Salesforce jumps on the Twitter-for-CRM bandwagon

Salesforce's Service Cloud dashboard. Click for larger version.

(Credit: Salesforce)

Twitter customer service: It's the hot new thing that all the kids are doing! Salesforce has added a new application to its "app exchange" so that clients who use its Service Cloud product can better wrangle Twitter for customer service purposes. It'll be available this summer.

With the app, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, clients can monitor Twitter messages that pertain to their company, aggregate the replies and conversations around those messages, and then respond to the inquiries and complaints and whatnot.

Service Cloud already helps clients keep tabs on the likes of Facebook, Blogger, and Web forums.

Alex Dayon, Salesforce CRM's senior vice president of customer service and support, said that with the abundance of social-media tools on the Web, people are turning to "crowdsourced" help with customer-service issues. I don't blame them. When was the last time you spent ages on the phone with your TV manufacturer only to have some random Twitter follower provide you the solution in five minutes?

"While $20 billion of software is being spent on call centers, the customers are somewhere else," he said.

[WeCanDoBIZ]

This looks quite neat. I am not sure what mechanisms exist behind the dashboard though to ensure the social media "chatter" about a brand is effectively managed if it includes customer complaints.

Little doubt though that CRM combined with Web 2.0 elements is enormously powerful. We are in discussions with a few companies about integration of our sales leads network into their sales focused CRM systems, helping to capture people sharing needs over our social network to create an actionable sales plan.

This could be one of the best things to happen to the business web.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

[mquag]

> When was the last time you spent ages on the phone with your TV manufacturer
> only to have some random Twitter follower provide you the solution in five minutes?

Let's see... the last that has happened to me was, um... NEVER.

I am not some technology hating Luddite (for example, I starting using email in 1986) but I don't see the value in Twitter. Or, more accurately, I don't see enough value. The signal-to-noise ratio is terrible.

For example, here's what one of my friends posted on Twitter recently: "Making another pot o' coffee".

Who has time to monitor this self-absorbed, low-value stream of consciousness?

[hiphopster]

The fleeting Twitter Tweets about your company or product are not very lucid or valid....140 characters or less and very low value content by random folk with bad spelling. Is this just some Sales Force Hype that we always get about nothing very important?

Social Networks sure, but Twitter having depth and data mining value for the Fortune 2000?

I don't think so.

[Harrison912]

I'm typically on Twitter to socially market my safety and security web site. I can see this being helpful to a some degree but the above comments do hold some merit. I'm sure you'd have to weed through tons of usless chatter to get to something of value. Will this really be worth it? I guess time will tell.

[bvell]

Great presentation. I suspect most of this is vaporware at the moment, but a compelling presentation nonetheless. The next growth phase is integrating Social CRM with traditional CRM, and this provides a good example of one potential application.

Brian Vellmure
http://freecrmstrategies.wordpress.com

[underbrink]

It's not as silly as it sounds. Here is a very real example from the SXSW conference in Austin last week: There were so many iPhone's gathered in one place that the AT&T network slowed to a crawl due to the immense volume of traffic. While there may have been some people who called AT&T customer service to complain, there were many, many more who simply posted complaints to the world via Twitter. The 140-character posts were at times the only way to communicate. To their credit, AT&T eventually addressed the capacity problem, but imagine how much faster they might have responded if they had channeled all that Twitter traffic into the same application that runs their call center?

[bobpeery]

There will always be some niche that is served very well by new ideas and technology. However, for enterprises with tight budgets, small staffs, and more problems to address than ever before, it's unlikely that Twitter monitoring will be anything but a flash in the pan like parachute pants, mullets, and Michael Jackson leather jackets. While one could argue that Twitter monitoring is scalable and actionable, as someone pointed out above, given the signal to noise ratio and various other impediments...how much bottom line value is going to be realized and will it even offset the initial and ongoing investments? I?d love to be proved wrong, but I don?t think it?s going happen.

[Business_Reader]

This makes for an interesting additional capability to Salesforce, but they?re missing a really important point. The fact is that any social media really should be thought of as ?a collaborative engagement platform.? While that may seem obvious, or a trivial label, it?s an important distinction. Collaborative engagement platforms have the power to truly transform the way organizations operate. When you can leverage user controlled/contributed content in a collaborative decision-making fashion you enable a productivity boost amongst traditional knowledge workers that is akin to robotic automation of traditional manual labor.

The problem is that operating models in nearly every organization are based on a post-industrial revolution command/control structure and haven?t changed in the last 100 years. Sadly, most efforts aimed at leveraging the these kinds of technologies try to do so in these outmoded operating models. Imagine your CEO tweeting ? now imagine your CEO actually being able to use Twitter to engage an audience of interested employees on a topic area. Traditional organization structures, communication channels and business processes would stifle any creative engagement long before it happened, leaving the platform as an interesting "hobby" when a decision-maker had some spare time.

But, get it right, change the underlying operating model and the opportunities are really tremendous. Here?s a link to an approach that a few companies have started to realize is necessary to really get the juice from squeezing the web 2.0 fruit:

http://www.bis-insight.com/Site/The_Future_of_Productivity.html