JMP Cheers Salesforce's Customer Service Response

salesforce.com, inc. CRM experienced an outage that affected some regions in North America and lasted from 13:31 UTC on May 10 to 9:30 UTC on May 11.

JMP Securities’ Patrick Walravens maintained a Market Outperform rating on the company, with a price target of $90.

How Management Coped

Walravens mentioned that salesforce.com has explained on its website that it had “resolved the service disruption impacting the NA14 instance,” although the “NA14 instance continues to operate in a degraded state. Customers can access the Salesforce service, but we have temporarily suspended some functionality such as weekly exports and sandbox copy functionality.”

While stating that this type of disruption was unfortunate, Walravens said that the company was taking the right actions to correct the problem and retain customer loyalty.

The analyst also said that he liked the way salesforce.com’s Trust website offered customers constant insight into the status of the company’s service.

Walravens pointed out the CEO Marc Benioff had personally apologized on Twitter (Twitter Inc TWTR) and responded to customers, asking them to directly email him or make a phone call to co-Founder Parker Harris.

Looking Ahead

The analyst expects the company to post its FY17 non-GAAP EPS at $1.00, in line with the guidance, on revenue growth of 22 percent.

For FY18, Walravens expects non-GAAP EPS of $1.30, in-line with the consensus, on revenue growth of 21 percent.