Salesforce is announcing a new app called Salesforce Anywhere that embeds chat capabilities directly into its customer-focused tools.
The collaboration integration is a necessary step to compete with Microsoft's rival customer relationship management tools, especially as more businesses consider permanently shifting to remote or partially remote workforces, said Chris Marsh, an analyst at 451 Research.
Salesforce Anywhere is built on the same infrastructure of productivity tool Quip, which Salesforce acquired in 2016. Quip's office suite tools are now embedded directly into Salesforce tools like Sales and Service Cloud. Salesforce Anywhere builds on that, Sarah Franklin, Salesforce's head of Platform said.
"We've learned a lot from Quip," Franklin told Business Insider, "We've learned how that collaboration has worked in a modern way and we're bringing that into Salesforce."
In addition to message-based chat, Salesforce is building video chatting into its platform with the new app, via a built-in feature using Amazon Chime and an integration with Zoom. The feature will automatically make sure users are following which pages within Salesforce their teammates are looking at during a video call.
These kinds of features are already available with Microsoft, through its integration of Dynamics 365 and its chat app Microsoft Teams, 451 Research's Marsh said. That's why releasing similar capabilities was crucial for Salesforce: Its new app makes its tools more useful and valuable to users overall since they now have collaboration and productivity features built-in, he said. The new chat features complement the document collaboration features from Quip to make a productivity suite of sorts within Salesforce.
Marsh has thought for a while that software companies would start to embed collaboration into the tools where information and data is stored because they want people to get more value from them, he said.
"Most are talking the language of integration, like 'This one is great with Slack, this one is great with Teams,' but that leaves a lot of value within Slack and [Microsoft] Teams. And I think Salesforce just doesn't want to leave that on the table," Marsh said.
Right now Salesforce Anywhere isn't competing directly with Teams, he said, because it's for specific use cases like sales or customer service rather than general use. If Salesforce continues to build out the apps features, though, it could become more competitive in the long run.
The new app also makes it easier to access Salesforce information from mobile devices, which Alan Webber, an analyst at IDC, said is necessary if Salesforce wants to keep up with how work is changing.
"When you look at the progress towards where people are going, more use of mobile devices within the enterprise and the business, it just makes sense that Salesforce has moved to an app that allows them to maximize their platform within a mobile device," Webber said. He added that this shift has just been accelerated due to increased remote work amid the pandemic.
Franklin, the platform executive at Salesforce, said Salesforce envisions these new tools as helping people streamline how they work by cutting down on the number of applications they have to use to get work done.
"You want to be able to keep those conversations secure and relevant to the customer information that customer records," she said. "If there's a question that legal has, or if there's a question that your quoting team has, or that the customer has, keeping that context in the customer record is so important for you to have that complete view of the customer."
The new app will be available in a trial mode on desktop and in an iOS app in July, and available to all customers in the fourth quarter of this year.
Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at pzaveri@bjinnox.com or Signal at 925-364-4258. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.
