Before the NBA playoffs started the talk of the town here and across the country was about the NBA’s Golden State Warriors winning streak, and today I wanted to highlight how Salesforce is celebrating one of our own. Just a week ago we were recognized, for the 8th consecutive year, as a leader in Gartner’s Customer Engagement Center Magic Quadrant. We are excited to share this news because this is a true testament to the success of our customers on our platform. As the General Manager of our Service Cloud platform, I’m meeting with customers every day, and it’s both inspiring and humbling to hear their enthusiasm for our product and to be trusted by them in delivering their vision for the future of customer service. It is thanks to the success and leadership of our customers that Gartner has recognized us as a leader, and it strengthens our commitment to help you deliver an outstanding customer experience with our solutions.  

What does it mean to be a leader?

As customer expectations in the digital age rise, we are meeting the challenge to help our customers be where their customers are. And moreover, to provide those customers with a faster, smarter, more personalized experience that will keep customers happy. With key criteria being top of mind for Gartner, like scalability, native mobile support, and powerful analytics, we’re at the forefront of delivering the kind of functionality that’s important to our customers. At Salesforce, we are inspired to innovate based on what we hear our customers want and need. Last year, we enabled companies to connect to their customers in a more personalized way in their mobile worlds – with the launch of our SOS video chat and co-browsing functionality. At Dreamforce, we launched Service Cloud Lightning to help drive agent productivity and customer satisfaction. And just last month, we launched our brand new Field Service Lightning product to enable companies to connect to their customers from the phone to the field. Innovations like these help drive the businesses forward for our customers – and it’s their success that Gartner is recognizing by naming Salesforce a leader.  Again.

What The Position Means For The Industry

A consistent trend we see this year is that service can be used as a key “disruption wedge” to shake up traditional industries.  The organizations that are leading the way are using Service Cloud to deliver an experience to their customers that is unprecedented by allowing them to connect to their customers in a whole new way.  First, we enable organizations to empower agents with cutting edge tools that drive their productivity in our Lightning Console. Second, we help companies be more intelligent in how they provide service, with omni-channel routing capabilities and native analytics to help both agents and managers be smarter about the service they deliver.  Third, we’re connecting businesses with their customers in a whole new way by being where their customers are – on social channels, in mobile apps, and in their communities.  Equipped with the tools to connect to their customers, organizations are now able to deliver the experience that customers are seeking today in their digital worlds.  Best of all, we’re building an open platform so that our customers have an insurance policy into the unforeseen future of new customer contact channels, especially in an Internet Of Things world where everything is connected.

We couldn’t be more proud that the leading companies across industries turn to Salesforce to deliver game-changing experience to their customers. The success of our customers validates the decisions we make every day to deliver a world-class product to the market. The kind of innovation we are bringing to market is providing organizations of all sizes the ability to disrupt markets and industries, which comes from working every day with the world’s most progressive customer experience leaders.  We’re flattered to keep our winning streak going, which we hope continues across the Bay with that other winning team as well!

Thanks to our customers for helping us get recognized as a leader for the 8th year in a row!

To download the full report and learn more about what it means to be a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, download the report here.