Salesforce.com Adds Business Contact Service to CRM
Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) is integrating business contact information with its cloud CRM service.
Based on Salesforce's Jigsaw acquisition, the new Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM crowd-sourced business data service offers real-time updates to contact and company information in Salesforce CRM through Salesforce's Chatter collaboration service.
Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research Group, said in a statement that the new offering gives Salesforce CRM users “reliable business data that is updated and published to sales and marketing employees in real time. We're likely to see more companies turning to data in the cloud to support their dynamic operations.”
With more than 22 million business contacts and 4 million company profiles in Jigsaw, Salesforce is also promoting the service as a way to find new sales leads.
Integrated with Chatter, Salesforce said Jigsaw can automatically identify changes to important contact and company data in Salesforce CRM, update and reconcile the records and then publish the changes in Chatter in real-time. “As a result, sales reps and marketers instantly know when business contact data degrades or becomes bad,” the company said.
Updates can also be received on mobile devices such as the Apple iPad and iPhone.
Jigsaw for Salesforce also includes two new analytics dashboards customers can use to monitor the overall health of data and report on usage. Jigsaw offers real-time status updates on how much data is being actively managed by Jigsaw, and visual reports on how much data is correct or out-of-date.
Salesforce CRM reports are also integrated with Jigsaw data to determine if records related to future sales are incorrect or incomplete, and alerts notify users when records are flagged as dead so reps can search for the record and update it with accurate information.
Salesforce said companies spend more than $3 billion a year on data sourcing services. As Jigsaw is delivered entirely in the cloud, “customers are liberated from legacy data sources that require expensive and complex data management, including storage, backups, security, updates and integration,” the company said.
Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is generally available and starts at $29 per user per month.
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Paul Ferrill has been writing for over 15 years about computers and network technology. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering as well as a MS in Electrical Engineering. He is a regular contributor to the computer trade press. He has a specialization in complex data analysis and storage. He has written hundreds of articles and two books for various outlets over the years. His articles have appeared in Enterprise Apps Today and InfoWorld, Network World, PC Magazine, Forbes, and many other publications.
