Salesforce.com Integrates Twitter

Written by Bernard Lunn / March 23, 2009 12:01 AM / 17 Comments

When Gmail failed a few months ago, I tried using Google to find out what was going on. When that did not get me an answer, I tried Twitter and did find some answers. That alerted me to the power of real-time search in one specific usage case. It was a relatively minor problem for me. But what if I ran customer service for a SaaS firm that just had a major outage? How would I find and monitor the conversations going on out there? That is what today's announcement by Salesforce.com about Twitter integration is all about.

What Is It?

Salesforce.com has just announced this extension to its Service Cloud, a tool it released back in January. Service Cloud is built on Salesforce.com's Force platform and allows customer service people to monitor and manage conversations that are happening about their company on social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

When Gmail failed, the idea of calling Google's customer service never occurred to me. That is increasingly normal. We turn to online services because calling customer support call centers is too frustrating.

Salesforce.com announced that you can now search, monitor, and join conversations specifically on Twitter:

Search: find mentions on Twitter.
Monitor: track subsequent mentions and replies.
Join: become an active participant in the conversation.

These are all things you can already do on Twitter and countless Twitter-specific apps. Salesforce.com, though, thinks that you want to be able to do this from within your customer service system, and that Twitter is only one of many places where these conversations are happening.

What Does It Look Like?

The screenshot below shows the Service Cloud with the capability of tracking conversations across multiple social media venues:

Why Is This Important?

There are two ways to look at this:

Salesforce.com is recognizing that a lot of important conversations are happening on Twitter, and it needs to provide this information to its users.
The media is hopelessly infatuated with Twitter, and Salesforce.com saw this as a good way to get some attention.

If the latter is true, then one point to Salesforce from this journalist! Our take, though, is that it's a bit of both. Salesforce.com presents this as a tool for customer service, but it is equally applicable to sales. Before contacting someone on an important call, a quick check on what is being said about them, about you or your firm, and/or about the subject of your call is simply good preparation.

Today's announcement is important because Twitter is where those conversations are most easily available, for two reasons:

Twitter is up to the minute (unlike Google). This matters in customer service. You cannot say, "Sorry, Google's crawler hasn't yet found this," when speaking to an irate customer.
Twitter's real-time information is more visible and accessible (compared to Facebook and LinkedIn). This is a testament to Twitter's openness. Facebook's March 5th redesign seems motivated, at least in part, by the need to make the real-time news feed more visible.

Comments

Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteEnterprise posts

Have personally had the same issue, telco customer service could not answer my querry... as the twitters began and filled me in, meaning I did not need to continue my phone call, I informed the service person. if twitter is providing this search adv. will google buy them?

Posted by: elliot | March 22, 2009 10:02 PM

This is becoming increasingly common, we're delivering a platform which enables us to deliver custom solutions for our clients in this space.

Posted by: David Banes | March 22, 2009 10:29 PM

Very good! I like microblogging and Twitter.

Posted by: rvdh.co.cc | March 23, 2009 3:06 AM

Very interesting.. it's really nice to know that there are always options we can use to find information. I'm beginning to twitter.

Posted by: Latest Technology Gadgets | March 23, 2009 5:23 AM

It is becoming increasingly important for small and medium companies do be more visible and the best way out is using social bookmarking tools

Posted by: Sreedhar | March 23, 2009 5:45 AM

Very Good!

Posted by: Eğitişim Kariyer Enstitüsü | March 23, 2009 7:15 AM

This is kind of neat, although other tools exist to enable you to do a better job of searching social networks and other social media for mentions of your company. I'd like to know more on what Salesforce.com does with a customer complaint voiced over Twitter once it had found it, as that's where the value should be in finding this data from within the CRM application.

By the way, I see social networks and CRM linked together as enormously powerful. Who wouldn't want their customers updating and padding out records for them in their CRM system, so they can identify all they could possibly need to know and that contact is willing to share publicly before starting a call with them?

We have several CRM vendors asking to integrate with our social network for sales leads and business referrals. I can't wait to show our users how they can manage sales leads identified through our site using their CRM.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

Posted by: Ian Hendry | March 23, 2009 9:06 AM

You made an interesting point about using Twitter instead of calling the company call centre - this is exactly what I did two days ago when my email stopped working. I thought the problem may have been with my ISP and I used Twitter, rather than get held up in an automated phone system, to see if anyone else had the same problem. They didn't, it was my laptop, but I saved myself a few pennies and a lot of swear words.

Posted by: Stephen D | March 23, 2009 10:00 AM

Another success story. Looks like another company Google will snap up!

Posted by: Linda | March 23, 2009 12:27 PM

Real time information creates real time results for sale people! Twitter is an amazing tool for anyone in sales. To really know an account - follow the people behind the account!
Good stuff!

-Tom

Posted by: Tom Canning | March 23, 2009 12:39 PM

Wow... this looks very cool for brand tracking and to get feedback from your customers.
Try the best homepage

Posted by: mattmcb | March 27, 2009 12:09 PM

It will be interesting to see how this kind of data is leveraged in the future - and by that I do not mean what it is leveraged for (i.e. for customer relations, or for market research etc) I mean literally the ways in which applications will gather, sort and analyses this data. Kind of like imagining listening to a room full of crowded people chattering away, and trying to figure out the best way to learn as much as possible about the people in the room in as little time as possible, just by listening o what they are saying. Fascinating.

Posted by: Joseph C Lawrence | March 31, 2009 8:53 AM

This is an excellent move to integrate twitter with CRM as it should be part of that. Salesforce's quick adoption of new and emerging media channels is sure to make its adoption higher.

Posted by: Vikas Sah | September 8, 2009 9:22 PM

Real time information creates real time results for sale people! Twitter is an amazing tool for anyone in sales. To really know an account - follow the people behind the account!
Good stuff

Posted by: infant | November 13, 2009 2:28 AM

Thank you for your sharing.!

Posted by: nusret | November 24, 2009 5:37 PM

Real-time search is awesome, whenever a website is down and I want to check, I just head over to twitter.

-Alison

Posted by: Alison | February 3, 2010 12:17 AM