What Did We Learn from Dreamforce?

As the dust settles on Salesforce.com's (News - Alert) popular and well attended Dreamforce event, held last week in San Francisco, many attendees are still busy trying to process what they've learned. Billed as “the cloud computing event of the year,” the even was so broad and in-depth – with 40 sessions for service and support professionals alone – that attendees probably wished they could split themselves in three.

Contactual's (News - Alert) Kimberly Odom recently blogged about her own experiences at the show, highlighting the top three things learned at this year's Dreamforce event regarding customer service and support in the cloud. (Contactual is a cloud-based call center solutions provider.)

Social Networking Belongs in the Call Center

Social media isn’t going to change how you interact with your customers, writes Odom: it already has. While many companies are still clueless when it comes to how to leverage social networking, the early adopters who embraced social media and understand how to use it to improve customer interaction programs are reaping rich rewards, including better customer satisfaction and improved customer loyalty.

“Capturing these conversations (which are all happening in the cloud) is the first step in this new form of dialogue,” writes Odom. “These conversations are taking place with or without you, and you can only benefit from being an active participant.”

The Home Agent Model is Hot

While customer service from the cloud has a dizzying array of benefits, the ability to enable agents to work from home is a key one. 

“More and more organizations are moving to a home-based agent model where they are free to recruit agents based on skills set, experience & cultural fit – attributes that truly make a difference instead of just geography,” writes Odom. “Significantly lower agent attrition rates, faster resolution time, inherent business continuity, and the ability to respond rapidly – we heard these impressive results from many organizations who’ve taken this approach to agent staffing.”

Key Performance Indicators are Still Critical

Regardless of how “new horizon” your customer service model is, you cannot skip measuring KPIs, was one of the messages from Dreamforce. In fact, writes Odom, in cloud-based customer support, they may be even more critical than before for a company venturing into new interaction models.

“The devil is in the details,” writes Odom. “And the only way to understand these details is through a comprehensive approach to measuring performance.”

Which is another lesson for another day.

Read Odom's full blog: here

Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco