Salesforce.com Service Cloud Gets Social With Facebook

Your humble correspondent had to cancel his attendance at the Salesforce.com event CloudForce 2011 at the last minute in order to make it to the oft-mentioned Intel Day In The Cloud. Apparently, what I missed was the launch of an initiative designed to move Salesforce.com away from being a pure CRM provider in the form of SaaS marketing tool Service Cloud 3. They’re calling it “the next generation of social contact centers,” and it lets users open a Service Cloud ticket directly from Facebook and Twitter.

While Salesforce already offered similar functionality with Twitter, the company plans on taking advantage of the chatter (no pun intended) between Facebook’s 500 million users, according to the press release. Agents can turn any Facebook wall post, status, or comment into a case in Salesforce.com Service Cloud 3, letting the brand engage the customer. And to help manage that constant flow of social networking, a revamped interface for agents comes with.

Other new features in Service Cloud 3 include integration with the Radian6 platform by way of a free AppExchange tool, which enables automatic case creation based on monitoring social media channels for different brands. And Salesforce Chatter can be used around knowledge articles for real-time collaboration. Finally, a live chat module can be inserted right into the client’s site.

Will any channel pros find this useful? Maybe, maybe not. But if you’re a cloud VAR and have a customer worried about their Facebook presence, Service Cloud 3 might be worth remembering.

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