September 9th, 2009
Salesforce rolling out a beefier Service Cloud
Salesforce on Wednesday will announce an upgrade to the Service Cloud offering it unveiled back in January, incorporating enhancements to its social networking tools and announcing plans for the rollout of a Knowledge-as-a-Service offering and crowd-sourcing Answers product.
The company boasts that it has been growing at a time when many other companies are downsizing and they attribute it to the demand for cloud services that allow business customers to do more with less.
The two main offerings on the social media front - integration with Twitter and Facebook - are piggybacking off what other companies are doing to connect with customers who are talking about their products or brand names in social networking circles. But building them into the salesforce tools is smart because it allows the companies to mash data to resolve problems faster.
The Knowledge-as-a-service offering is interesting because it allows users to take the customer and support data - whether it be information from a service call or a quick fix tweeted by a customer - and incorporate it into the company’s knowledge base. From there, customers can upload the info into the public domain so other customers who might have the same issues with a product can find the answers from a trusted source, the company.
A final offering, Salesforce Answers, will allow customers to tap into the crowd of the Internet, posing questions over the Web or within Facebook to solicit the “knowledge of the crowd” for use to solve problems faster and more efficiently.
Salesforce’s social offerings will be available immediately while Knowledge-as-a-Service will be available later this year. Salesforce Answers will release early next year.
Previous coverage: Salesforce announces Twitter app; further validates power of cloud
Salesforce partners with Facebook, Amazon to spark more app development
Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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