Sword Ciboodle, a provider of process-managed CRM software services to contact centers, has stated that they have released a new social CRM product - Ciboodle Crowd that is supposed to blend the strongest aspects of online communities and customer service.

The company has claimed that it created Ciboodle Crowd in recognition of the fact that traditional customer service offerings do not always fulfill the needs of new social media-enthused customers. Sword Ciboodle's (News - Alert) community based software enables the agent to contribute or add insight to the social customer's experience while, at the same time, customers can collaborate and interact with each other to share experiences and viewpoints.

The company officials have asserted that they are committed to empowering organizations to consistently, effectively and profitably service customers in real-time across any channel, and Ciboodle Crowd fulfills this mission as the final piece of their customer engagement continuum.

The flexible platform enables organizations to create an online community, which is molded to meet their exact requirements, with familiar features including forums, blogs, discussion boards and question and answer threads.

Connecting users with their social customers, Ciboodle Crowd delivers: Real-time interaction and input between community members - a feature that lets customers to directly interact with each other sharing experiences and viewpoint; Early identification of the social customer's issues and inquiries - users can listen to their social community and realize their problems before they become critical and work on an early resolution; Tools to collaborate and network - the Blogs, forums and questions make customers part of the service experience; Mining of community knowledge - interaction between customers also results in exchange of knowledge and experience which only help improve services; Full integration to central customer profile - all interactions within the community are captured and stored within a customer's unified profile which ensures that users' agents always have a 360 degree view of customers, regardless of channel.

Ciboodle Crowd premiered to industry praise during the June 2010 Gartner (News - Alert) Customer 360 Summit, where the software's social CRM capabilities and seamless integration with Sword Ciboodle's existing modules was showcased.