CRM rush to Twitter predicted

Peter Dinham
Friday, 03 April 2009 09:25

IT Industry - Market

Social network Twitter is growing in leaps and bounds with thousands of new tweeters singing up every day, and now many large businesses have jumped on the social networking bandwagon, reportedly starting to use Twitter as a key tool in their customer service inventory.

According to industry analysts, Datamonitor, the recently announced addition of Twitter to the Saleasforce.com service cloud is likely to be followed in rapid succession by other customer relationship management (CRM) vendors needing to address increasing demands for social networking.

Datamonitor says Salesforce.com is the first to offer integration with social networking websites, providing integration with customer data to subscribers from the summer.  The Twitter announcement adds to Salesforce’s existing integration with Google and Facebook.

Aphrodite Brinsmead, customer interaction technologies analyst at Datamonitor, says many large brands have begun to use Twitter as a customer service tool, such as Bank of America, Comcast, JetBlue, and Zappos.

“These companies are offering customers advice in response to queries and providing information about new products and services. This allows companies to make information more readily available and, additionally, customers are sharing advice and information among themselves.
 
“Using Salesforce.com, these brands will be able to set up alerts when someone mentions the company name in order to track sentiments. Salesforce.com will offer analytics capabilities for customers to find trends and data patterns.”

Brinsmead says the solution connects social networking with client interaction processes, utilising forums and search engines for customer feedback, with the integration with Twitter available from summer 2009, and allowing automated searches of Twitter content to be pulled into Salesforce CRM.
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