventana Research
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