Cisco Spark for Salesforce Is Now Available

Some people spend most of their time working in collaboration tools. They message, attend meetings, and share documents — living in applications designed to help them connect faster, better.

Others work almost entirely in specialized applications. Healthcare staff, financial services teams, sales organizations: People in these roles use tools tied to specific business processes.

For these workers, collaboration tools are a secondary destination. First priority is the vertical or functional application. Collaboration apps must work within those environments to support utmost productivity and effectiveness.

Today, the newly available Cisco Spark for Salesforce experience does just that. This solution puts essential collaboration tools in the hands of users directly within Salesforce. It’s turnkey and intuitive, allowing you to gain user value from day one.

If you’re in Salesforce, then you now have a free and ready-to-use solution that provides:

• High-quality video calling
• Group messaging with advanced features including file sharing, read receipts, and message deletion
• Visibility of user status
• And other tools designed to improve your effectiveness

These capabilities integrate smartly into the Salesforce interface. Simply hover over another user’s name to send a message or start a video call. Link group messages right inside relevant Salesforce records to keep things streamlined. Have multiple ongoing discussions to multitask as you move between different records.

Take a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQlsnKx4Lz8

Here’s what it means in practical terms:

For groups: Align teamwork with important Salesforce activities.

Anyone associated with a Salesforce record can link a new or existing Cisco Spark group messaging space to the record, generating a place for team members to ask questions, share files, and save helpful snippets of exchanged messages. This lets you streamline work by creating a topical discussion with all the right people – including external stakeholders – directly within an associated Salesforce record.

For individuals: Improve how you research a new customer opportunity.

There’s no need to send an email or compare schedules to find time to connect with someone to get important information about a new customer opportunity. You can explore associated Cisco Spark spaces to review previous conversations and shared files. Or you can initiate a message or video call with an account owner to get questions answered quickly.

For everyone: Get more done in a single place.

Cisco Spark for Salesforce gives you the power to interact with anyone else who uses Cisco Spark – and all that takes is an email address. Using Cisco Spark to interact with non-Salesforce users means you can get more work done with all your colleagues and stakeholders from a single place.

The benefits to Salesforce administrators are just as numerous. Enable it in a few clicks, it deploys “instantly.” Users just need to authenticate with the Cisco Spark service. They can leave downloads and plug-ins at home. And the video calling works right in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers.

Get started today by simply turning on the Cisco Spark experience in your Salesforce Lightning Sales or Service clouds via the Salesforce administrator page.

And I want to know how it’s going! Please ping me via @JSGoecke on Twitter to tell me how you’re using it. We’re already working with Salesforce on our next release, so your feedback can help us make it better.