Salesforce goes mobile for Service Cloud

Salesforce.com hopes the growing dominance of mobile devices will prompt more companies to use its Service Cloud product, after launching a free mobile add-on for customer service.

The new offering, which is HTML5-based, includes mobile co-browsing to enable salespeople to help consumers make purchases on their mobile, as well as in-application links to mobile chat and mobile communities for customer service.

“Mobile is such a pervasive technology that I think it will drive [our] customers to rethink how they’re delivering customer service,” Salesforce director of solutions marketing Michael Peachey told iTnews.

The CRM and cloud specialist has slightly adjusted its catchcry of “mobile, social, local” to “social, geo-aware and touch” as it steps up its focus on mobile customer service.

“Legacy customer service systems are simply not built for this new mobile era,” Peachey said.

Today’s announcement is what Salesforce.com said would be the first of many mobile-related innovations it planned to launch during the year.

“Salesforce.com is doubling down on mobile,” said Salesforce.com Service Cloud GM Alex Bard.

Peachey cited the Commonwealth Bank as one company that was doing “incredible things” to improve the customer experience.

CommBank has used Salesforce.com's cloud services for internal and external social networking, marketing, and its December 2011 IdeaBank campaign.

Chief information officer Michael Harte last year decried public cloud concerns as "garbage", revealing that it had shifted a dozen applications onto Amazon Web Services.

However yesterday CommBank's manager of information systems and frontline analytics, David Tannis, said his company wasn't in the business of handing over customer information to a cloud storage vendor.

“We like our data managed by the company, for the customers and kept here in Australia,” Tannis told the audience at a Gartner conference.

Salesforce currently hosts data in the US, Singapore and Japan.

A spokesperson for Salesforce today told iTnews the company remained committed to building a data centre in Australia, but it didn’t yet have a date or timeline for it.