Your Number’s Up
This week’s scheduled post about Spring ’12 will be seen at a later time due to this breaking news interruption.
OK, not breaking news, but that was my best impersonation of the announcer when they interrupt the show you’ve been looking forward to all week to tell you about something you don’t care about it. If you cared, you’d probably be watching the news. But I digress…
For anyone who has been using Salesforce reporting for any significant amount of time, you’ll know the analytics options leave much to be desired. And if you’ve been watching the IdeaExchange or had attended the roadmap sessions at Dreamforce, you’ll know that big changes were coming soon. And you’ll also probably know how shocked & disappointed we all were when the release notes came out & all the awesome analytics functionality we had been waiting years for was listed as a paid add-on (and not a cheap one either). Cries of “Foul!” went up across the internet.
So what happened next?
No “corporate spring” as Benioff had warned companies against.
No reliving what happened to Netflix.
No repeat of what happened to Bank of America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn51PR1vNnM
What did Salesforce do instead? They practiced what they preach. They listened to their customers.
They listened to us, and included the analytics functionality in the core product. And they didn’t do it in the way that would be easiest to them (giving it to Unlimited Edition users only), they gave it to Unlimited AND Enterprise edition. This covers a majority of their customers, including the non-profits that get licenses for free. That’s huge!
There is no denying that Salesforce is eating their own dog food. They made a mistake, they heard it form their customers, and they fixed it (probably even better than we expected them to). And by doing so, they bought a ton of goodwill with their customer base. And the icing on the cake for Salesforce? They gave PE users just once more reason to upgrade.
S.O.C.I.A.L.