With its revenue growth projected to slow this year to half of what it was Salesforce.com, the CRM software-as-a-service pioneer, has come up with a new trick that adds a new revenue stream.
It’s rigged up a thing it calls a Service Cloud, touting it as the next generation in customer service.
The object is “to capture every conversation and leverage every community expert in the cloud” – where, according to Salesforce, 50% of all service conversations already take place – by linking to chatty social networks like Facebook as well as Google Search (the first place people go for an answer) and Amazon’s cloud.
The way Salesforce see it by capturing these conversations – and funneling them into a knowledge base – “the Service Cloud empowers companies to deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners.”
It claims the Service Cloud represents the future of customer service and has Gartner analyst Michael Maoz say, “Ultimately, organizations will have to change their singular emphasis on tools for agents to a broader strategy that also supports the role of community experts.”
The underlying Service Cloud widgetry is being built on the company’s Force.com platform coupled with assets from the InStranet knowledge management software for call centers that Salesforce acquired last August for $31.5 million, and involves a bundle of software that costs $995 a month to start.
Salesforce says the software package – some of which is already available separately and used for customer service – can be used to create an online customer community with unlimited use for up to 250 customers; set up a contact center with up to five agents; connect with Facebook and Google Search; and invite up to five partners to participate.
Service reps should be able to contact customers via phone, e-mail and chat.
By the way, that total service outage that Salesforce customers experienced last week doesn’t seem to have fazed the company or the cloud’s advance any.
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