New Way to Reach Customers: Twitter

Salesforce Inc. said Monday it will offer a customer-relationship management application for Twitter, the so-called micro-blogging service.

The new application is aimed at helping companies find and help customers who are going to Twitter members to solve product problems rather than call customer service.

Comcast Corp. and Dell Inc. have already signed up for the Twitter to Service Cloud, Salesforce said.

The software lets customer-service agents search for Twitter postings, called tweets, on their products and companies, look through a database for answers and keep track of the "conversation level" on a certain topic or product. It will cost $995 a month for five agents and five business partners, and support for 250 customers.

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang speculated on Monday that customer-relationship management could be a business model adopted by San Francisco-based Twitter Inc.

"This has tremendous opportunities for Twitter should they create their own brand management system that they can resell to the world's companies to monitor, alert, track, prioritize, triage, assign, followup, and report on the interactions with brands," he wrote on his blog Monday.

by BizJournals.com

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