Salesforce.com has announced the next chapter in the customer service revolution with Service Cloud 2. The Service Cloud, announced in January of this year, is the next generation solution for customer service - it exponentially increases the quality of service, while lowering the cost, by leveraging the expertise of the community. Since its introduction, the Service Cloud has led market momentum with 8,000 customers and received a number of industry accolades. The Service Cloud will also deliver entirely new product innovations for the customer service industry by introducing the world's first knowledge base designed for cloud computing - Salesforce Knowledge; an entirely new way to look at customer communities and discussion forums - Salesforce Answers; and Salesforce for Twitter, which allows companies to monitor and join the customer service conversations taking place on Twitter. The customer service application market represents a major opportunity for salesforce.com, which according to IDC will be worth $4.2 billion by 2012(1).

Service Cloud 2 - Customer Success and Market Momentum for the New Customer Service Standard

• Eight thousand companies, including Extra Space Storage, NJ TRANSIT and Plantronics, have standardized on the Service Cloud for their customer service operations - representing a 175% growth in business year over year.
• Companies using the Service Cloud have seen a 28% increase in customer satisfaction, 25% increase in call deflection, 30% increase in first call resolution, 37% rise in service and support productivity and a 26% increase in customer retention, according to a recent third party survey.
• Salesforce.com was placed in the leaders quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Support Contacts(2).
• Since January of 2009, the Service Cloud has won the 2009 TMCnet CRM Excellence Award, Network Products Guide 2009 Innovation Award, CRM Magazine Service Leader Rising Star Award, and the IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Award for Best IP Contact Center Service. The Service Cloud was also named to KMWorld's list of Top 100 Companies in knowledge management.
  

Salesforce Knowledge - The World's First Knowledge-as-a-Service

A year after salesforce.com acquired Instranet, salesforce.com will offer the world's first Knowledge-as-a-Service, the first ever multi-tenant knowledge base designed for cloud computing. The core Service Cloud knowledge base built on Force.com will deliver:

• Rapid Deployment: Companies will be able to deploy their knowledge base in a matter of days and extend the technology to mobile devices and public websites. Companies will be able to deploy Salesforce Knowledge without having to install and manage hardware or software.
• Immediate Results: Customer service agents will be able to find the right answer, the first time, ensuring that companies amaze and delight their customers with a truly integrated customer service experience.
• Google Accessible: Companies will be able to utilize the latest Force.com capabilities, including Force.com Sites, to expose knowledge articles out to the Internet so that customers can find information on the public Internet and through search engines such as Google.
• Simple Customizations: Users will be able to quickly and easily deploy changes and customizations to the knowledge base to fit a company's dynamic and evolving needs.
• Automated Upgrades: Product enhancements will be automatically released three times a year. Customers will no longer have to worry whether their applications will continue to work with other hardware and software after an upgrade.
• Secure and Trusted: Companies will be able to leverage all the benefits of the proven security, reliability and scalability of salesforce.com's trusted global infrastructure.