SalesForce Makes Listening And Engaging In The Social Web Easy

Salesforce.com (see previous CloudAve coverage) today announced Service Cloud 3, their customer service software available as SaaS. This new version ties social web to the customer service portal making the interaction across social network seamless. With this tight integration organizations can closely monitor the conversations across social networks and engage with their clients seamlessly from within the Service Cloud. Clearly, Salesforce.com is following up on the vision of their CEO, Mark Benioff, on Social.

Any company to be successful in today’s hypersocial world, they need to have their ears close to where their customers are. Whether it is Facebook or Twitter or any other social network, customers are freely sharing with others talking about both positive and negative experiences that have with any business. If the business is not listening to their customers across these social networks, they will be losing out fast. However, the tools needed to monitor and engage across these networks are not closely integrated with the existing customer service tools, resulting in Silos and breakdown of communications. Salesforce.com is trying to change the situation for their customers by integrating these tools deeply with the Service Cloud and empowering the service professionals to reach out to customers and solve their problem in real time.

Service Cloud 3 will let organizations engage with customers on any social community, including Twitter, Facebook and other social networks via Radian6. Companies will also be able to scale their operations quickly and easily to manage a high volume of service issues, including the millions of conversations that are happening every day on social media sites. Leveraging built-in social analytics, agents will be able to prioritize interactions across any channel and tailor support strategies to meet changing sentiments on the social web.

Some of the features of Service Cloud 3 are:

Monitor and Engage Instantly With Customers Across the Social Web
Manage High-Volume Social Interactions and Respond in Real Time
Prioritize Interactions Across Any Channel with Real-Time Social Analytics

I had a chance to see a demo and it was pretty interesting. As a service representative, you can monitor channels like Twitter or Facebook from inside the Service Cloud. Any complaint on these Social Networks can be easily converted into trouble tickets. Similarly, any solution can be easily made into a knowledge base and shared through these social networks. The integration is pretty deep and the analytics engine gives a pretty good overview of what is happening on the Social Web around any organization. Overall, an interesting release.