Cio.com breaks the news about Salesforce.com integrating aspects of social media networking into its CRM and customer service SAAS application:
“First unveiled in January, the Service Cloud strategy presumes that in order to find answers to product and service questions, customers are increasingly using means besides traditional call centers, such as search engines or social-networking and messaging services like Facebook and Twitter…the application is a response to traditional website forums, which provide some customer self-service functionality but tend to get overwhelmed by long, meandering threads that obscure the most valuable answers to particular questions.
On-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) from salesforce.com. It’s a comprehensive, easy-to-use system for managing your customers, partners, data, and sales process
Websites such as Yahoo Answers, where community members rate and rank answers to questions, are a better solution, and Salesforce.com’s software will work much the same way. It will also be available as a Facebook application that connects back to the Salesforce.com system. It is scheduled for release in the first half of 2010.
Meanwhile, a knowledge base application called Knowledge, derived from Salesforce.com’s 2008 acquisition of InStranet, will be available sometime in the fourth quarter at a cost of US$50 per agent per month…the idea is to make the tips and how-to information commonly found in knowledge bases available through multiple channels, as well as use those channels to procure additional useful material.
For example, an agent who spots a particularly popular response to a question posed through Salesforce.com Answers could choose to pull it into a new file for the knowledge base.
In addition, Salesforce.com will announce that its Service Cloud Twitter integration, announced earlier this year, is now generally available.
A company can use Twitter to track conversations about its products, or set up a Twitter channel dedicated to fielding customer service requests.”
So the integration of social media continues. As we are always keen to emphasise at Juice, Salesforce.com is essentially a CRM application and about engaging with customers and prospects once they know and are aware of you.
Social Media Marketing, on the other hand, attracts prospects through the skilful seeding of content on social media. At which point, they become worth tracking in Salesforce.com and other CRM tools.
Salesforce.com’s move emphasises the importance of Social Media Marketing in any marketing communications strategy and cements its place as one of the top trio of e-marketing tools along with SEO and E-mail Marketing.
