NETTING IT OUT

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.

Creating Custom Fields in Article Types

© 2009 salesforce.com, inc.

Illustration. In this Illustration, we show the workspace for creating custom fields in Article Types.

SERVICE CLOUD 2

Product Overview

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...