Salesforce Adds Twitter Support

Last week in Data Center Outages and Staff Scalability we predicted that service providers will be hiring more social media specialists to handle the growing shift in customer support from traditional channels to Twitter and other real-time feedback networks. Salesforce.com has clearly recognized this trend, and announced that it is integrating tools into its Service Cloud to help customer service staff to monitor conversations about their company on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Salesforce told VentureBeat that "the core insight behind the Service Cloud is the fact that customer service has become decentralized and spread throughout the web. If customers need answers, they’re no longer calling into the company for help. They may not even be logging into the company’s customer service website. Instead, they’re looking on Google, on their social networks, and on other websites."

See additional coverage from ReadWriteWeb and Steve Rubel, who has seen this coming for some time.