What Does Salesforce Do?

You may have come across an interview with our CEO, seen our friendly characters, or heard about Agentforce — all of which raise the question: What does Salesforce do? 

In short, Salesforce’s technology and services bring humans and AI agents together to drive customer success. This is possible thanks to digital labor — autonomous agents that can mimic the ways that humans think and act — which helps employees do more. Another way we make it easier to serve customers and reach your business goals is by bringing all of your customer data into a unified view that can be seen and acted on by employees across any department.

What does Salesforce do?

As the world’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Salesforce helps businesses use artificial intelligence (AI) and data to improve their customer connections. We’ve become the world’s #1 AI CRM by building apps, tools, and services for sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams of any size, across any industry, at any stage of growth. Our CRM brings these teams together around a single shared view of each customer’s data, accessible to every employee, so that they have the latest information.

It’s all possible with Data Cloud, which brings together all of your data into unified profiles, while keeping it secure. It’s the solution to an all-too-common problem — siloed data that is available to one team, but inaccessible to the rest of your organization, causing issues like:

• Sales doesn’t share opportunities with marketing
• Marketing doesn’t know when a customer has an open service ticket
• Commerce doesn’t have transparency on marketing campaigns

With a unified customer profile, the sales team can automate follow-up emails, marketing can personalize messages, commerce can highlight the latest promotions, service can proactively resolve issues, and IT can make it all happen more efficiently by integrating that data with Agentforce — the agentic layer of the Salesforce platform, which enables AI agents to work across our CRM apps.

Agentforce makes it possible for employees to exceed customer expectations with the help of digital labor — autonomous agents that are built on top of your customer data to perform tasks without the need for human oversight. They are always on, available to take action any time of day or night.

For example, agents can identify potential customers in your pipeline and autonomously reach out with personalized emails. Then, they can follow up, answer specific questions, and schedule an intro meeting with a prepared agenda.  Agents can interact directly with customers to answer questions, resolve cases, and act as personal shoppers across ecommerce channels. 

Agentforce is CRM built for the AI era, making companies faster and more efficient. If you’re looking for increased productivity and better customer relationships, read on to learn more about Agentforce. (Back to top)

What is Agentforce?

Agentforce is the agentic layer of the Salesforce platform, which brings together  data, AI, automation, and humans to be more productive through the use of trusted AI agents. These autonomous agents work side-by-side with employees to take action across CRM apps for every department, and to interact with customers directly at any time.

Agentforce acts autonomously to identify what work needs to be done, build a plan to complete the work, and then execute the plan. Agents use your existing customer and business data to make decisions, so their plans and responses are relevant to the specific needs of your company and customers.

Our agents perform tasks all on their own and adapt based on what they learn from real-time data. And it all happens within the predetermined guardrails set by your business, and with total transparency from our Atlas Reasoning Engine, which provides step-by-step explanations behind each action. Agents can interact with customers using natural conversational language to resolve issues (and escalate to a human if needed) and proactively reach out to sales leads to discuss your business and book appointments. They can also engage with shoppers to make recommendations and plan marketing initiatives that they can continually optimize based on campaign performance and KPIs.

Salesforce owns Slack, the employee chat and collaboration tool, and has developed agents that work within that platform, too. With Agentforce, Slack users can quickly get IT help, recalculate a proposal, or generate a competitive intelligence report. (Back to top)

How does Salesforce work?

Salesforce works by unifying all of your customer data on one platform to provide a single shared view of your customer, accessible to any member of any department at any time.

Agentforce uses that profile to share insights, suggest next steps, and even take autonomous action to interact with employees and customers on their preferred channels. With MuleSoft, our platform also integrates seamlessly with non-Salesforce systems. Mulesoft lets IT teams do everything in one place: integrating data and systems, automating workflows and processes, and creating incredible digital experiences.

After all, data is the fuel of modern business, but managing it can be challenging. The average enterprise scatters customer data across nearly 900 applications, and tries to connect them with a mish-mash of quick fixes. But with Data Cloud, you can access and harmonize any data — web, mobile, API, and even real-time — so your teams have a complete picture of customers and their histories on one secure platform. These profiles give you a holistic view of all your structured data (like the information in your CRM apps) as well as unstructured data (information pulled from emails, PDFs, and data lakes), which can be unlocked and integrated into a single unified profile.

Data Cloud keeps your data secure with zero copy integration, pulling everything into unified profiles without copying or moving it. This lowers costs, ensures you’re working with real-time information, and that there are no errors due to data movement. When you unify and automate millions of data points, you create a seamless experience that builds trust with customers  — and your clean data clears a runway for AI.

Agentforce helps you create personalized customer content, answer customers questions, and even write code. You can build and customize agents that provide always-on support to employees and customers. Equipped with your business data, and using conversational AI, agents use a deep knowledge of your business to act within your predefined boundaries. Every piece of generated content — like a marketing email, product description, or customer service chat — is optimized for performance as Agentforce continuously learns from incoming data and analyzes the content and interactions that perform best. (Back to top)

What is the ROI of Salesforce?

On average, our customers see a 31% ROI (return on investment) when they implement Salesforce. And it’s not some customers who benefit from switching: 99% of Salesforce customers achieve a positive ROI.*

That’s because we have an entire support ecosystem to help you reach your goals fast. We’ve built a whole Customer Success ecosystem to help you get the most out of your Salesforce investment, including access to resources, best practices, and product experts. Collaborate with industry experts and our Professional Services team to set up your Salesforce instance so you can start delivering value to your customers fast.

You can also access any of our thousands of apps in the AppExchange to customize Salesforce products to your unique needs. And you can train your entire workforce on Salesforce and in-demand skills for free with Trailhead.

With Salesforce, you can lower costs and boost productivity across your entire organization using one trusted platform. It increases productivity with the help of AI agents, and it drives efficient growth by helping your employees exceed customer expectations. (Back to top)

Salesforce for sales

Sales is in our name. It’s how we got started in the CRM business, and we’ve never stopped finding ways to empower sales teams. With generative AI and autonomous agents, today’s Sales Cloud gives sellers unified insights and recommendations to help them spend less time on busywork and more time closing deals. And better still, by connecting sales with marketing, service, and more, your opportunities increase, and your customer experiences feel more seamless and engaged. On average, our customers see a 31% increase in sales productivity, and 31% increase in win rates after implementing Sales Cloud.*

Our platform simplifies and manages the entire sales cycle — from prospecting to deal close to upsell and cross-sell. With Sales Cloud, you’ve got the full sales tech stack ready to automate and scale all your manual sales processes, inspect your pipelines and forecasts with precision accuracy, and connect all customer touchpoints for the best buying experience. And now, sales teams can use Agentforce to autonomously conduct outreach, compose emails, and schedule meetings. It can even share deal insights, provide sales coaching, and recommend the next best interaction to improve your chances of closing deals. (Back to top)

Salesforce for customer service

With Service Cloud, Salesforce customers decrease their support costs by 24% on average.* Our leading customer service tools help you scale service that customers love while maximizing ROI and driving efficiencies from the contact center to the field — all on a single cloud platform. Autonomous agents, powered by Agentforce, increase productivity by providing 24/7 customer service, generating responses to customer queries, and knowing when to bring in a human as needed. Now, you can resolve cases faster, provide instant support, and have a complete and informed view of your customers at every interaction.

Today, customers expect to interact with your business through their preferred channels. We can help you manage those critical touchpoints to provide seamless customer experiences, including self-service channels, field service, and digital interactions like chat, SMS, and social messaging apps. When your teams are working together with agents, there are endless opportunities for time and cost savings. (Back to top)

Salesforce for marketing

Marketing Cloud helps you save time, increase efficiency, and meet customers on their preferred channels — email, web, social, mobile, ads, or any combination. And with the help of marketing analytics and AI insights, rest assured you’re getting the most out of every dollar and optimizing campaign performance. Marketing teams that use Salesforce estimate a 31% average increase in customer engagement and 26% average decrease in costs to acquire new customers.*

With Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform (CDP), you can better understand your customers through unified data and engage them with relevant messaging, delivering hyperpersonalized interactions everywhere. With Agentforce, you can improve lead generation and generate dynamic personalized content that engages customers and prospects on their preferred channel, boosting customer acquisition. (Back to top)

Salesforce for B2C and B2B shopping and commerce

Salesforce also has tools to build seamless business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) commerce experiences that help grow revenue, engage customers, and connect commerce to the rest of your business.

Easy to implement and adapt, Commerce Cloud can help you maximize revenue by creating personalized shopping experiences. With Agentforce, agents can act as personal shoppers for each individual customer. Our tools remove friction from the buying experience, even if a customer starts their shopping journey on one channel and completes it on another. In fact, Commerce Cloud customers see a 25% decrease in costs to place orders and a 29% increase in online revenue.* (Back to top)

Salesforce for IT

Whether your team is tech-minded or not, our integrated Information Technology (IT) tools can help your entire organization automate processes, build more intelligent apps, and secure data across Salesforce. The Salesforce Platform will put you on the path to increase productivity by automating processes that help teams across your organization improve scale, transparency, and security as you need it — even when it comes to AI, with the ability to customize anything with no code, low-code, and pro code.

And with our platform, integration is easy, because we make it simple to connect with other systems, data lakes, and services so that your data can flow seamlessly, to boost efficiency. With Salesforce, organizations see a 27% decrease in IT costs.* (Back to top)

Salesforce for small business

Salesforce for Small Business is a scalable CRM platform with a suite of tools tailored to small business needs, including sales, customer service automation, and real-time analytics. With its flexibility and powerful automation features, Starter Suite allows small businesses to focus on what they do best — innovating and serving their customers. Plus, its seamless integration with third-party apps ensures that all business processes are aligned, making it a powerful asset for any growing enterprise. (Back to top)

See an example of Salesforce in action

We have many customer stories to share, but let’s look at just one example of how Salesforce helps deliver success. 

The Adecco Group, one of the world’s largest talent solution companies, processes 300 million job applications every year while placing 1 million people in jobs each day. They are building an agent-first recruiting system that automates candidate shortlisting and initial outreach. This intelligent assistance will help recruiters quickly find the right talent for their roles — maintaining their advantage in the competitive staffing industry, without losing the human touch.

“Looking for a job is one of the most emotional, stressful times of anyone’s life, right?” said Greg Shewmaker, senior vice president of global operations and AI for the Adecco Group. “When you never hear back, you start to question your self-worth.”

Autonomous agents will step in to unlock resume data and identify the best candidates right away. They will also keep candidates informed when they aren’t a match, suggesting other opportunities that may be a better fit. This helps build relationships with job seekers while also finding the best fit for clients’ open roles. “We can move from a one-to-one relationship with candidates to connecting with millions while maintaining the human touch,” said Denis Machuel, CEO of the Adecco Group.

Unifying their information with Data Cloud and combining 40+ Salesforce instances with other third-party systems via Mulesoft, the Adecco Group is also creating comprehensive profiles of each candidate and customer that let them gain actionable insights from around the world at scale.

By adding Salesforce AI, they’ll supercharge their Sales Cloud capabilities to automate the repetitive process of taking call notes, creating reports, and adding orders. Then Marketing Cloud will use agents to perform the order generation process. AI will also assist recruiters by pulling job posting details from phone call transcripts or emails – such as the role scope, pay range, and qualifications – to quickly create an order within Service Cloud. Together, these tools are helping the Adecco Group manage key metrics like fill rates and order intakes in real time and act quickly to optimize talent delivery globally. 

Salesforce’s ongoing innovation aligns seamlessly with their mission of providing 1:1 support for 100% of applicants and making the future work for everyone. (Back to top)

What is Salesforce best known for?

Salesforce is best known as the first company to put business software in the cloud. Today, we continue to innovate what a CRM is capable of with AI agents that use generative and conversational AI and unified data to help companies connect with customers in new and better ways.

As a company, we do more than build great products. We believe that our greatest resource is our values, and that businesses big and small can use their platforms for change to build a better future.

We’re doing what we can to tackle the current climate crisis, trust crisis, and the crisis of inequality. Since we began in 1999, we’ve placed a major emphasis on supporting the global environment. We launched Net Zero Cloud, and we’re behind the 1 trillion trees effort to unleash a global reforestation movement.

Companies can create welcoming environments for all employees by seeking diversity and teaching inclusivity. We have an equality fundamentals module on our Trailhead online learning platform with more information. We also have training anyone can access on how to build ethical and inclusive products. It’s part of a movement to build technology with intention.

Additionally, our 1-1-1 philanthropic model means we’ve donated more than $240 million in grants, contributed 9.1 million hours of community service, and provided product donations for more than 59,000 nonprofits and educational institutions since we started. You can learn more about our philanthropic efforts here. (Back to top)

Humans and agents driving customer success

Now you know that Salesforce creates CRM-based tools for companies of all shapes and sizes. As the #1 AI CRM, Salesforce gives your teams a centralized location to store, track, and manage customer information. With Agentforce, we bring the benefits of AI into your organization with autonomous agents that help you build strong, lasting relationships with your customers. 

Learn more about how your company can bring together humans and agents to drive success and growth. Find out which Salesforce solutions are right for your business with our Solution Finder, and continue your learning journey with these resources:

Salesforce 101 — Discover how to connect with your customers in a whole new way with Salesforce.

Discover Agentforce Agents — Learn about autonomous agents and how they can help you get more done.

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*Source: 2024 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights. Data is aggregated from 2,165 customers across 9 countries.