Salesforce “Service Cloud”- SaaS 2.0 And A Wealth Of Knowledge

Building on the success of Salesforce.com’s CRM cloud-based service, they’ve launched a new service called “Service Cloud.”  The idea is to centralize the knowlege of particular subjects from sources like Google, Facebook, IM chat histories, etc. into a web-based cloud environment.

“The Service Cloud is the first customer service solution that empowers companies to join and manage all service conversations happening in the cloud,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “This has been made possible through the emergence of native cloud computing platforms like Force.com that are built to harness the power of other clouds like Facebook, Google, and Amazon.com.”

Here are some of the major components of the service:

1. Online communities–talk with the company and with other customers.
2. Connections to existing social networks and the blogosphere–funnel existing knowledge into a company’s knowledge base.
3. SEO–make sure your company’s community shows up high when I reach for Google.
4. Sharing with business partners–the cloud makes it easy to share portions of your knowledge base with partnered companies.
5. Contact center technology–give your customer service agents access to this knowledge base.

Traditional on-premise contact center technology is disconnected from the experts and knowledge found in the cloud. Yet so many customer service questions are already answered online in forums, Facebook, Google, Amazon, or others. Or the answers are sitting on your personal Instant Messaging history, e-mail history, or corporate intranet.  It’s a great idea and definitely something to watch.  It follows the same method of Google wanting to index the world, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they introduce their own model similar to this in the near future.