Service Cloud or Customer Service 2.0

January 22nd, 2009 by Julia Lim

Salesforce.com just launched Service Cloud – a set of customer service tools that leverages Google search (because apparently you wouldn’t just do that yourself) and online communities such as Facebook, where “trusted answers” to common questions can be voted upon.

Service Cloud could just as easily have been called Customer Service 2.0 – because of the way it relies upon social networking to generate trusted content. The new service has its roots in Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Instranet, which provided knowledge management software for call centers. The Instranet acquisition was interesting in that it deviated from the usual Salesforce.com acquisition of companies building out apps on AppExchange or Force.com. In this case, Salesforce.com took a software company and created a SaaS offering…cloud offering…Web 2.0 offering…any other cool acronyms we can throw at this?

Announced at the Dreamforce conference in Nov, Service Cloud is a good example of the “dream” Salesforce had announced at the show – cloud apps built on the Force.com platform and tied to Web services offered by the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon and others. (Wait, I seem to remember VMware making a similar announcement about vCloud services tying into Facebook. Everyone wants to friend Facebook.) Apparently, if you want something done right (or in your timeframe), you should do it yourself.

The service starts at $995/month to create an online community for up to 250 customers, set up a contact center with up to five customer-service reps, and connect up to five partners. Argh, as a Salesforce customer, this nickel and diming on the pricing looks eerily familiar. I don’t have the numbers to do a comparison, but potential customers of Service Cloud certainly should. Whether you call this a cloud solution or a SaaS solution, it seems likely in the long run (and up to you to figure out where that inflection point is) that customers pay more using this model. Yes, you don’t have the upfront investment costs ($$ and time) if you did it yourself or with on-premise software, but at some point you’re paying more. And by the time you say “enough”, you’ll be so firmly entrenched in the way you’re doing things with Service Cloud that you might just think change is too costly.

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