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Salesforce.com has expanded its Software as a Service (SaaS) offering so that customer service agents can use social networking to join in conversations about their products and services on the web.
Service Cloud lets businesses create online communities as well as tap into what is being said about their products in existing internet communities such as Facebook. It also allows support staff to contact customers by phone, email and chat, and lets firms set up their own online communities where customers can interact with each other and answer queries.
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff says the idea behind the new offering is to "enable businesses to join the conversation" that is already happening on the web, often without any involvement by the company. "The Service Cloud is the first customer service solution that empowers companies to join and manage all service conversations happening in the Cloud," he said. "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 was created from Salesforce.com's $31.5 million purchase of InStranet. Customer services agents in companies such as 3M, Comcast and Business Objects use InStranet to access online reference and policy databases to answer customers' questions. Running on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform, Service Cloud combines the InStranet knowledge bases with the likes of Google search and Facebook connections, enabling customer service agents to communicate with customers via phone, e-mail and chat.
Salesforce.com noted that 50% of customer service interactions now happen on the internet, outside the traditional channels of customer service centres. "It's really a completely new way of looking at customer service," says Salesforce.com's vice president of customer support applications, Alex Dayon, founder of InStranet. "When we have a question, the first thing we do is Google it. The bad news is that those conversations are happening outside the framework of the organisations. Companies are losing touch with the people who are having problems."
The Service Cloud is made up of five main planks around the knowledge base to gather, distil and disseminate the expert knowledge found in Cloud communities to customers, agents and partners. These are:
- Community: Companies can easily set-up and maintain an interactive Cloud community for their customers by leveraging new Salesforce.com technologies such as Salesforce CRM Ideas and Force.com as building blocks.
- Social: The Force.com platform enables the Service Cloud to connect to leading social networking sites and funnel this information directly into their knowledge base to ensure it has the most up-to-date support information sourced from community experts.
- Search: 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, allowing companies to share cases, contacts and company information, without the need for complex integration software.
- 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.
Is it all just talk?
So, that's the theory but how does it work in practice? An early user highlighted at the launch event in San Francisco was UK telco Orange. Its Service Cloud deployment has tabs for community, Google, Facebook, business partners and communications channels such as email and chat. For example, customers can connect with the Orange Service Cloud through a Facebook community, enabling other customers to answer questions and have both the questions and the answers stored inside the Salesforce.com system. If eight or more customers vote an answer as correct on the Facebook community, an Orange customer service agent comes into the Service Cloud and reviews that knowledge. If the information is correct, the agent can then disseminate that knowledge to other Service Clouds while the knowledge gets passed on to other Orange customers for whom the problem is relevant.
The Service Cloud will let users create an online customer community with unlimited usage for up to 250 customers, set up a contact centre with up to five agents, connect with sites like Facebook and Google, and invite up to five partners to participate in the Cloud. Eventually, it will not be restricted to Salesforce's existing partners so it can be extended out to firms such as Yahoo or LinkedIn. "We see this market as our next billion-dollar opportunity," says Rayon.
Inevitably, rival vendors were less than impressed by Salesforce.com's latest gambit. "We would like to welcome Salesforce.com to the world of internet customer interaction!," comments Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. "What we heard is that they will announce a 'new' customer service capability that allows online customer interaction and that they will be charging money for this service. NetSuite offers a more robust capability in our own customer centre portal that has been part of NetSuite for more than eight years."
Nonetheless, some analysts saw the move as a step in the right direction if Salesforce.com is to beef up customer service revenues. "The new generation of consumers trusts content created by peers. This consumer expectation that they can create answers and content as part of a community will lead businesses and other organisations to adopt similar techniques to succeed," says Gartner vice president Michael Maoz. "Ultimately, organisations will have to change their singular emphasis on tools for agents to a broader strategy that also supports the role of community experts."
But others point out some potential tension relating to the Instranet element of the offering. Bruce Richardson, of AMR Research, notes the irony of a 'no software' firm like Salesforce.com buying a software company that only sold on premises products. While observing that Salesforce.com had promised to deliver a multi-tenant version of the InStranet offering, he questions whether Service Cloud meets these expectations. "A closer look under the cirrostratus marketing cover shows Service Cloud consists of the existing Salesforce.com platform as well as a hosted version of the InStranet product," he says.
"Hosted software as a Cloud? I don’t mean to play the part of the purist, but I have to believe Mr Benioff would have thrown the red flag at the nearest referee had any competitor tried to position a hosted, single-tenant product as a being in the Cloud. Sure, you can offer the software on a subscription fee like you would SaaS, but you don’t get any of the advantages of multi-tenant, nor are your upgrades relatively seamless."
He questions how new customers who start with the InStranet product will move their data to the new Force.com platform. "What about current Salesforce.com customers that need the new functionality now and are willing to start with InStranet, moving to the Force.com version once it's available?," asks Richardson. "You would have to be in a lot of pain if you're willing to endure the two implementations in a relatively short time span.
"As for staying on the legacy InStranet software indefinitely, how long do you think the "no-software" leader will want to continue to support a foreign antibody?"
-----------------------------BY Stuart Lauchlan, news and analysis editor
Source：MYCUSTOMER.com
Copyright © 2009 Sift Media. All rights reserved.
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