The CX Blog

Salesforce is so busy being cool, it’s hard to keep up with them. Their platform Force.com interfaces with Facebook, Google, and Amazon and allows users like Neil Young to build a site that will track all kinds of info for them.  Tres cool.

Neil Young's LincVolt

And now Salesforce has announced the logical extension of its Cloudy Ambitions: The Service Cloud.  announced it new service channel on Thursday, called Service Cloud.  In essence, Service Cloud leverages those places where customers meet to discuss, share info, and help each other in order to participate, harvest knowledge, facilitate knowledge sharing, and make sure the best expert info is available via the cloud.

This is pretty exciting stuff.  If it really does walk its talk, Salesforce will be forging a path for other service organizations on how to incorporate the growing reliance on friends, colleagues, area experts, and the larger virtual community to resolve issues and share information.

The Vision

Their ambitions are modest.  They simply want to help companies capture and leverage everything on the internet that has to do with their products and/or service.  You know how this works, I had an example of it yesterday.  It really, really was time to update my Wordpress version on Bluehost for this blog. First thing I did was casually glance at the help offered thru WP itself, and then I went immediately to Google to find “real” help.  And I found it pretty quickly–a video made by a citizen geek which got me pretty far down the road, no muss or fuss.

Well, that’s the kind of stuff that Salesforce would like to help you harness–tap into your community’s created and trusted info, make sure it shows up first in Google searches, help your agents have access easily and simply to the same info, and maybe as part of a Facebook app that gets the word out fast to the rest of your customers.

According to Salesforce, 50% of all service conversations are happening in the cloud.

force.com on Facebook

According to Cloud Computing Journal, Michael Maoz of Gartner asserts that “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.”

Marc Benioff, CEO of SF, says, “The Service Cloud is the first customer service solution that empowers companies to join and manage all service conversations happening in the cloud…this has been made possible through the emergence of native cloud computing platforms like Force.com that are built to harness the power of other clouds like Facebook, Google, and Amazon.com.”

Service Cloud uses the Force.com platform with Instranet KM software for call centers and offers a bundles of widget based software that costs $995 per year.

According to a Customer Think article recently, Service Cloud will follow and leverage community knowledge in the following ways:

• Community: Developing an online customer community is an integral part of the Service Cloud. The Service Cloud represents a fundamental shift in how companies approach their online presence - its not just a place to post information, but a community where customers can interact with each other have conversations with the company at large.

• Social: The Force.com platform enables the Service Cloud to connect to leading social networking sites such as Facebook, community forums, blogs and more. Through these connections, companies will be able to funnel this information directly into their knowledge base.

• Search: More times than not, customers begin with a Google search to find answers to their questions. By creating an active online community with the Service Cloud, companies can ensure that their site is one of the top results returned in a customer’s search.

• Partners: Using the Service Cloud, companies can now share all of the information in the knowledge base quickly and easily with their partners.

• Phone, Email and Chat: The Service Cloud will give agents access to knowledge in the cloud, regardless if they use phones, email or chat to service customers.

Service Cloud uses the Force.com platform with Instranet KM software for call centers and offers a bundles of widget based software that costs $995 per year.