News

Salesforce.com's Service Cloud Goes for Social Media

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• March 3, 2011

Salesforce.com recently announced that the latest version of its Service Cloud app will offer native Facebook integration and other social media tracking and scoring tools.

Service Cloud 3, the latest iteration of its cloud-based customer service and support contact center portal app, was announced at its CloudForce event held in New York this week. Service Cloud 3 offers new social monitoring capabilities for Facebook (Twitter was already included) and other tracking tools.

Customer service agents of a company can monitor what people are saying about their organization on the two social networks through the Service Cloud 3 console. "Social monitoring is very important," said Alex Dayon, Salesforce.com's executive vice president of CRM, speaking at a luncheon for press, analysts and customers at CloudForce. 

"We announced the Twitter native integration more than a year ago, and today we are announcing Facebook native integration within the wall. Instead of us bringing it as an app in Facebook, [we are offering] a very deep integration.

When an agent spots a customer issue on Facebook or Twitter, Service Cloud 3 lets the agent reach out to the customer in real time. Agents will be able to convert wall posts into customer service cases, the company said.

In addition, through a partnership with Radian6, agents can monitor scores of other social networks, blogs and discussion forums. The Radian6 Engagement Console is available to agencies (such as public relations and advertising) for $600 per user per month or corporations starting at $1,750 per month for five users.

Salesforce also announced a new feature for Service Cloud called Live Agent, which will let customers embed instant chat capability into the console. It will be available by July and priced at $50 per agent.

The Facebook integration will be available by the end of April and will be free to users of Service Cloud 3 Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited edition. Customers will be able to acquire it on Salesforce.com's AppExchange, the company's online app store.

Some 15,000 customers use Service Cloud, according to Salesforce.com.