Salesforce.com Puts Twitter in Its Service Cloud

Thanks for posting that link Woody! Great find! That gets very very close to what I was talking about, though my example was more targeted at a specific workflow challenge.

I had a similar experience not long ago. I had tossed out a Twitter update lamenting the fact that the Flock web browser had no native support for Linked-In despite including just about everything else. Low and behold, Flock responded the next day and indicated that Linked-In had yet to open up their API, which was a gating factor in Flock including it in their offering. It was a great example of how companies are out there mining for dissatisfied customers and getting ahead of them.

I still think the far more boring and practical uses are being missed for the time being, and it won't be long before they get addressed. The part that's missing from that article is what happens after someone discovers a product mention out in the Social Media Cloud.

Off the top of my head are questions like:

- Is a case created automatically?
- What kind of workflow happens as a result?
- What determines which team in the organization handles the mention?
- How new or old is the data and what aspect of the system is able to discern from a Twitter update last week that was already handled vs. one today. (Closing the loop is always the hard part)
- What kind of performance management reporting are you able to generate that offers any kind of meaningful, actionable information?

The one I find the most intriguing is that any time you have a “case” or “incident” there’s typically a need to bind it to a customer entity. I wonder how companies will bind the case when they don’t know who the entity is beyond “twitter.com/their_profile”? It has interesting implications for the CRM players, who’s entire notion of customer management is built around the idea that you KNOW who your customer is. Certainly during my time at Motion, where the entire Sales channel was built off a network of distributors and resellers, the biggest challenge was knowing who owned the product and where. It quickly becomes a “Customer Master Creation” problem. And now a Company profile as well as individual profiles will need to provide facilities for capturing the Facebook site location, Twitter, etc. You might as well have their status updates fed directly in to the CRM system and trigger workflow off of those. Interesting.

Perhaps SFDC has addressed many of these questions already. I'll have to go read up on what the Salesforce.com offering is in more detail. I have some friends who work there and am curious to see what they perceive the value is along with the elegance of the implementation. I’ll circle back and share what I learn, if anything.

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Jay Grady
jay@bootstrapservice.com

Another question is how many and what type of responders or listeners will be involved in this service conversation.

If a twitter user posts about a problem with an iPhone, the service entry point for AT&T or Apple is obvious. However, there could be many more "interested parties" including rival cell phone providers rushing to participate.

Since Twitter is including the search function to more and more users on its site, the ability to monitor and respond in a targeted fashion for all users is expanding.

On another point: The assumption on response behind the Salesforce.com structure is that the service organization engages the Twitter user using Twitter -- DM, for example. But questions remain here about who is following whom and how that takes place.

Regardless of the "how," and assuming the contact is successful, the service organization may or may not be able to connect the dots to their customer DB or case tool initially but, given appropriate response from the issue poster, should be able to do so at some point in the process.

Look forward to hearing more as your research continues.

William W. (Woody) Williams
Senior Project Manager
Software Development, PMO, IT Governance
My door64 Blog
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