My coverage at Salesforce.com's (News - Alert) one-day event, "Cloudforce 2 Tour: NYC," has been focused on Chatter, the company's revolutionary enterprise application
The application - designed to change the way agents work - leverages a Facebook (News - Alert)-type social networking application that allows agents to connect themselves to conversations with their customers
At today's event, I had a chance to sit down with Salesforce.com Senior Manager of Product Marketing Viviana Padilla, who spoke to me about the way the company came to this "killer enterprise application.
"The reality is that companies have to understand that people are spending their time on social networks and they're using these as a research platform," Padilla told me during our interview. "We're trying to get ahead of the curve and help our customers get ahead of the curve.
Since agents are managing customer service issues from all over the place, the reality is that agents are on a kind of island, serving as both the frontline and defense, Padilla told me in an interview
Keeping that in mind, Chatter was developed to give agents the ability to handle issues from all facets of a company.
'There's no 'Press 1 for Customer Service' on social networking sites like Facebook; agents need help to find the right answer for their customers, and find it fast," Padilla said
"Chatter can escalate a case and automatically finds the right person to get in contact with," she added
And now, with this social application, the way service and support teams get their customers answers and issues resolved has evolved to a real-time, full service platform to handle needs of all kinds
"It's the killer feature for what we believe enterprise applications should be," Padilla said. "Chatter really benefits all of the four core products; so now any custom application build on the platform effectively comes alive."
Kelly McGuire is a TMCnet Web editor, covering CRM and workforce technologies, and anchor of its daily TMC Newsroom video broadcast. Kelly also writes about eco-friendly "green" technologies and smart grids, compiling TMCnet's weekly e-Newsletters on those topics, as well as the cable industry. To read more of Kelly's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Michael Dinan