Extending Customer 360 with Salesforce AppExchange
Quickly and easily extend the power of Salesforce with proven partner apps and experts.
Introduction: The State of the Cloud Marketplace
During the great cloud migration of the past decade, millions of organizations shifted workloads from siloed legacy systems to the cloud to make their businesses more efficient and meet the disparate demands of clients across the globe. The cloud has fulfilled many of their expectations, making it easier to scale and reach more customers than ever before.
But are companies reaching them with relevant content and keeping up with their evolving demands? Have the apps increased productivity and efficiency, getting their products to market faster and hitting revenue targets sooner?
For many, these goals remain elusive. Nearly 30% of workplace apps duplicate others or fall into disuse. And Salesforce research shows that while 75% of companies think they are customer-centric, just 30% of their customers agree.
To reap the full benefits of the cloud, businesses need to take a more strategic approach. They need to deploy the right apps — those that zero in on the needs of their industry, their business, and their customers. And they need a way to find these apps efficiently, instead of wasting their time searching the internet only to find dead-end solutions that don’t fit the challenges they face.
Salesforce AppExchange was built to address these needs. The platform enables you to quickly find and deploy prebuilt apps that extend the capabilities of Customer 360 to achieve better results — whether that means automating processes, measuring employee performance in real time, discovering what your customers really want, and more. On the platform, you can also connect with experts who tailor solutions to your specific needs and help you drive results with data-driven insights. In this playbook, you will learn how to use an ecosystem of apps and experts to exceed customer expectations and accelerate business success.
Chapter 1: Harness the Full Power of the Salesforce Partner Ecosystem
Customer Spotlight
BBF was expanding quickly and had outgrown its inventory management system. This required manual data entry, resulting in errors and precious staff time spent fixing them. The first solution the company found on AppExchange was GoldFinch, an enterprise resource management app customized to meet the needs of consumer packaged goods organizations. Next, it utilized Tableau to analyze data and deliver new business insights. Finally, Accounting Seed helped BBF better organize and unify its financial procedures.
These three apps, integrated with Customer 360, helped the company:

Eliminate manual errors and increase productivity by 16%.

Save $200,000 a year by managing inventory more efficiently and greatly reducing costs from expired, thrown-away goods.

Retire licenses with other service providers, saving over $18,000 a year.

Reduce staff time spent on creating reports and forecasts by 70%.

Trust Is Our #1 Value
All partners are carefully vetted by Salesforce for their knowledge, credentials, and experience, and the quality and consistency of their products. Before partners can publicly list their app on AppExchange, it must pass a security review. The AppExchange security review tests the security posture of partner apps, including how well it protects customer data. It identifies security vulnerabilities that a hacker, malware, or other threat can exploit. Salesforce security review teams test with threat-modeling profiles that are based on the most common web vulnerabilities. The teams attempt to penetrate the defenses programmed in apps. Their goal is to extract or modify data that they don’t have permission to access, just as security threats attempt to do.
You will see a consulting partner’s level of expertise within the Expertise tab of their consultant listing on AppExchange. From a Level I Specialist, who possesses the knowledge to deliver customer success in a product or industry vertical, to an Expert.
Tips for Using AppExchange
AppExchange makes it easy to find the apps and experts that cater to your business needs.
Tip 1: The intelligent search bar will guide you to solutions most relevant to your use cases, taking into account your organization’s Customer 360 profile, your search history, and feedback from thousands of customers with similar needs.
Tip 2: When you click to view a solution, you will immediately see customer ratings, a link to customer reviews, product information, vendor contact information, and pricing plans to help you quickly narrow your choices. Some partner apps are free.
Tip 3: Your business is evolving, and the technology for managing it also changes over time. AppExchange is a dynamic platform where partners continue to release state-of-the-art solutions to meet new challenges as they arise.