Salesforce Mobilizes Customer Support Experience

Tap the Power of Your Network: Five Mobile Apps

At a Salesforce World Tour event in Paris today, Salesforce unfurled an addition to its Service Cloud that promises to make it simpler to incorporate mobile applications within the overall customer service experience.

Sarah Patterson, senior vice president of marketing for Salesforce Service Cloud, says it’s apparent that people are increasingly relying on mobile applications within their daily lives. The issue that most companies face is that most of them don’t have any effective means of engaging customers on mobile devices, especially in regards to customer service.

Patterson says that a new Service for Apps extension to the Salesforce Service Cloud, which is currently in private beta, gives Salesforce Service Cloud customers access to a customizable mobile application that service organizations can invite customers to download. As a full-blown software development kit, Patterson says Service for Apps makes use of Salesforce 1 application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate with the Salesforce Service Cloud.

Service functions incorporated into Service for Apps include live chat, tap-to-call, an integrated knowledge base that helps customers resolve their own issues, an ability to track customer service engagement over time and support for Salesforce SOS, which enables organizations to embed support for video calls inside the mobile application.

Today, most organizations are trying to find a way to incorporate mobile computing applications within their customer support functions. Such capabilities not only bring them closer to the customer, they should over time reduce the cost of providing customer service. The decision many of them need to make now is whether to develop that capability themselves or move to a cloud service that provides that capability within the context of a larger customer engagement strategy.