Salesforce.com is helping its customers get on the Twitter bandwagon. The company on Monday announced Salesforce CRM for Twitter to allow companies to search, monitor and join conversations on Twitter directly in its Service Cloud.
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. Dubbed tweets, the posts can cover any topic area, including specific companies, brands and products.
Salesforce.com announced its Service Cloud in January to increase the quality and lower the cost of customer service. Salesforce CRM for Twitter will let companies leverage the Service Cloud to connect with Twitter’s more than eight million users.
“Since its introduction in January, we’ve seen tremendous momentum and validation from customers, prospects and partners that the Service Cloud represents the future of customer service,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com. “Today’s announcement builds on this momentum by enabling companies to join the conversations happening between the more than eight million users on Twitter.”
Joining the Conversation
Twitter’s explosive growth has attracted the attention of companies like Dell, Starbucks and Whole Foods that want to get involved in what is becoming an influential community. In addition to tweets, Twitter offers a platform for companies to make direct connections with their users in a casual setting.
Salesforce CRM for Twitter and the Service Cloud aim to offer companies a convenient way to join Twitter conversations by enabling search, monitoring and joining functions. Specifically, the service lets companies search through the millions of tweets to find relevant conversations, capture and monitor the conversation by creating a record that tracks the original posts and all replies, and a way to funnel relevant responses to customer needs from the Service Cloud into a Twitter post.
“Twitter is being mainstreamed…