Salesforce.com on Thursday rolled out its next-generation solution for customer service. Dubbed Service Cloud, the new software is built on the Force.com platform and leverages the benefits of cloud computing.
Service Cloud will capture customer-service conversations with the goal of empowering companies to leverage the expertise of partner sites, which include cloud platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon.com, to customers, agents and partners, regardless of location or device.
The company says its latest innovation represents the future of customer service, where more than two-thirds of all service conversations will take place in the cloud. If Service Cloud performs as Salesforce.com describes, it could keep customer service consistent across every channel.
“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.”
A New Customer-Service Model
Contact-center technologies traditionally have been removed from the experts and knowledge found in the cloud. Yet, according to salesforce.com, 50 percent of all service conversations are already taking place in the cloud.
Salesforce.com said the Service Cloud is vying to create a new model for customer service by joining two disconnected worlds. The Service Cloud captures and funnels information from inside the enterprise and in the cloud into the knowledge base.
The Service Cloud is made up of seven main components around the knowledge base to gather, distill and disseminate the expert knowledge found in the cloud to customers, agents and partners. Those components are community, social, search, partners, phone, e-mail and chat.
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