Support for
KM-based customer service in Salesforce.com applications is provided by capabilities
in Service Cloud 2, Customer Portal, and Salesforce Knowledge. These are
new capabilities that were delivered with the Winter ’10 release of
Salesforce.com’s products in November 2009.
Like all Salesforce.com products, Service Cloud, Customer Portal, and Salesforce
Knowledge are offered through subscription licenses for hosted multi-tenant
deployment on the firm’s cloud computing platform. To date, more than
8,000 customers have licensed Service Cloud, and one million user licenses
have been purchased for Customer Portal. Salesforce Knowledge is brand new.
We estimate its customer base to be currently fewer than 50.
On the Customers.com Report Card for KM-based Customer Service, Salesforce.com’s
KM-based customer service capabilities earned “exceeds requirements” grades
for UI content management, environments, and company viability. They need improvement
in knowledge
management, search, and analytic functionality.
We recommend that you begin to consider Salesforce.com’s KM-based customer
service capabilities to address your requirements for knowledge management-based
customer service. With expected improvements in upcoming releases, they will
have everything you need to help you deliver excellent customer service.
CUSTOMER SERVICE TO ANSWER QUESTIONS AND RESOLVE PROBLEMS
This report presents our evaluation of Salesforce.com’s knowledge management
(KM)-based customer service capabilities against our evaluation framework for
KM-based customer service. The evaluated capabilities combine the KM features
and assisted-service UI of Service Cloud 2 with the UIs of Customer Portal
and Sites and the knowledge management capabilities of the very recently introduced
Salesforce Knowledge.
KM-based customer service products help customers get answers to their questions
about your organization, your policies, and your products and services as
well as to diagnose, isolate, and resolve problems with those products and
services. These products are considered knowledge management products because
they combine content management and search technologies to build customer
service applications that create the “knowledge” that answers
your customers’ questions.
The Winter ’10 release of Salesforce.com’s products is the current
release of the knowledge management-based customer service capabilities of
Service Cloud 2, including Customer Portal and Salesforce Knowledge. It’s
also the first release of Salesforce Knowledge. This release was announced
on September 9, 2009 and delivered on November 9, 2009. The facilities and
tools that support KM-based customer service include:
•
Creating and managing knowledgebases
•
Authoring, editing, and managing the knowledge items contained in those knowledgebases
•
Creating (or reusing) and managing Web UIs to let customers and agents find
and access knowledge across a range of customer service channels, including
public Web sites
•
Enabling customers and partners to create and track cases when they can’t
find knowledge items that answer their questions or solve their problems
Search facilities are provided through an included search engine that has
been developed and maintained by Salesforce.com. Customers and agents use search
to help them find the knowledge that contains the answers and solutions that
they seek. Navigation facilities are part of the technology of Salesforce
Knowledge.
Acquiring, purchasing, and deploying the KM-based customer service capabilities
offered by Salesforce.com requires your licensing of either the Enterprise
or Unlimited editions of Service Cloud 2 and licensing the separately packaged
and separately priced Salesforce Knowledge. Licensing the separately packaged
and priced Customer Portal is also required for the UI that customers login
to for self-service.
Salesforce.com offers subscription licenses and hosted multi-tenant deployment
for all of its products. (Note that what we’ve been calling hosted-multi-tenant
deployment, Salesforce.com calls cloud computing-based multi-tenant. Salesforce.com’s
term provides a more accurate description. We’ll use it from now on.)
Licenses for the Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Editions of Service Cloud
are offered for a flat monthly fee. Licensees for Salesforce Knowledge and
Customer Portal are offered on a per-user per-month basis.
Salesforce.com claims that 8,000 of its customers have deployed Service Cloud.
Also, the firm claims that more than one million users have Customer Portal
licenses. However, because Salesforce Knowledge has been available only since
November 9, 2009, customers are just beginning to deploy KM-based customer
service applications. We’d estimate that number to be fewer than 50
as we publish this report.
Product Background
The backgrounds of the products that comprise the KM-based customer service
capabilities follow these lines.
•
Service Cloud has its origins as Supportforce in September 2004. Supportforce
was rebranded Salesforce CRM Service in October 2006. Salesforce CRM Service
was rebranded Salesforce Service & Support in September 2005. Finally,
Salesforce CRM Service was rebranded Service Cloud in January 2009. Service
Cloud 2 was announced in September 2009 and delivered in November 2009 with
the Winter ’10 release of salesforce.com’s products.
•
Customer Portal was introduced in April 2007 as the self-service UI for users
with logins.
•
Salesforce Knowledge is based on technology developed by InStranet, a Paris,
France-based supplier that Salesforce.com acquired in August 2008. This KM
technology had been the foundation of InStranet’s Contact Centers OnLine
(CCIL) offering.
Service Cloud’s lineage is in case management. Basic KM capabilities
were added with the Solutions knowledgebase in 2001. Service Cloud was a rebranding
and the announcement of plans for the integration of customer service with
the social Web through the support of Twitter, Google, and Facebook as customer
service interaction channels and through the support of communities like Facebook
as a knowledge source (“crowd-sourced knowledge”). Service Cloud
2 delivers Salesforce for Twitter and support for Salesforce Knowledge. Salesforce
for Twitter supports Twitter as a customer service interaction channel. Salesforce
Knowledge, as we mentioned just above, provides KM improved capabilities and
a superior alternative to Solutions, the basic KM capabilities delivered with
the Service Cloud. Support for communities, including Facebook, are planned
for inclusion in a future release, likely within the next several months.
The Salesforce Knowledge knowledgebase and its mechanisms for classifying
and navigating knowledge items use the InStranet technology. Knowledge authoring,
editing, and administrative tools; agent, customer, and end-user UIs; search;
and analytic functionality use (existing) Salesforce.com technologies, technologies
that support all of Salesforce.com’s products and applications. So
Salesforce Knowledge has the look and feel of Salesforce.com, not of InStranet
CCIL. For KM-based customer service, this initial release of Salesforce Knowledge
is not as functionally rich as the final release of InStranet CCIL. However,
we expect significant functional improvements pretty soon in planned future
releases.
Company Background
Salesforce.com is a publicly held (NYSE:CRM) supplier founded in 1999 and
based in San Francisco, CA. The firm calls itself the “enterprise cloud
computing company.” It was a pioneer and has become a leader in cloud
computing and in delivering, licensing, and supporting cloud computing-based
multi-tenant
deployments of its CRM applications and of customer applications built by
its customers and partners of its Force.com cloud computing platform. Salesforce
automation was the firm’s first application. Case management capabilities
came next, and the company’s first branded customer service solution,
Salesforce Service & Support, in 2004.
We’re not kidding when we say leader. Salesforce.com claims that it
currently has 67,900 customers, ranging from very small businesses to the largest
enterprises.
Its cloud computing-based multi-tenant deployment environment can support both
ends of the spectrum and everything in the middle equally well.
Salesforce.com offers per-user per-month subscription licenses for its applications
and its platform. With such a large and continuously growing customer base,
the firm has done an excellent job providing highly available, highly scalable
computing facilities for customer and partner deployments. The firm operates
three data centers, providing real time data mirroring across them and supporting
failover between any of them.
FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATING KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT-BASED CUSTOMER SERVICE PRODUCTS
Our framework for evaluating knowledge management-based customer service products
and services has these nine top-level evaluation criteria and sets of sub-criteria
for each top-level criterion.
•
Knowledge management
•
UI/Web content management
•
Search
•
Escalation
•
Analytic functionality
•
Environments
•
Product viability
•
Company viability
In the next sections of this report, we’ll briefly describe these criteria
and their sub-criteria in a little more detail. Then we’ll present our
evaluation of the KM-based customer service capabilities of Salesforce.com
Service Cloud against them followed by our analysis. Finally, we’ll summarize
our evaluations and analyses in the Customers.com Report Card for knowledge
management-based customer service.
Release 1 KM-based Customer Service
Before we get to the details of this report, we would like to qualify our
evaluation. The KM-based customer service capabilities of Salesforce Knowledge
are very
new. They’re a release 1 level of offering initially positioned for
the SMB market. In fact, we began our research on a pre-release version.
Not surprisingly, then, we found the capabilities to be limited, especially
so in knowledge management, search, and analytic functionality. While these
limitations influenced our evaluation and should influence your selection
decision, we believe that Salesforce.com is already addressing them in future
releases as its target market broadens to the enterprise—so much so
that we plan to update this evaluation in the timeframe of the Summer ’10
release.