CRM Battle Heats Up as Salesforce Launches Social Media Update

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Salesforce.com unveiled its Service

Cloud 3 March 3, giving businesses the ability to analyze and respond to

customer feedback filtering from Websites such as Twitter and Facebook. It

represents the next stage in Salesforce’s quest to leverage social networking

for the benefit of its cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) platform, and the latest twist in the company’s

competition against not only Oracle, but also SAP and Microsoft.

All of those companies are seeking to profit from

businesses’ increased interest in CRM and its ability to not only make their

customer service more efficient, but also blunt the occasional public relations

snafu.

“There is strong corporate awareness, including at corporate

executive levels, of social networks and their potential impact on corporate

brand management and customer service perception,” Drew Kraus, a research vice

president at Gartner, wrote in a March 3 research note. “We expect the

high-profile nature of social networks and social CRM for customer service to

rapidly advance adoption from early adopter to mainstream deployments despite

the volatile and rapid evolution of social networks in general.”

For the Salesforces, Oracles, Microsofts and SAPs of the

world, that translates into a constant push to add new features and

functionality, giving their respective CRM platforms an edge — however

temporary — over their rivals.

Service Cloud 3, for example, lets employees click on a

dashboard tab labeled “Social Conversations” and see whatever customers are

posting on Twitter or Facebook. Those employees can also monitor broader swaths

of social-networking data, via dashboard metrics such as “Twitter Volume by

Product” or “Cases by Channel.”

For more, read the eWeek article: Salesforce.com, SAP Highlight Growing CRM Battle.

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