by Jon Husband
March 23, 2009 at 11:06 pm
· Filed under Communities, Product Management, Web 2.0, Web Apps, social media, social tools
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… 1) send an email, 2) try to call ( into the hell of “Press 1 for …, Press 2 for …” ) or should I just 3) put it out on Twitter ?
Well, it seems that Salesforce.com is getting ready to bet on Door #3 above.
It’s not too much of a stretch to wonder how quickly this will affect the call-center work force of the future.
Here’s the direct quote from Salesforce.com’s SVP of customer service and support:
“While $20 billion of software is being spent on call centers, the customers are somewhere else,” he said.”
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Salesforce jumps on the Twitter-for-CRM bandwagon
By Caroline McCarthy
“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.
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Read the whole CNET article here …
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Interesting trend. How will they be able to track all the messages?
hash-tags, keyword clustering (various types of tweet-clouds) and eventually I suspect some kind of natural-language processing / semantic analysis algorithms (I did say eventually with respect to the last functionality).
Jon, Based on a slew of presentations at Business of Community Networking in Boston last week, #bocn, suffice to say big changes are ahead in “customer service” and call centers.
Chris Carfi, who has lead the charge for Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) made that case conceptually. Susan Getgood described how AAA’s Twitter presence prevented a customer relations issue before it became so through their proactive actions from monitoring the information stream. Brian Davidson from the National Collegiate Scouting Association described how active participation in Twitter can go beyond customer service to winning new customers as we’ve heard Dell doing through $1m+ sales months via Twitter.
Clara Shih, who is the FaceConnector developer and also manages Salesforce’s AppExchange (where the new Salesforce for Twitter app is distributed),, provided a state of the art keynote. Her book “The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Network to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff” is out and I would say required reading for anyone needing to understand the new age of customer service and networked business: http://snurl.com/exjbh
Chris Carfi also hosted a very essential ROI panel that addressed an underlying issue: the search for measures to explain how value is created through networks. Otherwise organizations stick to doing what they can measure even if this means not moving to deliver service through networks, like Twitter and Facebook, where their customers are now.
In fact Clara Shih’s observation at panel end was to propose a revamped Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) measure that includes network effects. http://snurl.com/exjij Indeed, the future is here and anyone in customer service business has to be more than prepared for changing ways.
Thanks, Jenny, for the report on the Business of Community Networking Conference.
The updates are appreciated.
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