Salesforce collaboration gets mobile boost with new app

Salesforce plans to release a beta of a new free collaboration app, Salesforce Anywhere, in July.

The Salesforce collaboration tool, announced at the CRM giant's TrailheaDX virtual developer conference, can track and log text, chat and video conversations about an account in Salesforce CRM records as users nurture deals in their pipeline.

In many instances for Salesforce users, whole teams court big accounts; sales reps using Salesforce Anywhere aim to keep other team members abreast of what their colleagues are doing with clickable mobile notifications as they work in concert to close a deal. GIFs and emoji come with the chat package.

Salesforce also will embed the same features into its desktop interface, so users can toggle between mobile and desktop and the CRM platform without losing a conversation or task assignment. That's important, said Chris Marsh, an analyst at 451 Research, as sales reps -- and office workers in general -- are often more comfortable using phones for messaging, even when sitting at their desktop workstations.

The app is Salesforce's way of capturing unstructured data in conversations crucial to sales work, Marsh said. It surprises him that so many technology vendors are willing "leave that on the table" for other business applications providers like Microsoft to capture.

"I'm not surprised at all that Salesforce is doing this; it's something they have to do," Marsh said of the Salesforce collaboration app. He added that the problem with systems of record like the Salesforce CRM platform is they depend on the accuracy and timeliness of information entered by users. Automatically logging conversational data helps solve that problem.