Salesforce.com Unveils the Next Chapter in the Customer Service Revolution
with Service Cloud 2 – Leading Market Momentum and New Defining
Technologies, including the Industry’s First Knowledge-as-a-Service
8,000 companies have already standardized on the Service Cloud including
Extra Space Storage, NJ TRANSIT and Plantronics
Product innovations include Salesforce Knowledge, the world’s first
Knowledge-as-a-Service; Salesforce Answers, crowd-sourced community
knowledge; and the general availability of Salesforce for Twitter
For the first time, companies can amaze their customers with an integrated customer service experience that leverages their own agents as well as real-time conversations happening throughout the cloud
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM),
the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced the next chapter in
the customer service revolution with Service Cloud 2. The Service Cloud,
announced in January of this year, is the next generation solution for
customer service – it exponentially increases the quality of service, while
lowering the cost, by leveraging the expertise of the community. Since its
introduction, the Service Cloud has led market momentum with 8,000 customers
and received a number of industry accolades. The Service Cloud will also
deliver entirely new product innovations for the customer service industry
by introducing the world’s first knowledge base designed for cloud computing
– Salesforce Knowledge; an entirely new way to look at customer communities
and discussion forums – Salesforce Answers; and Salesforce for Twitter,
which allows companies to monitor and join the customer service
conversations taking place on Twitter. The customer service application
market represents a major opportunity for salesforce.com, which according to
IDC will be worth $4.2 billion by 2012(1).
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050216/SFW105LOGO
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Service Cloud 2 – Customer Success and Market Momentum for the New Customer
Service Standard
* Eight thousand companies, including Extra Space Storage, NJ TRANSIT
and Plantronics, have standardized on the Service Cloud for their customer
service operations – representing a 175% growth in business year over year.
* Companies using the Service Cloud have seen a 28% increase in
customer satisfaction, 25% increase in call deflection, 30% increase in
first call resolution, 37% rise in service and support productivity and a
26% increase in customer retention, according to a recent third party
survey.
* Salesforce.com was placed in the leaders quadrant of Gartner’s Magic
Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Support Contacts(2).
* Since January of 2009, the Service Cloud has won the 2009 TMCnet CRM
Excellence Award, Network Products Guide 2009 Innovation Award, CRM Magazine
Service Leader Rising Star Award, and the IP Contact Center Technology
Pioneer Award for Best IP Contact Center Service. The Service Cloud was also
named to KMWorld’s list of Top 100 Companies in knowledge management.
Salesforce Knowledge – The World’s First Knowledge-as-a-Service
A year after salesforce.com acquired Instranet, salesforce.com will offer
the world’s first Knowledge-as-a-Service, the first ever multi-tenant
knowledge base designed for cloud computing. The core Service Cloud
knowledge base built on Force.com will deliver:
* Rapid Deployment: Companies will be able to deploy their knowledge
base in a matter of days and extend the technology to mobile devices and
public websites. Companies will be able to deploy Salesforce Knowledge
without having to install and manage hardware or software.
* Immediate Results: Customer service agents will be able to find the
right answer, the first time, ensuring that companies amaze and delight
their customers with a truly integrated customer service experience.
* Google Accessible: Companies will be able to utilize the latest
Force.com capabilities, including Force.com Sites, to expose knowledge
articles out to the Internet so that customers can find information on the
public Internet and through search engines such as Google.
* Simple Customizations: Users will be able to quickly and easily
deploy changes and customizations to the knowledge base to fit a company’s
dynamic and evolving needs.
* Automated Upgrades: Product enhancements will be automatically
released three times a year. Customers will no longer have to worry whether
their applications will continue to work with other hardware and software
after an upgrade.
* Secure and Trusted: Companies will be able to leverage all the
benefits of the proven security, reliability and scalability of
salesforce.com’s trusted global infrastructure.
Salesforce Answers – Crowd-Sourced Knowledge
For years, customer service centers have been limited to knowledge articles
produced by company employees, and have not benefited from the explosion of
consumer wisdom that exists across the Web. Today, online communities and
social websites hold a wealth of knowledge and facilitate conversations
around uncommon problems, new product use cases, best practices and much
more.
Utilizing the Service Cloud, Salesforce Answers will deliver a unique online
experience that helps companies leverage the expertise in the cloud to bring
the right answer to their customers. Salesforce Answers will enable
companies to:
* Start the Conversation: Create a complete, customizable website that
facilitates question/answer style conversations between customers. Encourage
the community to ask, rate and answer questions and issues posted to the
site.
* Crowd-Sourced Knowledge: Filter the appropriate knowledge created on
Salesforce Answers directly into the Service Cloud’s knowledge base,
ensuring that customers, agents and partners will all have access to the
best knowledge available.
* Leverage Facebook: Companies will be able to set up a Salesforce
Answers community directly on a Facebook company fan page, allowing the
company to harness knowledge from the 250+ million Facebook members.
* Create Dynamic Customer Communities: In combination with Service
Cloud features like Salesforce Ideas, companies will be able to create
dynamic, interactive customer communities.
Salesforce for Twitter – Join Real-Time Conversations on Twitter
Twitter provides a free platform for users to answer the question “What are
you doing?” in 140 characters or less and broadcast the answer to a broader
community. These “tweets” can cover any topic area, including specific
companies, brands and products. In today’s Web-driven world where there is
an expectation of real-time interaction, Salesforce for Twitter and the
Service Cloud give companies an easy way to join the real-time customer
service conversations happening on Twitter by enabling them to:
* Search Twitter in Real-time: Search through the millions of tweets
happening on Twitter every minute to find the most relevant customer service
conversations.
* Monitor Service Issues on Twitter: After identifying an appropriate
tweet, a company can capture and monitor a service conversation in the
Service Cloud and track the conversation.
* Join Twitter Conversations: Salesforce for Twitter empowers
enterprises to be active participants on Twitter by enabling them to engage
in Twitter conversations, right from within the Service Cloud.
* Establish a Twitter Support Channel: Customers can tweet their
customer service issues and instantly create a case within the Service
Cloud. Once the case is created, companies can leverage internal business
processes to route cases to the most effective service representatives.
* Deliver Real-time Knowledge: Salesforce for Twitter facilitates the
delivery of expert knowledge back into the Twitter community by posting
tweets directly from the Service Cloud’s knowledge base.
Comments on the News:
* “With Service Cloud 2, salesforce.com is doing for customer service
what we did for sales: proving that the cloud is a better way. The customer
service market is being held back by traditional technology. With two-thirds
of customer service interactions moving to the cloud and the popularity of
social networks, it is high time for a change. I am excited by the momentum
we are seeing in the customer service market and believe it is the next
billion-dollar opportunity for salesforce.com,” said Marc Benioff, chairman
and CEO of salesforce.com.
* “We’ve seen more and more businesses use Twitter to make smart,
meaningful and timely connections with their audience. We are excited to
work with salesforce.com as they help businesses join the millions of
conversations happening every minute on the web,” said Evan Williams, CEO of
Twitter.
* “The Service Cloud’s knowledge base will give companies access to
the best answers for a situation culled from Twitter’s 45 million users and
Facebook’s 250 million users. The Service Cloud makes an important advance
on social networking by helping enterprises harness the power of real-time
conversations and crowd-sourced knowledge to benefit their companies,” said
Denis Pombriant, Beagle Research.
* “Salesforce Knowledge and the Service Cloud will definitely help our
company increase agent productivity and customer satisfaction, an incredible
testament to the power of cloud computing,” said Kimberly Jansen, Misys
Banking Systems.
* “Comcast-Spectacor is now a leader in leveraging cloud computing to
enhance our relationships with the Flyers and 76ers season ticket holders
because of salesforce.com. The Service Cloud and Salesforce for Twitter have
enabled us to connect directly with our customers on Twitter and integrate
these real-time conversations with our customer service strategy,” said Mark
DiMaurizio, Comcast-Spectacor.
Pricing and Availability
* Salesforce Knowledge will be priced at $50 per agent, per month for
salesforce.com customers and is currently scheduled to be available in the
fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010.
* Salesforce Answers is currently in pilot and is currently scheduled
to be available in the first quarter of fiscal year 2011.
* Salesforce for Twitter is available today at no additional charge on
the Force.com AppExchange for Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited Edition
customers.
Supporting Resources
* For more information, please visit
g_id=6382982&adr_order=27&url=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zYWxlc2ZvcmNlLmNvbS9zZXJ2aWNlY2
xvdWQy> http://www.salesforce.com/servicecloud2
* Follow salesforce.com on Twitter @salesforcenews
About the Magic Quadrant
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2009 by Gartner, Inc., and is
reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of
a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s
analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that
marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor,
product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise
technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders”
quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is
not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all
warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any
warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company’s
portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available at
http://www.salesforce.com/products/
g_id=6382982&adr_order=27&url=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zYWxlc2ZvcmNlLmNvbS9wcm9kdWN0cw
%3D%3D> , has revolutionized the ways that companies collaborate and
communicate with their customers across sales, marketing and service. The
company’s Force.com platform (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/
g_id=6382982&adr_order=27&url=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zYWxlc2ZvcmNlLmNvbS9wbGF0Zm9ybQ
%3D%3D> ) enables customers, partners and developers to quickly build
powerful business applications to run every part of the enterprise in the
cloud. Based on salesforce.com’s real-time, multi-tenant architecture,
Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with
cloud computing.
As of July 31, 2009, salesforce.com manages customer information for
approximately 63,200 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Dow Jones
Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks. Any
unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases
or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on
time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should
make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently
available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in
Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker
symbol “CRM”. For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com
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call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
Copyright (c) 2009 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce and
the “no software” logo are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc.,
and salesforce.com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other
names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
(1) from: “Worldwide CRM Apps Forecast 2008-2012.” Dec. 2008.
(2) Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers, by Michael
Maoz, April 2009
CONTACT: Katy Dormer of salesforce.com, +1-415-901-8595,
[email protected]
