NewsCRM & Data18 Aug 2023 · 3 min read

The Latest BIG News from Salesforce, Clari and Gartner

A Week of Good, Bad, and Ugly News for Salesforce It's been a polarising week or so for global CRM provider Salesforce. Firstly, the good. Slack recently rel...

Kieran Devlin

BIG CX NEWS - BIG Customer experience news from CX Today

A Week of Good, Bad, and Ugly News for Salesforce

It's been a polarising week or so for global CRM provider Salesforce.

Firstly, the good. Slack recently released a new user interface to enhance user productivity.

The design update will go live on Slack over the next few months. It aims to streamline navigation, make it easier for users to focus on priority tasks, and the update also introduces tools for modern work.

Companies that can centralize their people and tools they use every day in one place will get work done more efficiently, and increase productivity. With Slack, businesses have a command center for modern work that seamlessly integrates their apps into one place, automating admin and time-consuming processes, and bringing teams into one platform to collaborate."

The bad news is that a former Salesforce vice president, Karl Wirth, is suing his former company and is blowing the lid on Salesforce’s claims it made during the release of Genie in September last year.

In a keynote presentation about its new CDP software, Salesforce described the offering as capable of processing information in real time. Wirth claims this was “all a lie” because “many of its processes took several hours”.

Wirth purported that Salesforce had not managed to develop a technology to live up to the scheduled release date and decided to knowingly mislead the public rather than adapt its announcement to accurately represent the software.

Salesforce's ugly news is that the business is due to face court proceedings to assess the claims it has knowingly assisted the sex trafficking website, Backpage.com.

Salesforce unsuccessfully attempted to get the case thrown out. "A company like Salesforce could simply bury its head in the sand with respect to individual victims," the judges found. "It could work, for example, only with high-level data on behalf of a venture that the company knows or should know is engaged in illegal sex trafficking on a large scale."

Salesforce was not proven to have any involvement in publishing details of trafficked victims. However, the allegations claim that the company did assist Backpage in reaching more sex traffickers, alongside those paying for commercial sex.

Clari to Acquire Groove, Bolster Its Revenue & Analytics Platform

Clari has announced that it will acquire Groove, the Sales Engagement platform provider.

The deal intends to allow customers to cut their tech stack spending and complexity while strengthening Clari’s capabilities across the end-to-end revenue process.

Sales engagement, interactional analytics, revenue forecasting, deal management, data ingestion, and more offerings support this process. In complementing these solutions together, Clari says it will provide “unprecedented visibility” into revenue generation.

Andy Byrne, CEO of Clari, commented:

By bringing together Clari and Groove, revenue leaders can implement their revenue collaboration and governance strategy across all internal and external workflows, giving them full visibility and control over the company’s most important business process: revenue."

The |Groove and Clari combination will allow brands to optimize their top-of-funnel programs, improve sales productivity, and enable CROs to become more predictive.

A Recap of Gartner Critical Capabilities for CCaaS 2023

Last week, Gartner released its 2023 Magic Quadrant for CCaaS study.

While the market research is expectedly thorough, the quadrant matrix is inevitably the star of the show, with some businesses levergaing its findings to inform their vendor shortlists.

Regradless of whether a business is a large, global enterprise or growing SMB pushing beyond the boundaries of UC or CRM platforms, the matrix can be enormously helpful.

However, business requirements can vary wildly. In response, Gartner routinely releases a Critical Capabilities study, where the analyst adjusts its weightings to assign each vendor a score across different use cases.

In this report, Gartner has done so across five use cases while listing “key findings”, “recommendations”, and – of course – “critical capabilities” to support various CCaaS buyers.