Salesforce.com has updated its customer service platform and added social network integration to help clients interact with their customers online.
As enterprise use of social networking sites continues to grow, companies are looking for ways to embrace sites such as Facebook and Twitter to help improve customer service. Salesforce.com’s new Service Cloud 2 contains two plug-ins that enable companies to monitor conversations online and engage with clients.
Salesforce for Twitter enables companies to search through the site in real-time to find relevant ‘tweets’ or messages, and then monitor it and all responses. Employees can then join in the discussion and directly engage with customers through the Service Cloud.
Service Cloud 2 offers what Salesforce.com claims to be the first Knowledge as a Service offering, a hosted database of crowd sourced hints, tips and best practice information.
Service Cloud 2 will also enable a company to enhance its Knowledge Base by sourcing information from customers via the web – known as crowd sourcing. Salesforce Answers enables a company to set up a question and answer feature with the most appropriate information being pumped into the Knowledge Base.
Firms will also be able to set up a Salesforce Answers community on a Facebook fan page, enabling them to interact with members of that group.
The upgrade is evidence that the traditional call centre approach to customer service is being replaced by Web 2.0 technologies, said salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.
“With Service Cloud 2, salesforce.com is doing for customer service what we did for sales: proving that the cloud is a better way. The customer service market is being held back by traditional technology. With two-thirds of customer service interactions moving to the cloud and the popularity of social networks, it is high time for a change,” he said.
Hosted CRM rival RightNow Technologies recently announced the acquisition of HiveLive, a enterprise social media platform provider.
