Published on the 04/09/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Salesforce has released software templates that allow organisations to build communities of customers, resellers or employers so they can interact and collaborate in the cloud including from mobiles and wearables…
The Salesforce1 Community Cloud solutions released last week are intended to speed the rate at which organisations can establish their own community-focused solutions.
According to Dan Bognar, vice president of sales engineering for Salesforce in Asia Pacific, although the company’s systems could always be used as the underpinnings for these sorts of community focused applications, organisations had to take a DIY approach. “We have taken that insight and packaged it up,” said Bognar. “We have prebuilt a series of applications so that the time to populate them is very fast.”
Salesforce is describing the solution as a sort of LinkedIn for corporates and clearly believes community clouds will open up new sales opportunities, citing IDC statistics which shows that spending on collaboration tools is forecasted to rise to $US3.5 billion by 2018.
Bognar said that most companies were likely to start with a customer cloud, then add other community clouds for resellers or employees.
One of the prepackaged Salesforce applications allows companies to set up customer communities, inviting customers to share information and ask questions of one another or the supplier, potentially taking pressure off the company call centre, while building loyalty. Two other applications have been launched that allow similar communities to be quickly established among reseller or partners – allowing for example marketing collateral to be shared, or sales leads distributed – or employees.
What’s not clear is how much it costs. While Salesforce says the global entry level pricing is $US500 a month, a local spokesman was not able to explain what that actually delivered to a customer.
Access to the communities can be via a browser, or a mobile app. At present iOS and Android devices are supported, but a Windows 8.1 version is slated for release in 2015.
The community clouds are connected to the underling Salesforce CRM, so that information can be captured for the CRM, or pushed out from that system. Besides providing mobile apps to link into the community cloud, Bognar said that the company was supporting wearable technologies which offered another way to push information out to a community.
