Salesforce.com is offering the capability to integrate Facebook and Twitter into its sales and customer support offerings, another sign the company is making a full-shift to the social web.
How deep is this move? On stage this morning at Dreamforce, Mark Benioff called Facebook and Twitter a “phenomena,” going on to say that the integration of the social web is the biggest development for the company in the past ten years.
You see this in Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2, two new offerings which are both built on Salesforce Chatter. The Salesforce Chatter application is an enterprise collaboration envrionment, which the company launched this morning.
Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2 are essentially extensions of its sales and customer support services but with social features fully built in all aspects of the products.
Some of the features to be found in Service Cloud 2 Sales Cloud 2:
Twitter integration: In Sales Cloud 2, users may Twitter stream into Salesforce so sales people can engage in conversations with people and add that information into the sales funnel. In Service Cloud 2, customer support may follow Twitter and respond to people with real-time customer support.
Answers: This is a pretty cool feature. A Dell executive showed how an “Answer,” tab can be added into Facebook where customers may pose their questions.
Mobile: A sign that moble apps are here to stay. Sales people may use the platform to send documents through the Salesforce platform.
These are a few of the features available with Service Cloud 2 and Sales Cloud 2. The majority of these features will be available in 2010.
