Salesforce.com unveiled the next generation of its Social Studio, incorporating tools and resources from the recent ExactTarget, Radian6 and Buddy Media acquisitions positioned to bring unified social engagement to the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. The new features, disclosed at an event in New York, are designed to help Salesforce customers leverage social media throughout their enterprise while offering a holistic view of social engagement with customers.
While social media grows among customers and prospective buyers, B2B organizations are looking for ways to track social conversations and data to get a complete view of what customers expect from their brand.
“As marketers, we are looking to analyze and cover the entire customer journey,” said Lynn Vojvodich, EVP and CMO at Salesforce, during a press conference at the Salesforce1 World Tour. “This is because, as a company, you want to be wherever the customer is while they take that journey.”
Social Studio’s new features include:
- New Social Listening capabilities designed to monitors more than one billion social data sources including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, news sites and more. The data sources can then provide a unified view of social interactions with customers and prospective buyers for the marketing, customer support and sales teams.
- New Social Customer Service features intended to help customer service reps monitor social channels for customer support inquiries. These inquires can then be turned into customer cases within Salesforce Service Cloud to be easily responded to by the right reps in a timely manner.
- New Social Lead Engagement capabilities, allowing sales reps to find and connect with new customers faster with social lead generation. By listening to conversations across more than one billion social data sources, sales reps can identify new leads and engage with them in real-time directly from the Sales Cloud.
“The lines between sales, service and marketing continue to blur,” said Scott McCorkle, CEO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. “However, many companies are still using siloed social engagement and listening solutions, leading to disjointed and ineffective customer engagement. We are now past the social hype cycle and it is clear that companies that make social core to the customer journey will be more successful.”
While Social Studio is already available for Salesforce customers, the new social listening capabilities are scheduled to be available in February 2015. The new social customer service features can be used by Service Cloud customers for free with up to two Facebook or Twitter accounts. The new social sales capabilities will begin beta testing with the Sales Cloud in February 2015.
