Salesforce.com today harnessed the social web (or at least, the segment of it that hangs out on FaceBook) to help corporations improve their customer service.
The Service Cloud, announced today and immediately available for use, brings Salesforce.com's Force.com application platform and its links into FaceBook together with the knowledgebase technology it acquired when it bought customer support vendor Instranet last year.
Businesses these day are increasingly becoming aware that their customers often take a self-help approach to customer service, seeking advice and help from third-party community sites or from the social networks, such as FaceBook, where they keep in touch with their friends online. That can mean that customers are exchanging complaints, compiling wishlists or finding solutions to problems without the company even being aware.
Salesforce.com's new Service Cloud connects into FaceBook so that businesses can plug into the conversations about their products that are taking place there. What's more, if the advice and information that's found there could prove useful to other customers elsewhere, it can be fed automatically into the business's internal customer service knowledgebase, where it can be cleaned up and then republished for others to see. It becomes part of the information store that call center agents consult when they're taking customer service enquiries over the phone or web, and can be published to a self-help section of the company's website.
I asked Tim Barker, senior director of product marketing at Salesforce.com, whether any competitors were doing anything similar. "We're unique in creating this connection between these services that are happening out there in the Internet cloud and connecting them into the knowledge base within your organisation," he told me.
That's all very well, but I'd like to see more social networks being supported than just FaceBook, which may be growing like topsy but is less well used in some countries and demographics than alternatives such as Bebo, MySpace, Orkut and others. And what about all those other conversations taking place on third-party review sites, shopping comparison sites and elsewhere? Of course, individual businesses can forge such connections into The Service Cloud on their own account, but the whole point of multi-tenancy is that everyone can share a single connection instead of everyone having to build their own.
Overall, I like the concept, and it's certainly ahead of what conventional service management platforms such as Oracle and AmDocs are doing, but I hope that Salesforce.com (or its partners) will push it further by connecting to more third-party communities and networks over the coming months.
Leave a comment