Tag: service one home warranty

Salesforce Connects the Social Web to Customer Service – The Connected Web

Salesforce.com is an innovative leader in the CRM space. A while ago, an enterprising employee of Salesforce created Faceforce, Now renamed as Face Connector for Facebook. Salesforce.com has jumped on this linkage and has expanded it to now include a customer service aspect via the social network.

This article below explains this more:

Salesforce.com Connects the Social Web to Customer Service

By Phil Wainewright on January 15, 2009 4:45 PM 0 0 Vote 0 Votes

Salesforce.com today harnessed the social web (or at least, the segment of it that hangs out on FaceBook) to help corporations improve their customer service.

The Service Cloud, announced today and immediately available for use, brings Salesforce.com's Force.com application platform and its links into FaceBook together with the knowledgebase technology it acquired when it bought customer support vendor Instranet last year.

Businesses these day are increasingly becoming aware that their customers often take a self-help approach to customer service, seeking advice and help from third-party community sites or from the social networks, such as FaceBook, where they keep in touch with their friends online. That can mean that customers are exchanging complaints, compiling wishlists or finding solutions to problems without the company even being aware.

via Salesforce.com Connects the Social Web to Customer Service – The Connected Web.

ERP as a Service

Software as a Service (SAAS) is growing significantly in the CRM space, but it has yet to take off in the ERP market. 

Gartner predicts that at least one-third of business application software spending will be on service subscriptions rather than on product licenses by 2012. The analyst firm also predicts that by 2010, 30% of new software purchases in the Asia-Pacific will be delivered via an application utility or Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

The following article looks at ERP as a Service (SaaS applied to ERP) and weighs the two sides of the coin.  (Note: the article is from India, so it has a South Asia slant to it, but it is still very informative)

http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20080721/market02.shtml

Tags: ERP, ERP as a Service, SAAS

Software as a Service

From ManagingAutomation.com:

One of the most frustrating aspects of today’s IT-dependent manufacturing environment is the challenge of deploying and maintaining enterprise applications ranging from enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) to customer relationship management (CRM) software. A significant proportion of new application deployments fail to achieve their original objectives, and even successful deployments can often cost far more to maintain than expected.

Depending on the complexity of the deployment, enterprise applications can take months or even years to implement, and they can consume the majority of the IT staff’s time just to keep them up and running. And, most major upgrades typically require additional investments in new servers, storage and other IT infrastructure upgrades.

Manufacturers trying to keep pace with escalating competition can no longer afford the extended lag-time of lengthy application deployment cycles. They can also ill-afford the ongoing infrastructure and staff costs to simply maintain their existing applications.

These frustrations have made the manufacturing industry ripe for a new approach to applications called Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Read More about software as a Service