SAN FRANCISCO — Having locked up a large chunk of the sales side of the market with its on-demand CRM service, Salesforce.com is taking aim at what it thinks will bring in its next billion dollars in revenue, customer service management.
Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) announced Service Cloud 2 on Thursday, an upgrade to its customer service management offering that operates in conjunction with its customer relationship management (CRM) software.
The company’s founder and CEO Marc Benioff, never shy with his opinions on the software-as-a-service market and model, seemed especially animated over this new market.
“A lot of people think of sales force automation when they think of Salesforce.com. That was the Trojan horse for how it got into their organization. The service cloud is the next step to go beyond just managing their sales opportunities to managing their customer. This is a huge market,” Benioff said at a launch event here.
The CEO said he thinks customer service management will drive Salesforce.com to the next $1 billion in revenue because of the size of the market, and the fact it’s “innovation stagnant” with technology more than a decade old. “These customers think what they have is state of the art and don’t realize it’s time for them to go to another level of technology.”
Of course, that meant a chance to take a dig at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and SAP, his three favorite whipping boys.
“Major vendors are just not talking about their next generation of customer service centers. They are trying to hold customers back in old client/server systems and soaking them for 22 percent on maintenance contracts on these old datacenters. Customers can save millions of dollars moving to this next-generation technology,” said Benioff.
The bravado was followed by product details. Service Cloud 2 adds three major new features: Salesforce Knowledge, Salesforce Answers, and Salesforce for Twitter.
Salesforce Knowledge, built on technology Salesforce acquired last year when it bought InStranet, is being billed AS “knowledge-as-a-service” technology and the world’s first knowledge base for cloud computing. It is knowledge base similar to what customer service representatives would use but is accessible from the Internet.
Not only are answers available for call center employees, they can also be made publicly-facing, meaning search engine crawlers from Google, Yahoo and other search engines can find that information. So if a person wants to know, for example, how to perform a memory upgrade on their PC, they can find it in Google rather than call a PC vendor’s call center.
Salesforce Answers builds on the in-house knowledge of articles that a vendor has and draws upon the knowledge of the Internet community. Alex Dayon, senior vice president of product management at Salesforce, noted that the “long tail of knowledge” means only 20 percent of knowledge on a product can be found in knowledge bases while the other 80 percent is in Internet communities.
These include LinkedIn Answers, which has 46 million members, and Yahoo Answers, which gets 27 million visitors per month. The question is how to utilize that for answering customer questions. Salesforce Answers lets customer service reps tap into these online communities and social networking sites to find even more useful information.
Finally, there’s Salesforce for Twitter, which helps companies perform real-time support. The idea is that when you send a Tweet requesting help, the needed information is retrieved from a knowledge base, and a link to that information sent back to the Twitter network, all automatically.
The Service Cloud’s knowledge base is $50 per person, per month. It will be available in the fourth quarter. Benioff said more upgrades to the Salesforce network will be announced at its annual Dreamforce conference, set for mid-November.
Article courtesy of InternetNews.com.
Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020
Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 05, 2020
The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
August 14, 2020
Datamation is the leading industry resource for B2B data professionals and technology buyers. Datamation's focus is on providing insight into the latest trends and innovation in AI, data security, big data, and more, along with in-depth product recommendations and comparisons. More than 1.7M users gain insight and guidance from Datamation every year.
Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on Datamation and our other data and technology-focused platforms.
Advertise with Us
Property of TechnologyAdvice.
© 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this
site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives
compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products
appear on this site including, for example, the order in which
they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies
or all types of products available in the marketplace.