Why Salesforce Doesn’t Cut It As A Content Moderation Platform

Many companies use Salesforce Service Cloud for content moderation because it is available and well-known, and adjacent teams like Customer Support, already use it. On the surface, this makes sense: Salesforce provides an out-of-the-box ticketing system and your company already uses it. But relying on Salesforce for Trust and Safety becomes clunky, slow, and expensive. 

Using Salesforce for content moderation is not customizable. Your team will run into information gaps, difficult-to-navigate and brittle workflows, as well as a lack of integration with the rest of your stack, leading to information silos. Plus, customizing Salesforce requires its own language and frameworks, further tying your teams’ hands. No Salesforce expert available? Bummer. Now you get to wait.

At Cinder, we work with a lot of companies who are evolving out of Salesforce-based content moderation and into a modern Trust and Safety era. 

So let’s break down a few common pitfalls of using Salesforce Service Cloud for Trust and Safety, and how to switch to something better.

Content Moderation in Salesforce: A Default Choice with Drawbacks

Salesforce Service Cloud is not built for Trust and Safety. It’s a good starting point for CX ticketing, but a few common Salesforce drawbacks we consistently hear about are that it:

1. Doesn’t integrate with your internal tools: Salesforce for content moderation means you’ll struggle to link enforcement actions, user data, and moderation history to individual tickets. This creates a fragmented system where Trust and Safety teams manually cross-reference multiple databases and platforms, leading to delays, inefficiencies, and errors. Sound familiar?
2. Cannot render your content: Salesforce makes it difficult to render first party content like images and videos. The typical workaround is a link in the ticket to an internal tool to view the content, forcing reviewers to switch between multiple apps or tabs. This means a confusing workflow that adds time to review, yields complex tab and tool management, and slows down reviewers with burdensome cognitive load. And it’s time-consuming, therefore more expensive. Again, sound familiar?
3. Doesn’t extract rich data: Salesforce isn’t creating structured, labeled data about the decision. So human reviewers make a manual action and move to the next ticket, without labeling the content itself. The decision is on the ticket, not always the content. And that’s what the company, the Trust and Safety, the ML or AI team, and the data science teams actually need: high quality labeled data. After all, content moderation is data labeling. 

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With minimal ability to collect and leverage data on previous outcomes, you are ultimately spending millions to scale a manual process, rather than fixing the fundamental problem of ensuring your models can learn, adjust, and spot trends in the data. 

Learn more about Cinder.

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How Cinder Helps You Transition Off Salesforce

Cinder provides a purpose-built Trust and Safety solution that eliminates the inefficiencies of general-purpose ticketing systems like Salesforce. Unlike Salesforce, which isn’t customizable enough for complex workflows, Cinder is designed from the ground up for Trust and Safety teams.

We know changing systems is hard! Some of our teammates at Cinder have done exactly that at their previous companies. And we help our customers understand and execute on the change. 

Companies that switch to Cinder immediately gain access to an optimized workflow that links user data, enforcement history, and appeal processing in one seamless platform.

Cinder comes with: 

1. Content moderation uniquely configured to your platform: Use Cinder’s content renderers or design your own to get the most from moderation. Moderate content, review whole profiles, and get more from moderation teams and BPO partners.
2. Appeals handling and reporting mechanisms: Get or stay DSA compliant with an integrated appeals workflow right in the Cinder UI. 
3. Policy management and Enforcement tools: Keep all your policies and labels in one central place; connect them to configurable enforcements to get consistent, auditable enforcements on each moderation decision. 
4. High-quality data labeling: At Cinder, we know great Trust and Safety starts with great data. And that content moderation is actually data labeling. So don’t compromise with Salesforce—use Cinder to label and annotate while you moderate. 
5. Quality Assurance built-in: QA is crucial for high-performing teams. Cinder QA helps you understand and compare effectiveness at the level of individual, team, org, policy, classifier/model and more. Plus, grade-the-grader and core metrics for a complete workflow. 

The Cinder team also helps mitigate the migration disruption. We offer integration support and structured implementation guidance. Cinder’s team can assist with the transition, helping Trust and Safety teams integrate their existing tools and data pipelines with minimal disruption.

Cinder teammates have led migrations internally and as a vendor. We get it. If you’re hesitant, here are a few things to consider about Cinder’s approach: 

1. Rather than an all-or-nothing data migration, Cinder can help teams implement a gradual transition, allowing them to phase out Salesforce without disrupting ongoing operations. 
2. Cinder’s experts can help you organize the cross functional buy-in necessary for a change. Support from engineering, ops, policy, legal, and data science might all be required.
3. A phased approach is usually critical—we can help you think through data you’re missing or compliance you need, and how to get that in Cinder. 
4. Advice on the business case: to persuade executives and peer leadership, you’ll need to develop a business case for the move. We have experience with just that! 

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The Future of Online Safety Means Purpose-Built Solutions

Companies don’t build their own billing platforms, CRMs, EDRs, or ATSes—they identify the best platform for their needs and buy one. Trust and Safety is no different: find the platform option that fits your companies’ needs best. And it’s probably no longer Salesforce Service Cloud. 

With the right planning and support, the transition onto Cinder and off of Salesforce can lead to major wins: for your users, for your execs (Finance will love the savings), for your ops and policy team, for your engineering and data science teams. Cinder not only provides a superior workflow for content moderation but also offers hands-on guidance to make migration as seamless as possible. 

For companies looking to streamline and upgrade their Trust and Safety operations, save time and money, and prepare their platforms for the next era of growth, the time to move beyond Salesforce is now. And with purpose-built solutions like Cinder, making that transition is easier—and more valuable—than ever.

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