Service in the Cloud

On the heels of VMworld, SalesForce held a delightfully upscale introduction luncheon to announce the Service Cloud 2. Sales force automation — SalesForce's primary offering — is a key pillar of CRM, but CRM is a much broader topic and customer service is another important pillar. To date, the customer service part has been typically done with in-house systems that organize problem/solution knowledge bases that are then used by call center agents. Enabling customer self-service is a less-expensive solution, and done well a fundamentally better solution, especially when augmented by community support where users help each other. But of course customer self service and community support are outward facing applications with scaling and distribution aspects that make them perfect Cloud candidates. About a year ago, SF acquired InStranet, a knowledgebase technology company (a key underpinning of all forms of customer service) and they have been integrating and extending that capability since. The SF Service offering is still only a small part of SF revenues but is growing much more rapidly that the core SFA business. This most recent announcement incorporated innovative Facebook and Twitter integration. For example, a vendor can set up a Facebook page and using the SF system, service questions can be posted entirely within Facebook, but fully integrated with the other service delivery channels. It's going to be interesting to watch how this catches on. It's fair to say that SF is way ahead of the traditional application vendors in offering a SaaS/Cloud service. For companies wanting to be on the innovative side of support (self-service and community-service early adopters) but not wanting to operate it themselves, the SF solution is pretty compelling.