Salesforce Customization vs Configuration: What's the Difference?

Introduction:

A Salesforce Development Company particularly deals with providing solutions to businesses with the help of Salesforce CRM. Before moving to the main point of discussion, let’s have a small brief about Salesforce CRM.

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM in short, aims to be the core heart of any business and works towards the betterment of the same. In an actual sense, it works as the connecting link between the organization, its clients, and even prospective clients. A good CRM solution is one that further encompasses all required information that is essential to have an effective relationship with customers. One such example of CRM is Salesforce CRM.

Salesforce is the worldwide known best cloud computing Software as a Service (SaaS) company specializing in customer relationship management (CRM). Salesforce implementation services further let businesses use and implement cloud technology so as to connect with clients, partners, and prospective clients. 

To ensure that there is the optimum usage of Salesforce applications, there are two options provided by them - Salesforce Configuration and Salesforce Customization.

Both of these concepts have been quite popular, but there is a need to understand both of them properly so that the organizations can choose wisely as per the business’ requirements. 

Before moving ahead with the discussion of points of difference between these options, let’s first go in-depth with their working separately.

What is Salesforce Customization?

Salesforce customization is a term given to customized development and coding that is further added to bring about powerful features to one’s CRM platform. These features can be further integrated with the business to ensure a scalable impact. Usually, these actions are not easily accessible with just the usual Salesforce platform and further start expanding the CRM functionality, which aims at expanding the scope of the majority of business tasks that are done by the platform. 

Few instances of Salesforce Customization Services include - Apex Classes, Apex triggers, various third-party integrations, visualforce emails, using CSS to alter the page layout, and building visualforce pages. 

Don't forget to check out: Successful Implementation of Omni-Channel | Salesforce Guide

What is Salesforce Configuration?

Salesforce configuration is the first step after one starts using the Salesforce CRM system for their businesses. This means a new field to Salesforce can be added, that requires a specific formula or a rule to move forward to get the desired outcome. In simpler terms, the configuration in Salesforce can be defined as the user-defined values that will grant access to a certain module or any feature to function. Except for the initial setup, configuration mainly includes interface modifications, data, and metadata organization, while ensuring the set up of business processes and logic according to one’s requirements. 

One of the main examples of the configuration in Salesforce could be setting up an email. Moreover, Salesforce configuration can help in altering fields, making changes in workflows, creating additional reports, customizing the user interface and changing page layouts, etc.

Salesforce Customization vs Salesforce Configuration:

Now, let’s have a brief look over the main points of difference between Salesforce Customization and Salesforce Configuration Solutions, which are as follows:

Way of Working:

Salesforce Customizations are known to comprise custom codes while writing it for alteration in the functionality of the Salesforce platform. The inclination towards this type of work is desirable only for those companies that are surrounded by hundreds of sales representatives or predominantly by those with compound sales funnels. 

On the other hand, Salesforce Configurations require the involvement of varying switches and setups in the Salesforce program, which would be done in the right way from the management panel. This could be further done by somebody who has the training to manage the Salesforce platform. With the use of configurations in Salesforce, companies can get help in the generation of new components and fields, understand surveys, upgrade multiple workflows, and also create custom-made reports, just by switching from things on and off while installing the elementary Salesforce.

Business Expertise:

The Salesforce platform is quite vast and has been filled with quite a variety of capabilities, tutorials, documents, and so on. Plenty of guides, as well as for instructions, are available to tell exactly how to do the customization and configuration.

Salesforce customization may be performed with the help of a Salesforce Platform Developer and Salesforce App Builder.

Whereas, the configuration in Salesforce could be easily performed by Salesforce Administrator, Community Cloud Consultant, Sales Cloud Consultant, Service Cloud Consultant. The Salesforce configuration is known to be less complicated because of the availability of all the features and functions that exist in the Salesforce ecosystem. 

Necessities while using both the options:

If one gets confused as to when both of these Salesforce options should be used, below are the solutions described briefly:

One can move forward with Salesforce customization in the following situations, with the help of a Salesforce Customization Consultant:

• Where there is a requirement of third-party integrations to carry out the business process for better performance.
• When there is a need for more interactive and well-built reports and dashboards to have the desired information.
• When it would have become difficult for the end-users to adapt to the Salesforce platform after its configuration.
• When there’s a set timeline for the customizations in Salesforce to materialize.

Whereas, one should follow the below-mentioned checklist of situations to go forward with Salesforce configuration: 

• When a need arises to utilize Salesforce’s built-in tools, functionalities, and various modules to advance the best practices required for the trade.
• When there’s a requirement to generate custom functionality for multiple customers using multiple options.
• When the applied business methodologies are required or needed to change all at once so that there could be a better automation process while working inside the Salesforce platform. 

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Conclusion:

Salesforce Customization and Salesforce Configuration are equally considered to be important in the world of Salesforce, whenever it comes to achieving business objectives for the companies that require the platform. 

The best way is to move forward with Salesforce configuration at first and try to work with it at its best. After configuration is done in an optimum way if a need arises for the organization to have more components that need to be available, for best usage, go in for customization and affix the missing ones. That may sound like the best way, but still, it can always differ from business to business. For the same, Salesforce consulting services would also help the businesses over consulting about both these important components of Salesforce implementation.

Understanding how to configure or customize CRM isn’t an easy process. An expert Salesforce service company or Salesforce Development Company is required to help do it, in the best way. A combination of good Salesforce customization and development partners will prove to be the most helpful to the organization that wants to take its business to the next level.