Salesforce Service Cloud 3 Taps Into Facebook -- Redmondmag.com

Salesforce Service Cloud 3 Taps Into Facebook

By Jeffrey Schwartz
03/04/2011

Salesforce.com announced on Thursday that its service desk app now natively supports Facebook social monitoring.

The capability is integrated into Service Cloud 3, Saleforce.com's newest cloud-based app for customer service and support. Some 15,000 customers use Service Cloud, according to the company. The new Facebook capability follows an earlier native integration of Twitter into Service Cloud.

Both additions enhance social monitoring capabilities for organizations. The Service Cloud 3 console lets customer service agents in a company monitor what people are saying about their organization via the two social networks.

"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 the company's CloudForce event held in New York.

"We announced the Twitter native integration more than a year ago, and today we are announcing Facebook native integration within the wall," he added. "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.com 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 editions. Customers will be able to acquire it on Salesforce.com's AppExchange, the company's online app store.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

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