Salesforce.com has recently rolled out the Service Cloud, a customer service application that basically tries to capture the crowdsourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet from sites like Google, Facebook and Amazon, and then uses this information to better equip commercial customer service operations with useful knowledge.
The the good news is, Salesforce has already connected Twitter to the Service Cloud, allowing customer service reps using the SaaS to access tweets from more than 8 million Twitter users.
Salesforce’s CRM for Twitter basically allows enterprises to search for tweets about their companies, products and their brands. Here’s how it works. First, Salesforce CRM searches within the Service Cloud for any tweets that are relevant to a company. Then, the company can capture and monitor the conversation, creating a database in the Service Cloud that keeps track of all subsequent conversations about the company. The Service Cloud also allows enterprises to tap into company-wide online communities, creates connections to existing social networks and the blogosphere, provides SEO tools, shares the social network knowledge with business partners, and integrates customer service operations into the cloud.
The Service Cloud looks like a very useful tool to capture and then sort conversations about a particular enterprise. But what’s fascinating is how businesses want to tap into the dialogue of what’s happening on social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Salesforce has consistently managed to provide innovative, desirable technology platforms for enterprises to merge their business operation with the web 2.0 world.
