Video: An Introduction to The Service Cloud

As more and more consumers turn to the web for support, here is Salesforce.Com’s solution for Servicing and Supporting Customers using their platform. Some of the immediate features are the ability to track community forum conversations, Twitter Conversations, Facebook, and Google pages. It seems that the solution is not entirely agnostic.

For example, tracking community conversations and knowledge related to those conversations sounds ideal, but you have to build your knowledge base using the Salesforce.Com Community platform. Other features like the ability to listen to chat, phone, and email conversations are likely dependent upon the software a company utilizes for these support channels. It is very likely that if your applications used to support customers across these channels is not integrated with Salesforce.Com, then your chances of tracking those interactions now become a development effort. Salesforce has started to release some decent documentation on how to push realtime data into the Service Cloud using their Apex programming language, but it to truly accomplish this you will need a dev effort occuring on the SFDC side of the application and your host application which could be a Chat, Email, or other ticketing system.

Other conversations like the Twitter and Facebook conversations seem to be more feasible and available out of the box. So the question still remains is the Service Cloud worth it? The package starts at $995 per month. With this basic package you get the following:

• The ability to create an online customer community with unlimited usage for up to 250 customers.
• Set up a contact center with up to five agents.
• Connect with native cloud computing sites like Facebook and Google.
• Invite up to five partners to participate in the service cloud.

My thought is that if your a B2B business with no online support tools and your looking to build Service & Support from the ground up, this would be an ideal solution. However, if your like many companies whom have several disparate support solutions in your organization, the costs of integration and development between SFDC and all your other applications may not be worth it.