{"id":1314,"slug":"salesforce-vendor-asserted-portal-demand","title":"Salesforce State of the Connected Customer — vendor-asserted: 57% say self-service \"critical/very important\"; 59% prefer self-service for simple questions; 88% say experience as important as products","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","smb-owner","candid-team"],"topics":["citation-practices","self-service-adoption"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** Salesforce \"State of the Connected Customer\": **57%** say it's critical/very important that companies offer self-service; **59%** prefer self-service for simple questions; **88%** say experience is as important as products.\n\n**Source:** salesforce.com state-of-the-connected-customer PDFs.\n\n**Confidence:** Single-source / Industry-consensus among vendor reports.\n\n**Caveat:** Salesforce sells service software; numbers favour self-service adoption. Survey methodology details are not surfaced in the public materials.\n\n**Why this matters for Candid:** Useful to recognise — clients will quote this number. The polite move is to set it alongside the *behavioural* Gartner numbers ([[gartner-2024-14pct-self-service-resolution]]) — *stated preference* and *actual resolution* are different things, and the gap is enormous.","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[{"slug":"gartner-2024-14pct-self-service-resolution","title":"Gartner (Aug 19, 2024; survey of 5,728 customers Dec 2023) — only 14% of customer service / support issues are fully resolved in self-service; even for \"very simple\" issues only 36% resolve fully","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}],"incoming":[{"slug":"research-brief-client-portals-smb-june-2026","title":"Research brief: client portals for SMBs — the honest case (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"portal-market-size-7x-spread-vendor","title":"Portal \"market size\" projections range ~7× between sources (US$1.47B - $10.47B for the same period) — the spread itself is the finding","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}]},"created_at":"2026-06-20T17:57:32.116Z","updated_at":"2026-06-20T17:57:32.116Z"}