Customers.com Technologies

How Good Is the Customer Service Functionality in Salesforce Winter ’13?

Knowledge Management Is Strong; Analytics Are Weak

We’ve just done an in-depth evaluation of the customer service capabilities in Salesforce Winter ’13, the latest release of the CRM suite from Salesforce.com. These capabilities include account management, case management, knowledge management, process management, internal communities, and social network management. They comprise the broadest and deepest customer service offering that we’ve seen from any single supplier.

Service Cloud is the Salesforce CRM application that provides the case management capabilities and serves as the anchor. A collection of tightly integrated, but variously packaged and priced features and additional applications provide the rest of the customer service functionality. All of the apps and features run on the Salesforce CRM platform, which provides a very large set of common, shared services, data, and tools.

An “Expert Visibility Platform” – What’s That?

By Sue McKittrick

Over the last 10 years, marketing technologies have dramatically changed the processes, skills, and metrics that businesses use to build awareness and influence customers’ decisions to purchase. Marketers continue to adapt to take advantage of new capabilities that change the ways customers buy. The payoff from these changes has been huge for many businesses—well worth the investment of time and resources.

Nevertheless, some marketing processes have changed very little. One of those in particular, the identification and placement of company experts in speaking engagements, continues to be handled manually by most companies. As a result, opportunities are missed and marketers waste a lot of time.

Speakerfile provides a platform for maintaining up-to-date rich-media content about internal experts and for promoting those experts’ accomplishments on the web. For a low annual fee, marketers can take advantage of Speakerfile’s content management and search engine optimization capabilities to make their experts more visible to event planners, reporters, and others seeking specialized expertise. For those seeking experts, the robust profiles—which include videos and details on past speeches as well as location, fees, and speaking style and preferences—enable substantive pre-qualification before contacting the expert or expert’s handler.

It’s refreshing to see solutions that do simple things simply—especially one like Speakerfile that comes with a strong cost justification.

Speakerfile’s Expert Visibility Platform
A “Speakers’ Bureau in a Box”
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, January 10, 2013