Last week, a mixed bag of news swirled around Salesforce, from the launch of a new Slack interface to customer data software concerns.
Let’s dig down a little to find out what has made this such a polarized week for the global CRM provider.
The Good
Last Wednesday, Slack released a new user interface to improve productivity for users.
The design update will reportedly go live on Slack over the coming months. It aims to simplify navigation, make it easier to focus, and add tools for modern work.
In Salesforce’s related blog post, it explains: “Companies that can centralize their people and tools they use every day in one place will get work done more efficiently, and increase productivity.
With Slack, businesses have a command center for modern work that seamlessly integrates their apps into one place, automating admin and time-consuming processes, and bringing teams into one platform to collaborate.
Slack is creating a default home view through which users will be able to navigate to channels, direct messages, and apps.
It is also adding a dedicated view designed to limit interruptions and allow for uninterrupted work.
This includes an Activity center to catch up on important work, Direct Messages to read in their own time, and an option to set reminders for messages and action items.
The Bad
A former Salesforce vice president, Karl Wirth, is now suing his former employer and blowing the lid on Salesforce’s claims it made during the release of Genie in September last year.
In a keynote presentation about its new CDP software, the company described it as capable of processing information in real-time.
This was “all a lie”, Wirth tells, because “many of its processes took several hours”.
According to Wirth, Salesforce had not managed to create a technology to live up to the scheduled release date and chose to knowingly mislead the public rather than adapt its announcement to truthfully reflect the software.
Wirth said he was fired within hours after raising his concerns to Salesforce’s CTO, Parker Harris.
Furthermore, he alleges that when he informed Slack CEO Lidiane Jones, she began a “deceitful campaign to diminish” his reputation.
Further “bad” news this month at Salesforce is that 50 of its staff have been laid off in Ireland, which takes its total job cuts over the ten percent announced in January.
Moreover, prominent customer experience analysts have raised concerns about Salesforce’s price hike.
The Ugly
Salesforce is due to face court proceedings to assess the claims it has knowingly assisted the sex trafficking website, Backpage.com.
The CRM giant tried unsuccessfully to get the case thrown out and, in the ruling last week, the judges found:
A company like Salesforce could simply bury its head in the sand with respect to individual victims.
“It could work, for example, only with high-level data on behalf of a venture that the company knows or should know is engaged in illegal sex trafficking on a large scale.”
Salesforce was not shown to have any involvement in publishing details of trafficked victims. Yet, the allegations suggest that the company did assist Backpage in reaching more sex traffickers, alongside those paying for commercial sex.
According to the plaintiff and their mother, who remain anonymous, Salesforce sold software to Backpage designed specifically for them and offered personalized support.
Salesforce is also said to have profited from several lucrative contracts with Backpage before the US Department of Justice shut it down in 2018.
A court case will give Salesforce the opportunity to defend itself and ascertain the “objective truth”, according to the judges, as the US Court of Appeals must accept the allegations as true.
