The San Francisco, California based vendor of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions - Salesforce. com today announced that it is preparing to integrate its Service Cloud customer-service platform with the popular social networking and micro-blogging service, Twitter.
According to Salesforce. com, it has added a new application, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, to its "app exchange" to make its customers, who use its Service Cloud product, to use Twitter for customer service purposes.
Salesforce. com explained that the Salesforce CRM for Twitter will allow its customers to monitor Twitter messages, pertaining to their company, aggregate the replies and conversations around those messages, and then respond to the inquiries and complaints and whatnot.
Salesforce. com told that the Salesforce CRM for Twitter is currently in its beta stage, and it will be available this summer at no additional charge for Service Cloud users.
Alex Dayon, Salesforce CRM's senior vice president of customer service and support, said, "With the abundance of social-media tools on the Web, people are turning to "crowdsourced" help with customer-service issues. I don't blame them. When was the last time you spent ages on the phone with your TV manufacturer only to have some random Twitter follower provide you the solution in five minutes?"
"While $20 billion of software is being spent on call centers, the customers are somewhere else," he said.
The Service Cloud stands for uniting the online customer communities, social networking, and knowledge base information. It aims to make data from cloud services like Facebook and Twitter available to e-mail, phone and chat-based customer service representatives.
According to one of the analysts, Salesforce. com's move is "incremental" but "interesting". Rebecca Wettemann, vice president, research, at Nucleus Research, said, "Salesforce is showing that perhaps the best use of social networking is perhaps on the service side of CRM [customer relationship management] and not sales force automation."
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