I'm excited to announce that iDialogue is now available in 4 licensing plans.

The Starter Edition is free to Developers and Salesforce System Administrators who want to get "hands on" with the tools. Or for Salesforce Partners and Systems Integrators building their own iDialogue solutions or providing demonstrations.

The Standard Edition supports teams of up to 25 members and includes sufficient document generation and eSignature capacity for a "deal a day" sales pace.

The Professional Edition adds support for collecting payment methods in the document portal, plus additional resources and transactions.

Enterprise Edition allows for unlimited transactions (doc gen and eSignatures) and includes integration with Salesforce Process Builder for automating advanced customer-facing dialogues and workflows.

All plans, except Starter, support batch document generation. The number of documents generated per month increases with each plan tier.

And finally, each plan provides access to pre-built extension packages for rapidly implementing Salesforce "Dialogues" that interact directly with customers. Pre-built solutions are available for CPQ-lite, Subscriber Management, Quote to Cash, Marketing HR People Tools, Financial Services, and Nonprofit Success Pack. The costs of the extension packages are included in the base plan.

Visit our homepage to learn more www.GetPacificApps.com.

By most measures the digital document revolution started at Xerox Parc in the 1970’s and has evolved into silos of innovation  involving word processing, collaboration, cloud storage, data-driven generation and eSignature.

The next evolution in digital documents brings these silos together; similar to what Salesforce and Siebel did in the 90’s when they integrated Leads, Campaigns, Opportunities, Contacts, and Cases and defined the “CRM” category. They recognized that the  disparate silos were actually supporting one common customer and created a pre-integrated solution.

With the addition of eSignatures to the iDialogue platform, I'm excited to announce we are one step closer to providing a pre-integrated, comprehensive digital document solution. No systems integration required!

End-to-end document-driven workflows are now seamlessly integrated across all the silos. Microsoft Word documents are merged with Salesforce records to create pixel-perfect Adobe PDFs delivered to customers for eSignature then safely stored in the cloud.

Please take a look at the various features offered by iDialogue eSignature and schedule a one-hour free demo and consultation. You'll be amazed at the cost savings and speed at which digital document solutions are deployed.

One of my favorite quotes from Marc Benioff on the foundation of Salesforce and the Pledge One model: 

"It's easy to take the 1-1-1 pledge as a startup because you have no product, you have no money, and you have no time."

-Marc Benioff 

I'm paraphrasing his actual statement, but Marc's message to startups was clear.... build Philanthropy into the DNA of a company early on.

When we launched iDialogue, we borrowed a strategy from the book "Crossing The Chasm" and studied several industry solutions to determine which markets we could most readily serve.

There were so many use cases to choose from, it made the decision very difficult. But our Pledge 1% inner compass kept pointing to "helping others first", which resulted in developing several document templates for the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). These templates are now free to download to all Salesforce NPSP Admins.

For Salesforce Administrators at Nonprofits, the task of generating year-end tax donation receipts may seem arduous. But since the majority of new donations come from current donors, this year-end "dialogue" between nonprofits and donors can become an opportunity.

At Pacific Apps, we break this type of campaign down into a few basic steps (which our Concierge support team can help setup and configure).

1. Create a branded document room portal
2. Add a Stripe payment method component to the page layout
3. Add a document component to the page
4. Generate donation letters (see below, either on-demand or in batch)
5. Invite donors to download their donation letters AND ask them to submit a donation

The donation letters support merge tags. Free Microsoft Word templates are available for download and customization. Templates are available for one-time donations or summarizing many donations in table rows.
Generate the documents either on-demand for each Account, Opportunity, Payment or Recurring Donation. Or generate the documents in batch.

Learn more about the iDialogue Accelerator for Salesforce NPSP or watch the video below.

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 secure website. A recurring pattern emerged among our early adopters. The majority of those visionary customers all implemented some sort of document management solution in their portal. Document-related experiences like generating and delivering quotes, uploading files and resumes, onboarding customers and employees, publishing product guides and manuals, and downloading invoices were common.

Now, more than 12 years later, the concept of an enterprise portal has evolved to primarily support direct, personalized, and secure customer transactions. This transaction tier is the final stage in what I'll refer to as the "Customer Dialogue Funnel".

At the top of the funnel there are mass marketing campaigns using TV, Print, Radio, and CPM Internet ads. 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 secure and personalized 1:1 customer experience that involves accepting a quote, signing an agreement, renewing a subscription, submitting a payment, or any number of transactions.

We refer to these personalized experiences as "rooms". A well-balanced customer experience architecture will funnel their customers through all 4 stages of the funnel and into "rooms" for direct interactions. 

iDialogue "rooms" are the personalized 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.
​
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 pages... in what we now refer to as "Room Builder".

To achieve a high level of personalization, the Rooms experience is built around the context of a Salesforce record. Every document merge tag, signature, text, image, and piece of content are merged with the Salesforce record. Itemized tables in documents are automatically bound to related child records. The record context can be an Account or Contact with a broad range of available details. Or the room context could be specific to an Opportunity, Quote, Job Offer, or  Home Mortgage Loan. Any standard or custom object can be used in a room dialogue.

We worked closely with the Salesforce Security Review Team to ensure our frictionless customer onboarding process; using one-time use tokens; is both convenient to customers but secure enough to host the most sensitive documents and transactions. Unlike portals, rooms do not require a username/password. Invitations to rooms are initiated from Salesforce records or flows (however, traditional username/password authentication can be enabled).

Messaging and comments are built-in to rooms 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.

Rooms are responsive to both desktop and mobile user experiences. Customers now experience an organization's website and brand through mobile more than ever. Taking a mobile-first approach to iDialogue required completely rethinking basic interactions like previewing documents, eSigning, fillable forms and data entry, and credit card processing.

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-driven interactions are just one feature in the rooms customer experience; as are electronic signatures and payments. 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 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is to facilitate dialogues between an organization and their customers, donors, partners, employees, patients... really any person defined by a Salesforce Lead or Contact. And the role of iDialogue is to provide a Customer Experience Management (CEM) framework for the essential interactions and transactions that occur between a company and a customer.