Have a problem with your dishwasher? Imagine signing up to follow customer service comments and discussion feeds via the microblogging service we know as Twitter, about the company that makes your plate-cleaning machine. It could be that you can get your answer or find a solution without even having to call and deal with an annoying phone tree or a 48-hour wait for a customer service rep to e-mail you back. It could be that an agent just tweets out the very thing you’re looking for, only to have it immediately confirmed or thrown into doubt by questions from other users that have had the same issue as you.
Welcome to the world of Twitter for Salesforce.com. The software as a service pioneer has announced a Twitter module that would let companies broadcast out – “tweet” -- customer service information into the cloud, so end users can monitor customer feedback, experiences and complaints, see what topics are hot, and join in themselves. It’s a bit like online discussion boards, with a key difference: Twitter has the social networking component going for it, as well as mobility, making for the ability to get real-time information and feedback from a vast pool of users.
"Customers are looking to the cloud for experts to help answer their service questions, said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus Research, in a note. “With more than eight million users, Twitter is a new destination for customer conversations, yet most companies don't have a strategy for joining those conversations," “Salesforce CRM for Twitter and the Service Cloud provides companies of all sizes an efficient and effective way to join the Twitter conversation.”
The new application, which will be free and available from the Salesforce application store this summer, is part of an overall strategy that will set Salesforce.com apart from other cloud computing and Web-delivered business services, analysts say. "Social networks have developed the power to not only influence customer buying patterns, but also how companies serve their customers and partners,” Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst with the Yankee Group, said in a March 23 research note. With social networking predicted to grow to a 229 million users worldwide by 2012, the ability to harness the information found on those sites is a marketing and service powerhouse."
The Twitter plug-in will be available along with other cloud resources, like Facebook Google, online communities and so on. The idea is to move the platform to the cloud, so more and more apps can easily be layered on, to enable mash-ups and customization for different companies’ CRM needs.
The need for a platform to support the addition of more and more Web-based applications to supercharge CRM was a theme touched on by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at a conference on Monday. "We’ve seen Google and Cisco and Omniture all come out and say the same thing," said Benioff "Platforms are moving to a service. It’s not just about apps; it’s about platforms."
Comcast is one Salesforce.com client that plans to use Twitter. "There’s a question that Twitter asks: 'What are you doing?'" explained Frank Eliason, director of digital care for Comcast Corp., at the event. "There’s a lot of great data, data that marketers pay a lot of money for, and it’s there for free."
