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Salesforce announced Service Cloud 2.0
September 09, 2009 | Author: Sandeep Sharma
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.
Salesforce Knowledge
This is a heart of Service Cloud, that is linked to all other modules and pulls knowledge from them. It's a knowledge base based on Dimensions (one of the best knowledge management systems in the world, acquired by Salesforce last year). Dimensions is famous for its categorization features that enable quickly find answers that are individual for each customer case. Salesforce made some magic with it and created the world first "cloud knowledge base" that is available not only for customer service, but also can be shared over the cloud: on public website, customer portal or even in Facebook.
Salesforce Answers
This is Salesforce's answer to popular support forums. As well as forums, Salesforce Answers uses crowdsourcing to reduce load on customer service (experienced customers help newbies). But unlike forums where you need to dig through unrelevant posts, in Salesforce Answers all posts are rated and company representative can select the "best answer" that will be shown first. This imitates Yahoo Answers or Google Answers. Each question/answer can be easily transformed into the knowledge base article.
Salesforce for Twitter
Salesforce CRM was first to become "listening" Twitter in order to find interesting messages regarding company or products. Now Service Cloud has a full-featured Twitter client, that can not only search through real-time web, but also convert Twitter messages to support tickets, track their lifecycle and post replies right from the Service Cloud.
See also: Top 10 Helpdesk software
