Announcing iDialogue for Salesforce

iDialogue 1.0 launched in 2006 as one of the first apps on the Salesforce AppExchange. At that time, iDialogue was an "enterprise portal" solution with a focus on providing self-service to Salesforce data through a company's own website. A recurring pattern emerged among our early adopters. The majority of those visionary customers all implemented some kind of document management solution in their portal. Document-related experiences like generating and receiving quotes, uploading resumes, publishing product guides and manuals, and downloading invoices were common.

Now, more than 12 years later, the online customer experience has stratified into four distinct layers; in what I'll refer to as the "Customer Dialogue Funnel".

At the top of the funnel there is mass marketing using TV, Print, Radio, and CPM ad campaigns. Eventually a more direct dialogue evolves using direct marketing solutions; such as CPC/CPA ad campaigns, landing pages, email and chat.

The third layer in the funnel represents community dialogues, where Customers are educating themselves about products, researching reviews and comments, and participating in discussion forums, the Idea Exchange, or Chatter groups.

Ultimately these dialogues result in a transactional 1:1 customer experience that involves accepting a quote, signing an agreement, renewing a subscription, submitting a payment, or any number of transactions.

A well-balanced customer experience architecture will funnel their customers through all 4 of these major channels. 

iDialogue is the transaction layer in this architecture.

Customer Dialogue Funnel
Mass marketing evolving to personalized, secure transactions.

Transactions tend to be document-centric, but may also include payment processing and intake forms. Much of the compliance, regulatory, and governance requirements tend to occur at the transaction layer.
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We've rebuilt iDialogue from the ground up with a document-centric focus on the Salesforce Lightning platform. The same portal builder features are included for building secure websites, portals, and landing. But the customer experience is built around the context of a Salesforce record for use in recording a transaction. The Salesforce record context can be an Account or Contact with a broad range of available details. Or the portal context could ve specific to an Opportunity, Quote, Job Offer, or  Home Mortgage Loan. Any standard or custom object can be used in a contact dialogue.

We worked closely with the Salesforce Security Review Team to ensure our frictionless customer onboarding process, using one-time use tokens, was both convenient to customers but secure enough to host the most sensitive documents and transactions.

Messaging and comments are built-in to document portals as more customers expect a messaging app experience when interacting with organizations. The concepts of "redlining" contracts and sending email attachments back forth are progressively moving to shared, online collaboration spaces with secure messaging in the context of a document.

Many Salesforce Veterans and System Administrators will naturally ask how does iDialogue compare to other document solutions like Conga, Drawloop, Spring, Docusign and dozens of others on the AppExchange. Over time it'll become evident that document generation is just one feature in the transaction platform. Ultimately, our focus on industry solutions with pre-built accelerators and AI-assisted workflows will be our greatest differentiator.

iDialogue's document generation technology certainly has had the benefit of experience, observing the best features in other solutions, and leveraging out-of-box capabilities of Lightning that were not available to competing solutions many years ago when they were pioneering the market.

The goal of CRM is to facilitate dialogues between an organization and their customers, donors, partners, employees, patients... or really any person defined by a Salesforce Contact. And the role of iDialogue is to provide a framework for the essential transactions that occur between a company and a customer.