Jul 31, 2019   SOURCE: PR NewsWire

Total Economic Impact Study of Salesforce Lightning for Service Cloud Shows 475 Percent Return on Investment over Three Years

SAN FRANCISCO, July 31, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today released a new Forrester Consulting study(([1])) quantifying the Total Economic Impact and benefits of Salesforce Lightning for Service Cloud. In the study, Forrester found that a composite service organization deploying Lightning Experience obtained a return on investment (ROI) of 475 percent over three years. Salesforce also announced today the general availability of more than a dozen features only available in Lightning Experience, including In-App Guidance and Smart Macros.

Lightning Experience redefines productivity for the age of CRM - offering a modern, intuitive user experience, access to innovations like artificial intelligence, and a modern framework for building and customizing apps fast. With more than 16 million custom pages, 1 million custom apps and over 2,000 Lightning-ready apps on the AppExchange, Lightning Experience is the present and future of CRM - empowering admins, developers and business users to build completely customized experiences at the center of their workflow.

"In our view, Forrester's latest study accentuates how Lightning Experience can be an engine for growth and productivity for any business," said Jonathan Sigler, Executive Vice President of Lightning Platform, Salesforce. "With more customers than ever set to turn on Lightning Experience, we believe that companies across every industry will reap the benefits of a more productive, smarter CRM."

Forrester's results also revealed significant cost savings and business benefits for service organizations that have deployed Lightning Experience - reducing support handling time by two minutes per contact and time for post-contact documentation tasks by 75 percent.

Among the other potential benefits, Forrester found that over three years a composite service organization:

    --  Saved more than $2.5 million by reducing support handling time;
    --  Saved $1.1 million by avoiding documentation time; and
    --  Increased customer satisfaction by 8.5 percent

According to a customer interviewed for this study, the director of customer service operations at a pharmaceutical company: "Salesforce Lightning didn't require as much training because it is more intuitive, and we eliminated multiple ways to do things."

Another customer interviewed for this study, the enterprise service applications manager for a medical hardware vendor, commented on the improved agent consoles and efficient guided workflows found in Lightning Experience, concluding: "Obviously Lightning has improved both the agent's and the customer's experience."

New Lightning Experience Transition Tools jumpstart the move to Lightning Experience
As part of the Winter '20 release, Salesforce will automatically enable Lightning Experience. This will occur on a rolling basis starting in September for orgs with editions that support Lightning Experience, and users will still have access to Salesforce Classic.

To help customers get ready, Salesforce provides a free set of transition tools, which have already helped tens of thousands of customers successfully make the move to Lightning Experience.

Updates to Lightning Experience transition tools include:

    --  Lightning Experience Transition Assistant - Available in Setup, it's the
        central hub for the journey to Lightning Experience and it delivers all
        the transition tools, help, and step-by-step guidance that admins need
        to implement, measure and iterate on their Lightning Experience rollout.
    --  Lightning Experience Readiness Check - With a single click, evaluates an
        org for Lightning Experience and provides guidance on any features or
        customizations that need adjustment.
    --  Salesforce Optimizer - Delivers admins a personalized report for how to
        improve their Salesforce implementation, including opportunities to
        reduce complexity and drive feature adoption.

Leading brands boost productivity and optimize operations with Lightning Experience
Thousands of companies today are accelerating business growth by driving new levels of efficiency and productivity using Lightning Experience. Here's how innovative companies SurveyMonkey and Wiley have reinvented their businesses after turning on Lightning Experience:

    --  SurveyMonkey, a leading global survey software company that helps
        enterprise organizations transform feedback into business intelligence,
        turned on Lightning Experience to streamline CRM for sales and service
        reps. Since transitioning its Sales and Service Cloud deployments to
        Lightning Experience, SurveyMonkey has cut page load times in half. Now
        armed with the simple and intuitive Lightning Experience interface, the
        company's sales and service reps are more productive than ever - able to
        access game-changing customer data and insights with just a few clicks.
    --  Wiley, a global publishing company focused on research and education, is
        unlocking new levels of productivity after turning on Lightning
        Experience for more than 1,300 sales users. Wiley's sales teams no
        longer lose time clicking and scrolling through pages to find key
        information; now, using tabs within the Lightning Experience customer
        data is readily available at key moments in the sales process. Packaging
        the data across mobile and desktop provides a seamless user experience.
        "Switching to Lightning took the administrative pains out of the sales
        process, allowing our reps to focus on selling," said Laurie Dusko, CRM
        Business Lead, Wiley.

Additional Information

    --  The Forrester Consulting Study of the Total Economic Impact (TEI) of
        Salesforce Lightning for Service Cloud is available here.
    --  Learn more about Lightning Experience on Trailhead, including Lightning
        Experience Basics and Make the Move to Lightning Experience.

Pricing & Availability

    --  Lightning Experience is generally available at no charge for
        Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance and Developer Editions
        Editions. Lightning Experience will be enabled, on a rolling basis in
        the Winter '20 release, for all customers with editions that support
        Lightning Experience and have standard Salesforce Classic deployments.

About the Total Economic Impact(TM) Salesforce Lightning study
Commissioned by Salesforce, The Total Economic Impact(TM) of Salesforce Lightning for Service Cloud study was developed through interviews with four customers that had deployed Lightning Experience in the past three years. Forrester Consulting aggregated customer interview information and data into a composite organization to calculate the quantifiable and unquantified benefits that deploying Lightning Experience could have on a service organization.

About Salesforce
Salesforce is the global leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), bringing companies closer to their customers in the digital age. Founded in 1999, Salesforce enables companies of every size and industry to take advantage of powerful technologies--cloud, mobile, social, internet of things, artificial intelligence, voice and blockchain--to create a 360-degree view of their customers. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: www.salesforce.com.

(([1])) The Total Economic Impact(TM) Of Salesforce Lightning For Service Cloud, a May 2019 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Salesforce.

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SOURCE Salesforce