Salesforce.com or a Third-Party Vendor: Choosing a Salesforce Support Provider 
Tags: salesforce, support, crm, helpdesk
Published: 2019-10-02 09:58:33

---
title: Salesforce.com or a Third-Party Vendor: Choosing a Salesforce Support Provider 
published: true
description:Find out what support services you can get from Salesforce.com, how much they may cost you, and when it’s better to turn to third-party support vendors instead.  
tags: salesforce, support, crm, helpdesk
---

Salesforce CRM can work for your customer relations in full only when it is regularly adjusted to live business process changes, performance issues [are minimized](https://www.scnsoft.com/blog/salesforce-performance-stability) and wide user adoption is seen to.

In the article, we highlight what support services you can get from Salesforce.com and when you’d better seek third-party providers’ help. We also share a list of trustworthy Salesforce support partners able to solve Salesforce issues that stall your business efforts and adapt your Salesforce solution to changing or emerging business needs. 

##Support from Salesforce.com: Plans, their Pricing and Services Included

Currently, there are [4 Salesforce support plans](https://www.salesforce.com/services/success-plans/overview/) available to users:
**•	Standard
•	Premier 
•	Premier+
•	Priority**

### #1 Standard  
(2-day response provided 12/5 online, free)

The Standard support plan includes the following support services free of charge:
•	Level-1 support from a Salesforce technical team (answering questions about issues, like system unavailability without offering a workaround).
•	[Guided Journeys](http://pages.mail.salesforce.com/gettingstarted/home/) (an online portal with training programs for different Salesforce products).
•	[Trailblazer Community](https://success.salesforce.com/) (an online community where Salesforce customers and partners can get answers to their questions, share their ideas, and learn the best practices of Salesforce use).
•	[Trailhead](https://trailhead.salesforce.com/) (an online training resource for different users: non-technical users, Salesforce administrators and developers).
•	[Events](https://www.salesforce.com/events/) (Salesforce conferences where users can find out about the latest features of different Salesforce products and the best practices of using Salesforce to reach their business goals).
•	[Interactive Webinars](https://www.salesforce.com/events/webinars/) (online webinars where users can get guidance and tips from Salesforce.com experts on the best practices of using Salesforce products). 


### #2 Premier 
(1-hour response to critical cases provided 24/7 by phone & online, 20% of your Salesforce license fees)

This support plan includes all the services of the previous plan, plus: 
•	Levels 1-4 support from a Salesforce technical team (from  system unavailability to Level 4 issues, like providing  workarounds for system performance issues and bugs affecting a small number of users).
•	Accelerators (the unlimited number of one-to-one coaching sessions with a Salesforce expert to solve specific Salesforce challenges, like managing duplicate records, automating case management, increasing the adoption of new Salesforce features).
•	Developer Support (assistance from a Salesforce developer, which implies troubleshooting Salesforce performance issues and reviewing up to 200 lines of Apex and Visualforce code per case created by third-party vendors).
•	Success Manager (guidance from a Salesforce expert helping to map customers’ business goals to Salesforce features, and provide a risk mitigation plan to reduce a chance of not achieving  those goals). 

### #3 Premier+ 
(1-hour response to critical cases provided 24/7 by phone & online, 30% of your Salesforce license fees)

In addition to the services of the already mentioned plans, this support option includes:
•	Admin Assist (help with repetitive CRM tasks, like the creation and maintenance of user profiles/roles, custom and formula fields, workflows and approvals, etc.).
•	U.S. Premier Plus (available for an additional price, the service implies that technical support will be delivered by a Salesforce team operating on the US territory).

### #4 Priority 
(15-minute response to critical cases provided 24/7 by phone & online, Salesforce doesn’t disclose the price publically)

The plan includes all the services of the 3 plans above (except U.S. Premier Plus), plus:
•	Proactive Monitoring (available for an additional price, the service includes 24/7 monitoring of a customer’s Salesforce solution to prevent performance and security issues). 
•	[Technical Account Manager](https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2018/05/salesforce-technical-account-manager.html) (available for an additional price, the service implies providing an onsite Salesforce expert who ensures continuous guidance on open support cases, helps to improve internal support processes, builds plans to address issues, like technical debt and poor data hygiene, etc.)

## When Salesforce.com Support won’t Help
Although the technical assistance from Salesforce within the support plans seems quite comprehensive, you’ll have to seek third-party support, in case:

•	***You need to introduce massive code-based customizations or tweak your fully custom functionality***

A developer’s help by Salesforce.com within Premier, Premier+ and Priority plans won’t be of use in the following situations:
•	Troubleshooting custom third-party applications connected with Salesforce.
•	Customizing your Salesforce solution’s UI with JavaScript and HTML.
•	Enabling automated retrieving of data from certain objects and fields with Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) queries. 
•	Reviewing more than 200 lines of code (while typical customizations contain thousands of lines).

In such cases, you need to resort to third-party support. It can be delivered on the basis of monthly subscription fees. If additional support services, not included into a monthly package were provided, you’d be charged following the Time and Material model. 

•	***You need ongoing administration of your Salesforce solution***

Third-party vendors can provide the ongoing administration of your Salesforce solution built on Sales, Service, Marketing and other Clouds. For instance, in case of managing your Community Cloud-based customer/partner portal, they may update info on products, good distribution rules that authorized dealers should follow, etc. Third-party administrators can also enhance the usability of your portal by adapting the portal’s pages for mobile UI with HTML and CSS, modifying page layouts to enable easier user access to important portal’s pages, etc. 

•	***You need data import and management activities***

Third-party administrators can carry out automated data import (for example, from Excel) and data cleansing, enable duplicate and validation rules to remove duplicate records and maintain standards for your CRM data’s quality.

•	***You need to provide instructor-led user training on default and custom-built functionality***

Third-party support vendors can provide instructor-led user trainings on the default and custom-buillt functionality of your Salesforce solution. If the solution has custom functionality created with code means (say, a custom application for property management), it’s important that training sessions are led by the vendor who created the functionality. Thus, they will be a source of firsthand info and provide for all-round user adoption. 

##Trusted Third-Party Salesforce Support Providers

Choosing a reliable Salesforce services vendor may turn out to be a long and complex process. To make it simpler for you, we’ve prepared a list of reliable third-party support providers that you may use as a starting point of your search: 
1.	[ScienceSoft](https://www.scnsoft.com/services/salesforce/support)  
2.	[Capgemini](https://www.capgemini.com/)
3.	[Appirio](https://appirio.com/)
4.	[VRP Consulting](https://vrpconsulting.com/)
5.	[Tech Mahindra](https://www.techmahindra.com/pages/default.aspx)

##The bottom line

To get your Salesforce issues addressed in a cost-effective way, think about sharing your support needs of different levels between different vendors. For instance, you can leverage free user help-desk and user self-learning opportunities from Salesforce.com and make a third-party support vendor responsible for ongoing administration and developer support of your Salesforce solution.