adayinthelifeofanintmkter: This Tweet is Priority 1: SalesForce.com's Chatter is Transactional Social Media

Thursday, April 8, 2010

This Tweet is Priority 1: SalesForce.com's Chatter is Transactional Social Media

chatter Lede Soon, Twitter users will be in a better position to get satisfaction with the companies that they do business with. This morning, SalesForce.com is announcing that the Chatter beta developer preview has grown to 500 companies and is integrated with its popular Service Cloud offering. The company has shown its ability to leverage the disruption of social media - rather than be disrupted by it.

We had a chance to review the new tools and experience what an end-to-end social media driven customer experience looks like. It was eye-opening for us - and is coming soon to the 70,000-plus customers of SalesForce platform.

Sponsor

The first thing we learned in our briefing with SalesForce is that the company has fully digested the reality of the new web. The company talks about how it started on a mission to bring the power of great web applications like Amazon.com to enterprise customers. Now, ten years later, the web and the company have moved on towards the new dominant engagement model on the web, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Here is a graph the SalesForce team shared with us on the emerging trend of Internet usage, a key driver in how the Chatter product has been considered.

internet Usage

old New SalesForce makes a case that a fundamental shift is underway and its completely re-factoring the engagement model. The company calls it the "Facebook Imperitive", which we interpret as "be as social and easy to use as Facebook, or whither". Reminiscent of the Wired Magazine's "Wired: Tired" lists SalesForce shares its observations of the fundamental shifts in the industry. We see Amazon.com as the old incumbent leader of the Internet being replaced by Facebook. Also series of observations that show the landscape change dominated by mobile, location, and web standards.

Here, we see a Chatter enabled service desk, where we can easily see the different channels that have opened tickets for customer service.

Service Cloud Dashboard

A case that has been opened via Twitter is seen in the dashboard here. It can be shared among team members, or escalated. We think this is an interesting evolution of the "follower" mechanic borrowed from Twitter. In this case, you can be assigned a topic to follow, since in the enterprise there is a job to be done.

Twitter Case in Service Cloud

Here, we see the familiar Twitter interface as the origination point of the case being managed internally.

twitter Response Received

From what we learned, several marquee customers such as Bank of America plan on rolling out Chatter plus Service Cloud. Shown here is the Bofa Twitter feed responding to individuals in the public forum.

twitter Bofa Chatter

Some of the productivity benefits offered by Chatter plus Service Cloud offered by the company are listed here:

"Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates

Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company

Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster

SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet

Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business"

We think there could be several big winners with SalesForce Chatter release.

SalesForce may have found its way into the entire enterprise, where it becomes essential to connect departments and individuals together in the best collaboration model possible.

Twitter seems like a big winner here, where it is now being demonstrated as the front end to customer service relationships. This pattern has been developing for several years with leaders like Comcast servicing customers with Twitter. Now, its moving to the next level where when you Tweet an issue, you'll essentially be opening a ticket. And, where tickets are opened, you can be sure that it is someone's job to close them. It seems that Twitter being cemented into enterprise processes just like the telephone of yesteryear.

Consumers win by getting faster answers with less searching in document bases, or waiting in call center queues. Consumers also win by bringing speed and transparency to the process. No longer, will we wait on hold all alone, as we're bringing our followers with us with every Tweet.