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.
There are some big new names backing ZocDoc, a start-up that lets you book doctor's appointments online (currently just in New York). Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has contributed an undisclosed amount to the company, as has Bezos Expeditions, the investment firm run by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.
In August, the company announced a $3 million Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures, the firm created by Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla. The Bezos and Benioff investments are considered contributions to that round.
The New York-based ZocDoc currently employs 12 people and said that there were nearly 20,000 medical appointments available for booking in the month of September.
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