If you consider enrolling in Salesforce products make sure you skip the Marketing Cloud (Social Studio). Here is some perspective, our business learned the hard way and we would have loved to have known before signing up to this half-baked, hugely expensive, and buggy software.We signed up with Salesforce in October and are still dealing with the setup and bugs for Salesforce’s marketing cloud. It was sold to use with two licences. In our mind that was two users, but it means two connectors!!! In other words, we can connect to only two social media accounts of our over 30 different accounts (we have different languages, podcasts and platforms as most international trading businesses have. Salesforce knew that but sold us two connectors for … $750 per month. The contract is in no way straight forward. Furthermore, our onboardeder was convinced that we should have 50+ for the same price as most customers do. We tried to discuss it with the management many times. But we didn’t even receive an answer to our emails. The Sydney based Marketing cloud head Tom Rastas, just disappeared and most of the staff that we talked to admitted not to know anything about him. We then escalated it to the Marketing Cloud Singapore head office, it was great to be given the CEOs contact details Tom Williamson. Tom (II) couldn’t muster an apology or make a call but instead didn’t reply to any emails and simply forwards us to a case manager that in the end gave us two more connectors (“User Entitlements”). We are a SME and are implementing Salesforce through all aspects of core business, it is a big investment in the future of our business. We would have thought that if an issue arrives that Salesforce as the global leaders in CRM would have the mechanisms to be looked after instead of pretending to not hear us (we spend a lot of time with calls, emails, and follow up calls and emails). The account managers are great people but lack the capacity to escalate things swiftly with management for a response, and it seems aren’t properly trained in the offering of Marketing Cloud. It feels as though our case gets lost in a big company with a disconnected hierarchy similar to governmental departments in the ’80’s.It has been a frustrating journey from a licence point of view and from a user experience point of view. The marketing cloud is missing simple functionality that HootSuite, Sprout, or Later provide and offer straight out of the box. On top of that it is buggy. It feels like the software was developed 10 years ago and not subsequently updated to meet modern business digital publishing requirements. We have been trialling the system for 4 months now and find more and more bugs. For a system that has been on offer by Salesforce for more than 10 years, this is just pathetic. We are still wrapping our head around the fact that the marketing cloud is just a very mediocre and super expensive product. This is not what was sold to us, and to be quite frank many free social publishing services have allowances up to 20 connected accounts.We are now only trying to get our money back and move on to a different system but even-though it was acknowledged that mistakes were made on Salesforce’s side, we are still waiting. Instead, Salesforce sends us standard training offers to get the most out of our 4 connectors - whatever - and still not even offering additional connectors to get our social accounts connected to our business so our digital team can get on with their job, requesting we pay an additional $50pm for each of these - crazy. So, please do yourself a favour and save yourself this headache, money and wasted time. Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Social Cloud, is not a good product and more important the management of this arm of Salesforce is somewhere up in the (Marketing) cloud not wanting to deal with customers.
