NETTING IT OUT

Service Cloud, Salesforce.com’s (SFDC’s) customer service offering, provides case management, knowledge management, and account management capabilities across assisted-service, self-service, and social-service channels. This offering is a collection of tightly integrated but variously packaged and priced features and external products—Service Cloud, itself, for case management and contact center support; Salesforce Knowledge for knowledge management and community; Live Agent for chat; Salesforce for Twitter and Facebook for social-service; and Visual Workflow for process automation.

SFDC offers subscription licenses for Service Cloud, and Service Cloud deploys on the hosted multi-tenant environment of Salesforce.com’s Force.com cloud computing platform.

To date, Salesforce.com claims that more than 17,000 customers have licensed Service Cloud. We estimate that approximately 200 customers have licensed Salesforce Knowledge. Visual Workflow and Live Agent are relatively new offerings with small customer bases. Tens of thousands of organizations have downloaded and deployed the free Salesforce for Twitter and Facebook.

Service Cloud Winter ’12 earns a good report card, earning exceeds-requirements grades in core capabilities, support for customer lifecycle activities, knowledge management, UI content management, and company viability. It needs improvement in customer service process support.

We recommend that you consider Service Cloud Winter ’12 for your organization’s customer service experience. This offering addresses customer service requirements for B2B and B2C organizations of all sizes across many industries in all geographies. Significantly, if your organization is already a Salesforce Sales Cloud user, Service Cloud could be your best fit.

Analysis Dashboard

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Illustration 1. This illustration shows an example of the Radian6 Analysis Dashboard.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Answer Customers’ Questions and Solve Customers’ Problems

Customer service products help organizations deliver answers to their customers’ questions and solutions to their problems through their case management, knowledge management, account management, and social network management capabilities--capabilities that support self-service, assisted-service, and social-service channels. These products help answer and solve customers’ questions and problems about products and services; business policies, processes, and practices; or about the elements of their customer relationships such as accounts, bills, orders, and contracts.

Salesforce Service Cloud

Service Cloud is Salesforce.com’s core customer service offering. Service Cloud provides...