This has been a tough week for SalesForce. Blogs and the Twitterverse have been full of the news that SalesForce was going to be charging for their analytics edition and everyone (including me) was outraged. The cost was quite high and it was going to be levied on every license in the organization. SalesForce has since backtracked and will be offering analytics at no additional cost for their enterprise and unlimited editions beginning with the Spring ’12 release. There are two important lessons that can be learned from this. 

The first lesson is to never forget the importance of keeping your customers happy. It is summed up quite nicely by George Hu, COO of SalesForce in his blog at http://blogs.salesforce.com/product/2012/01/responding-to-customer-feedback.html. In his post he talks about the importance of listening to your customers. He admits that SalesForce made an error, apologizes for it, and thanks customers for their feedback. Even in a digital age companies can never forget the importance of good old-fashioned customer service.

The second lesson is about the importance of social media. This is a great example of a company that kept an eye on social media, recognized that it had a serious problem, and quickly took steps to correct it. Back in the days before social media it is quite likely that they may not have realized what a massive issue this was until they started losing customers. But since they were keeping an eye on what their customers were saying they were able to react before the issue got out of hand.

Looking forward to the Spring ’12 release so I can see these new analytics in action!