Increasingly, customers prefer to receive service through the internet. According to Gartner, by 2012, 65% of all support conversations will happen over the internet. How is your company adapting?

Here at Myriad Minds, this trend has created strong demand for Salesforce Customer Portal and it’s helping our clients deliver faster, anytime service while lowering customer service costs. In fact, Gartner studies have shown the average cost of a customer interactive via phone is $7.50, while the same interaction via a self-service portal is only 50 cents. The value of customer portal is even greater now that Salesforce Content is free.

Using customer portal, your company can deliver a tailored web experience by selectively exposing internal processes to your customers. Because customer portal is built on the Force.com platform, custom portals can be rolled out in weeks, not months. A basic portal can be setup in a few days.

Some of the more common uses of customer portal include:

• Knowledge Base/Service/Cases: Provide easy self-service, 24×7
• Help & Training: Deliver rich content in an engaging experience
• Ideas: Let customers post ideas or questions, vote on the answers of their peers, and add their own comments
• Reporting: Allow customers to create reports and track their service

If you want to learn more, below is a recorded webinar that provides a comprehensive overview.

Security & reliability matter. Actually, they’re critical.

Until recently, formal certification of information security technology was a long and costly necessity of doing business.

No longer. Salesforce can handle these costs at a larger scale, which lower costs relative to on-premise technology.

Below is a summary of the rigorous audits performed and formal certifications that Salesforce has been awarded.

Third-Party Audits

Scrutiny by trusted third-party auditors yields formal assurance in the form of third-party certifications:

• SAS 70 type II – is an independent 3rd party audit of internal controls and data security controls.
• SYSTrust Certificate – is an independent evaluation measuring a service provider against four essential principles: availability, security, integrity, and maintainability.
• ISO 270001 – international standard of information security best practice providing comprehensive best-practice advice and on how to design, implement and maintain a compliant information security management system.

Customer Audits

Salesforce.com operations receive routine scrutiny from customers. Once example is the demanding security audit that ING Bank completed before selecting Salesforce. ING Bank is now one of Salesforce’s largest financial services clients.

Still not convinced?

An overview of Force.com security can be found here, or watch the “Introduction to Force.com Security” webinar (originally recorded on October 9th, 2009).

We’d love to hear from you, so contact us to discuss any Salesforce/Force.com security questions you may have.

On-premises computing often come with a host of issues and challenges that most business people would rather not have to deal with. You don’t own and operate your own power plant, so why do you own and operate a data centre?

Leave it to the experts.

Below are 5 reasons you’ll sleep better after making the switch to the Force.com platform.

1. Physical Security: Salesforce’s data centres are humidity and temperature controlled with redundant cooling systems. The buildings have 24-hour manned security, including foot patrols and perimeter inspections, biometric scanning for access, video surveillance throughout facility and perimeter, and all computing equipment is stored in access-controlled steel cages. How does your physical security compare against that?
2. Backups: Data is backed up to tape at each data centre, on a rotating schedule of incremental and full backups. The backups are cloned over secure links to a secure tape archive. Tapes are not transported offsite and are securely destroyed when retired. In addition, you can schedule a full or custom export of the data in your system so you have a local copy.
3. Availability: At trust.salesforce.com, Salesforce shows the live and historical status of each server. Up-to-the minute information on system performance provides unprecedented transparency.
4. Disaster Recovery: Salesforce performs real-time replication to disk at each data centre, and near real-time data replication between the production data centre and the disaster recovery centre. In addition, data is transmitted across encrypted links and disaster recovery tests verify projected recovery times and the integrity of your data. How does your existing disaster recovery compare?
5. Upgrades: With Salesforce.com, you receive updates three times a year. For free. Automatically. Welcome to the end of costly software maintenance fees.

Cloud computing removes the need to install any software, buy servers, upgrade servers, back-up data, etc. The result is massive cost savings due to reduced staffing, maintenance and power consumption.

Oh, and you’ll sleep better.

Contact us today to learn more how the Force.com can help your business.

There was a useful article posted by Phil Wainewright on the ZDNet blog this week which I thought worthy of note here. It’s all well and good for cloud practitioners to tout the cost savings that the cloud offers, but where do these savings come from? The answer turns out to be a simple matter of economies of scale, which Phil depicts succinctly with a neat diagram in his article.

The argument becomes self-evident when you start to think of IT infrastructure and application services as just another utility for businesses to tap into, like electricity or water. It’s uncontested that to have a single electricity grid to feed thousands of businesses makes more economic sense than everyone having a generator in their basement. Similarly, cloud applications and the Platform-as-a-Service model, especially when used on a significant scale, reduce each customer’s IT total cost of ownership simply due to the economies of scale of the shared service.

Have a read of Phil’s article here.

Everyone “gets” the concept of Salesforce as the killer CRM system in the cloud; Salesforce owns that space. But with a bit of creativity, you’ll see that the underlying Force.com platform is where the real power is, especially for extending CRM to your customers. The good news? Salesforce CRM is part of Force.com, so everything is seamless. The catch? There genuinely isn’t one, simply the need for a little upfront ingenuity.

Here’s a demo. We’ve used Force.com Sites and custom content management in Salesforce to create an interactive corporate website, entirely in the cloud. Everything you see here is pure Force.com, with no third party tools or extra licences required.

Are the days of big ERP systems finished? What role does cloud computing play in reshaping the software industry?

Those were just two of the questions our Managing Director, Glenn Elliott answered when he featured on The Scoop, a business and technology podcast commissioned by the Australian Financial Review. He was joined by Grahame Reynolds, chairperson of the SAP Australian User Group, and Steve Hodgkinson, research director at Ovum.

Click here to listen to the interview online, or here to download the 20 minute segment as an MP3.