Salesforce.com Unveils Service Cloud 3
Service Cloud 3 made its debut yesterday at Salesforce.com’s Cloudforce 2011 event in New York. The new application is now available for computers, smartphones, and tablet devices and will allow organizations to communicate with customers while managing a higher volume of service issues on a variety of social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and live chat.
“With Service Cloud 3, we are announcing a technology that helps you embrace those new social channels [to accommodate a high] volume of interaction and bring the intelligence to help you find what matters and doesn’t matter while bringing you the real time insight to act and prioritize things the right way,” says Alex Dayon, executive vice president of CRM for salesforce.com.
According to Dayon, customer service phone calls are becoming obsolete in an increasingly digital and social world. “Most customer service solutions have been built for a world that no longer exists,” he says. “While the phone was the primary channel, your customers are not calling anymore. In fact, calling a call center is usually the last thing that we do because we know it’s going to be painful. We are going to have to dial, we are going to have to wait, and sometimes it’s not a pleasant experience.”
Instead, the first thing customers do when they have a customer service need is “Google it or share it with friends,” Dayon says. “We go to the cloud and try to find the solution for ourselves,” he observes. Customer complaints are becoming much more public and unanswered service requests can wreak havoc on a company’s reputation. “That’s the new world of customer service and this new world has a different set of requirements.”
Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff says Service Cloud 3 enforces the company’s devotion to serving its wide range of customers. “The power of cloud computing is for everyone,” he insists. “It allows all of us to come together and small, medium, and large companies all get to participate. Whether you have one user or 100,000 users, we can accommodate that in the cloud world.”
Salesforce.com also announced upcoming partnerships with several social media companies at the event. Salesforce for Facebook is scheduled to be available by June and Radian6 for Salesforce is scheduled for later this year.