Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff can use any news or events for his marketing purposes. In his latest speeches, Mark is  talking about the well-known social movement Occupy Wall Street. As you know, this demonstration was organized mainly via the social networks, and in particular thank to the Twitter hashtag #OccupyWallStreet. "Look, what social networks can do" - says Benioff - "they can overthrow governments. And they also can easily destroy your business. Ignoring social networks - is ignoring your customers." Benioff has launched his own Twitter hashtag #OccupyTheEnterprise and scares enterprises with it. And from the other hand, he cites the example of using social networks by the Salesforce client  - KLM airlines.

Salesforce seriously decided to become the leading provider of customer support solutions. Its own solution Salesforce Service Cloud is already almost flying to space, but its price is also too cosmic for small business. Therefore, in order to land SMBs, the company decided to buy (for $80 million) the one of the two most popular SaaS Helpdesk services - Assistly (the second - is Zendesk). Assistly fits perfectly into the Salesforce's new Social Enterprise concept. This service allows you to communicate with customers via Twitter, Facebook, client forum, live-chat as well as via traditional channels (email and phone). At the same time support people work in one simple interface. Also, Assistly is known for its original pricing: it's free for one helpdesk agent, and the additional agents can use the service on per-hour based model ($1/hour). So if no requests are coming to support - your company pays nothing for the helpdesk.

The guys from Salesforce, that are engaged in developing Service Cloud, can't help repeating that traditional customer support systems (Call-centers + CRM / Helpdesk) - are already obsolete. They are built in expectation that a phone call is the primary communication channel that customers use to get support. But the world has changed. Customers want to solve their problems via the Internet - in Facebook, Twitter, forums. They want to talk to tech support via online chat or personal account at the company's website. They want to read what other users say about a product. They want to use video and screen-sharing, to show the problem to support engineer, rather than explain everything by phone. All these requirements are met in the new version of Service Cloud 3.

Of course, Mark Benioff can persuade anybody to buy his Salesforce CRM. But if it were a bad product, any partnership would stop at this point. But no! It turns out that Salesforce largest customers Cisco and Dell are so loyal, that they start selling Salesforce themselves. Last week Cisco and Salesforce announced the joint solution for customer service (Salesforce Service Cloud 2 + Cisco Unified Communications). And today Dell and Salesforce have unveiled a new offering, combining Salesforce CRM and Dell Integration Services. Both solutions target small business market. Cisco and Dell have the largest customer bases, and probably in the nearest years we'll see the new Saleforce income records.

Service Cloud - is the revolutionary customer service solution, that integrates helpdesk with social networks and tools. Today Salesforce unveils the second generation of Service Cloud with 3 new modules: Salesforce Knowledge, Salesforce Answers and Salesforce for Twitter. All them are tightly integrated with Salesforce CRM and built  on top of Force.com (so they can be customized for particular company needs). Starbucks, Comcast and Dell are already using these new tools.