TechSized » CRM

Salesforce.com Chatter – Yet another platform for Enterprise Social Networking

jdb — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:43:43 +0000

Today, Marc Benioff , Salesforce.com’s CEO, unveiled Salesforce.com’s Enterprise Social Networking platform. The platform supports employee profiles, status updates from people, a conduit for applications to write updates to either a group or a person’s stream and an API which can be used to extend these capabilities beyond what’s already provided. Although, Salesforce.com is touting this to be one of their biggest offering in years, the current offering only offers a rudimentary framework. The current Chatter offering is very one dimensional, say compared to Cisco’s offering (read about it here), and provides capabilities that are very text based. This is definitely not an all encompassing enterprise level social collaboration platform, but does it need to be?

Salesforce.com is what it is today, because they provided a means for the developer community to develop and extend Salesforce.com’s offering. This is most likely their strategy for the new Chatter platform as well. From that perspective, Chatter would do well. It provides an extensible and secure API to feed in updates into the various channel. One interesting possibility is to integrate CoTweet like functionality into Salesforce.com and manage twitter chatter that way.

See Salesforce.com’s video describing Chatter:

In the video, one possibility that Salesforce.com talks about is getting in feeds from various backend systems, like SAP, Peoplesoft, etc. Although this sounds interesting, and is useful for smaller players, it would be unthinkable for larger companies to implement both from a security and volume perspective.

Photo by na.presseportal on Flickr

CoTweet – CRM over Twitter

jdb — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:15:56 +0000

Given the popularity of Twitter, the accessibility and the instant quips one can make using Twitter, it’s probably the best channel to get a pulse of what your customers are thinking and saying about your product/service. This makes twitter chatter undeniably important for businesses to track and respond to, if they care about enhancing customer relationships. Enter CoTweet, a company that developed an online application that enables businesses to better track, manage and engage with customers on Twitter.

The CoTweet application can queue up direct messages (DM) or company related tweets in the inbox of particular customer service agents who can then respond to these tweets. Another neat feature is that clicking on a particular twitter user shows you all of the conversation history and additionally tagged notes for that particular user, so that a team member responding that that user has a good amount of context. It also provides a great user interface to manage the work flow. CoTweet could be even more effective if they addressed the following areas:

Metrics – It’s is important to understand trends, but it also important to understand the effectiveness of customer engagement on Twitter via CoTweet. Customer satisfaction should be measured though various events and quantified through metrics. One metric could track positive tweets by customers after they were served by company representatives. Another metric could track how one company is doing compared to another.

Integration – Companies have many channels through which they interact with customers. It would be great if CoTweet data can be published via an API so that it can be integrated back into an enterprise customer relationship application (like Siebel or Salesforce.com).

Salesforce.com Chatter – Yet another platform for Enterprise Social Networking