Salesforce.com
The central insight of the Service Cloud, as suggested by Senior Vice President of Product Management Alex Dayon when it launched in January, was that customer service has moved away from the old model where customers called the company and asked for help. Instead, they use search engines like Google and social networking services like Facebook and Twitter to find the answers they need. The Service Cloud lets companies adjust to this reality by letting them find and answer customer service questions wherever they're made on the web.
With the just-announced Service Cloud 2, Salesforce is adding three major features, which will be rolled out over the next few months:
- Salesforce Knowledge, a database of information (presumably customer service-related), that can be deployed quickly online, and which can be accessible just to customer service agents or to the general web-browsing public.
- Salesforce Answers, a tool for creating discussion forums where the answers to customer question are rated, and the best-rated answers are highlighted.
- A full roll-out to the Salesforce for Twitter service, which allows companies to answer questions on microblogging site Twitter. Dayon says Salesforce for Twitter now allows companies to manage their Twitter stream efficiently, for example diverting different Twitter queries to different people depending on their areas of expertise.
Competitors include companies that build customer service websites such as Parature and Get Satisfaction, as well as startups that focus on Twitter, like CoTweet. Dayon argues that Salesforce's broad approach will win in the end.
"We don't believe the 'best of breed' play will work," he says. "Customers don't come from just one channel anymore."