Sales agents and customer reps will soon be able to search and track tweets and Twitter conversations after Salesforce said it will incorporate the micro-blogging service into its customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
“Lots of companies are using Twitter to search for mentions of their brands or products and then finding ways to better serve customers. Salesforce has taken notice and announced an enterprise product” Twitter confirmed in an official blog posting.
Salesforce CRM for Twitter will let companies tap into the company’s Service Cloud to connect with Twitter’s more eight million users.
The link will let businesses tap into Twitter conversations by searching on key words to find relevant conversations, and monitoring dialogues and complaints about a product, a service or a company.
The beta feature will work off the Salesforce Service Cloud, and when it becomes available this summer will be available at no additional charge to the $995 per month that is billed for use of its cloud.
The move to embrace Twitter is a continuation of a plan announced at the start of the year by Salesforce to tie together disparate online communities, including social networking and partner communities, into a unified web for customer service.
In January when the company unveiled the Service Cloud, the bright new idea was to incorporate numerous formerly disconnected internet experiences, primarily those involving social networking or social computing, into the client interaction process.
At the launch event, Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff described the Service Cloud as a mechanism to enable businesses to join the conversation already taking place about their products and services on the web.
