Salesforce vs ServiceNow: Major Difference Between CRM Platforms

Quick Summary: The major difference between Salesforce vs ServiceNow is that Salesforce enables organizations to deliver faster and more reliable resolutions, whereas ServiceNow allows businesses to address customer requirements quickly and proactively.

In this technology-driven world, the success of any organization relies on customer experience. When we emphasize “experience”, it’s not only limited to the customer-oriented service but also a complete customer lifecycle with that product.

In addition to that, we shifted our paradigm from phone support to modern cloud-based tools. And they let us enhance our performance instead of just communicating with the customers.

Well, we have two major cloud customer service platforms available in the market that satisfy all customers' needs. These are the top customer engagement platforms – Salesforce and ServiceNow.

While talking about Salesforce vs ServiceNow, they are unique ITSM tools and SaaS-based platforms available in the market. ServiceNow and Salesforce offer various types of services; some of them are similar, while some are distinct.

In this blog, we’ll talk about the difference between Salesforce and ServiceNow, consider Salesforce implementation and ServiceNow as systems, their key features, and discuss each tool individually. So, let’s peek into the world of CRM and service desk systems – ServiceNow vs Salesforce.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM application that stands for Customer Relationship Management. The primary purpose of Salesforce is to manage and handle every facet of the relationship between an enterprise and its own customers, such as customer support, requests, contact details, personal information, and many more.

“Powered by AI, Salesforce enables teams to work together to build strong relationships and deliver personalized experiences.”

Moreover, Salesforce allows organizations to manage their customer’s details along with their seller organization. As a result, it becomes easier for customer-driven businesses to analyze and manage daily activities. Additionally, it strengthens the bond between customers and organizations, resulting in good business revenue.

Salesforce supports four major platforms: Android, iPhone, Windows, and Web-based. It also provides multi-platform support, irrespective of its size, which has forced big giants like Google to utilize Salesforce products for a better customer experience.

Salesforce provides various services, making it a great choice for CRM software. Below are the types of services Salesforces offers to enterprises for better customer relationship management.

i) Sales

Sales services by Salesforce enable your company’s sales teams to handle prospects and close deals with great accuracy.

It enables a smoother workflow and errorless distribution, and manages the pipeline with solid leads. This becomes a win-win situation for both organizations and customers.

• Sales Cloud: It allows you to manage user data and contacts and monitor the opportunities from your preferred devices.
• Salesforce CPQ: CPQ stands for Configure, Price, and Quote. It means Salesforce CPQ automates project quotes, billing cycles, business contracts, and order processes. You can easily create business proposals and project quotes with the utmost accuracy.

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ii) Service

With the Salesforce implementation, you can easily build a stronger relationship with the customer from the self-service portal to a customer help desk portal.

• Service Cloud: It enables better customer support and service using the Salesforce platform, providing faster customer-centric services.
• Field Service Lightning: It connects the entire workforce, resulting in faster delivery and intelligent onsite support.

iii) Marketing

Salesforce enables Pardot, Salesforce DMP (Data Management Platform), and Marketing Cloud to work collaboratively. It boosts the customer’s interaction through various cross-channeling journeys.

• Marketing Cloud: Through cross-channel and tailored customer journeys, the marketing cloud makes the most of every customer engagement. This results in a great customer experience across every platform.
• Salesforce DMP: It stores and activates your data across all touchpoints to offer a valuable customer experience and build healthy customer relationships.
• Pardot: It's a marketing automation function that lets you perform things like email marketing, lead scoring, and nurturing.

What Do Experts Have to Say about Salesforce?

Industry experts and analysts have strong views about Salesforce, which are as follows:

• High rating in field service by Gartner
• High marks in automation by Forrester
• High marks in CRM by Internation Data Corp

On the other hand, Salesforce has a steeper learning curve, making it difficult for many SMBs to use. It is also considered to be one of the expensive platforms available.

The Pricing Model of Salesforce

The pricing model of Salesforce is straightforward.

• For SMBs, sales functionality starts at $25 per user per month.
• The general model is cost-effective for basic functionalities, but the rates go up with adding new features and modules. However, predicting how this will play out in practice is difficult.

The greatest advice is to go deep into Salesforce pricing to discover how it works for your specific company.

Features of Salesforce

Some features of Salesforce define its popularity and top position in the international business marketplace. You should know each one of them before making the right choice for your organization.

Let’s walk through the features of Salesforce listed below.

Lead Management

An activity timeline from lead management is the prime feature of Salesforce. It lets you have control over every updated activity of your contacts, adhering to best industry practices. It also uses the sales path of the related documents for better understanding.

Trailhead

With the Salesforce integration, Trailhead offers many advantages and features to startups and small businesses. Trailhead provides amazing services to its customers with built-in intelligence support. It gives an end-to-end customer view by capturing the data from emails, calendars, and support channels.

Opportunity Management

Salesforce lets you manage every sales deal and connect with the prospect. Also, it has some steps which guide you through every deal and inform you what things to do in order to win the game.

Mobility

With the help of the Salesforce Mobile App, you can easily access CRM data from anywhere. This allows you to view every detail at your fingertips, including meetings, account updates, and events. In addition, you can view the offline data updates without having any internet connection.

Quote to Cash

Quote Management is simplified using Salesforce CRM by automating three key elements: Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ). CPQ enables sales teams to choose the best quotes for their customers based on the most recent discounts.

Salesforce CRM allows users to create accurate quotes and submit proposals much faster. Salesforce Lightning makes the process of collecting money and delivering invoices much easier.

What is ServiceNow?

ServiceNow is a customer engagement platform that works on the principle of its Service Management. Its IT Service management tool automates the service management process by bringing together traditional systems and fragmented tools.

ServiceNow comprises various functions that make it suitable for use in large and medium-sized businesses with various business requirements. In a nutshell, ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform that offers smarter solutions and enhances a security system. This is why you can expect the ServiceNow market to value around USD 23.6 billion by 2028, proliferating at 22.9% yearly.

There are multiple solutions that ServiceNow offers, such as:

• IT operations management
• IT business management
• IT Service Management
• Security

What Do Experts Have to Say about ServiceNow?

For the last eight years, ServiceNow has been leading the position for ITSM as per Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Moreover, Forrester consistently ranks ServiceNow as a leader because of its comprehensive ITSM capabilities in asset and configuration management, a variety of business service modules, such as HR and facilities, and robust Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities.

On the other hand, Forrester stated that the organization needed more talented developers in order to be more successful and highlighted concerns about the expense of deploying ServiceNow.

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The Pricing Model of ServiceNow

A subscription license option is available in a SaaS deployment option hosted in ServiceNow's private cloud. Everything is done with the help of "contact us". In other words, we can’t see any Pricing Model menu on the website.

Analysts frequently focus on the platform's complex license and hefty cost.

Features of ServiceNow

ServiceNow comes with many amazing features that allow you to manage, allocate, and prioritize resources in your organization. Let’s walk through some of the top features of ServiceNow.

IT Service Management

With the help of ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM), you can easily monitor and resolve IT errors using AI-powered modules. The AI-enabled solutions are utilized on the business network, the better they can detect faults.

Analytics, Intelligence, and Reporting

ServiceNow enables IT teams to create reports, like bar reports, tabular format, and pivot tables using the Natural Language Query (NLQ) prompt. This module also performs predictive analytics, predicting the occurrence of a result based on past data using statistical algorithms and machine learning.

Change Advisory Board (CAB) Workbench

The Change Advisory Board (CAB) Workbench employs an automated workflow that creates all the parts of a CAB meeting once configured. Attendees, calendar schedule and any calendar changes, recorded meeting notes, and the status of change requests are all part of the CAB definition.

Automated Testing Framework

The Automated Testing Framework (ATF) employs automated validation tests to help customers expedite the deployment of new apps and reduce risk while focusing on functionality. Separate test data and time-consuming rollbacks are no longer required with automated testing.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Account and Contact Management are included in the revised Customer Service Portal, as well as Warranty and Contract Management, Case Management, Asset Management, and Knowledge Management.

For B2C businesses, tools like anonymous chat and registration in the ServiceNow CRM are important. The Consumer Service Portal plugin must be activated in order to have access to the portal.

Difference Between Salesforce vs ServiceNow

TL;DR

• Considering Salesforce vs ServiceNow, Salesforce enables you to streamline communication with your customers, fetching all relevant information, whereas ServiceNow enables you to optimize your customer support operations by connecting siloed systems.
• While talking about uptime in ServiceNow vs Salesforce, the ServiceNow platform promises 99.58% uptime; on the other hand, the Salesforce platform promises 99.9% uptime.
• Salesforce vs ServiceNow: Salesforce is the best tool for large organizations with various departments, whereas ServiceNow is preferred for those organizations that handle sensitive data for ticketing and prioritization queues.

Let’s consider the most significant factors for ServiceNow vs Salesforce service cloud differences.

Performance: Salesforce vs ServiceNow

As we know, the downtime of CRM is a nightmare for any enterprise and could lead to a complete service failure. While cloud providers are usually good at keeping up with uptime, a ServiceNow or Salesforce outage might have multiple consequences, depending on the period of the downtime and your company’s reliability on that technology.

Let’s consider a scenario where your customer service database crashes during business hours or has an IT issue that prevents you from processing IT tickets. These types of challenges can arise with either Salesforce or ServiceNow. Furthermore, these are undesired business risks that are hard to avoid.

While talking about Salesforce vs ServiceNow performance, Salesforce CRM has almost 99.9% uptime, while ServiceNow claims around 99.8% availability.

In the case of Salesforce, the annual downtime implies around 8 hours and 46 minutes. On the other hand, ServiceNow has an average outage of 17 hours and 30 minutes annually.

As a result, Salesforce comes out on top in this category, claiming to offer a stricter uptime guarantee.

Integrations: Salesforce vs ServiceNow

Salesforce has multiple app integrations and built-in features that work together to strengthen the tool’s core CRM capabilities almost seamlessly. However, tools already have some integration. As a result, you don’t need to fully integrate it into your system with the help of developers.

Salesforce tops the list because of Sales customization, Salesforce integration, and configurations.

On the other hand, ServiceNow finds it challenging when it comes to ServiceNow integration, as its process takes some time. Hence, experts have to invest more time and effort.

Considering ServiceNow vs Salesforce, ServiceNow is also less convenient because it doesn’t provide crucial customer information. Besides, Salesforce is more convenient due to easier customer management. This assists in the development of long-term client relationships and alliances.

Customer Support: ServiceNow vs Salesforce

The higher quality and speed of assistance are the most important factors when comparing Salesforce with ServiceNow.

Salesforce has three levels of customer service. The standard level of support is provided through Salesforce Trailhead and the Trailblazer community. Customers who require further support can subscribe to the Premier tier.

Here, customer service in ServiceNow may collaborate with other departments and resolve issues more rapidly. It saves money and provides all clients with round-the-clock phone support via the Contact Support page. Moreover, you can also contact ServiceNow using their website's live chat feature.

Large businesses prefer the proactive support and specialized account reps given by Salesforce's enterprise-level, despite the fact that ServiceNow support is the greatest option for budget-conscious customers.

Communication System: Salesforce vs ServiceNow

When communicating messages to various audiences, corporate and internal communication work hand-in-hand. It's critical to evaluate how a customer support platform can help you expedite interactions within your business, whether it's for agent-to-agent or agent-to-customer communication.

Both Salesforce Service Cloud and ServiceNow offer different ways of communication capabilities to help your team collaborate and communicate with customers. However, there are some differences between Salesforce and ServiceNow when it comes to handling internal communications and providing customer-facing communication options.

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Usability: Salesforce vs ServiceNow

Salesforce is a SaaS-based company with a major CRM platform for sales, marketing, and customer care. However, it has gained huge popularity and acquired a large market due to its exclusive product line and customization. Salesforce has become the prime choice for every user and business owner due to its wide range of CRM capabilities and endless integration possibilities. Furthermore, Salesforce enables developers to configure the system in a short time.

While talking about ServiceNow CRM, it’s a web-based framework. Also, it’s a tedious process to upgrade ServiceNow tools. Only ServiceNow experts can able to execute the task and offer support to it.

Salesforce enables developers to build on-demand applications which could be easily accessible to every user. This includes those users who own assistive devices like screen readers and voice recognition software. Whereas ServiceNow doesn’t offer such functionality.

In a nutshell, Salesforce wins in the race of usability against ServiceNow.

Pricing Module: ServiceNow vs Salesforce

As we can see on the Salesforce official website, the Essential edition of Salesforce’s Sales Cloud costs $25 per user per month. Also, the Salesforce Professional plan costs $75 and $150 for the Enterprise plan. Salesforce offers unlimited user versions at $300.

On the other hand, having said earlier, ServiceNow doesn’t have any pricing module on its website. In such a case, you need to ask their customer support executive.

ServiceNow or Salesforce: Which is Better? A report states that Salesforce is the first choice for every education, non-profit organization, and government. However, that’s not any rule written anywhere. In fact, ServiceNow is equally important in many organizations.The number of users and popularity of both SaaS-based platforms are just crazy. Therefore, the right choice between Salesforce vs ServiceNow totally depends on your business projects and requirements. They both are excellent at offering support and services for their specific customer base.In a nutshell, to choose the right CRM platform – Salesforce or ServiceNow, you need proper guidance to figure out which could be profitable to your organization. And such guidance is provided by the consultants and experts from Radixweb. You can contact us to share your ideas and requirements for a proper consultation.