Salesforce.com expands call center support

IDG News Service - Hosted CRM evangelist Salesforce.com Inc. began a new branding campaign this week to draw attention to its customer service support functionality, launching a new Web site at Supportforce.com and announcing a batch of partnerships with top call center infrastructure vendors.
Supportforce.com highlights San Francisco-based Salesforce.com's existing call center integration and features, rather than adding major new functionality. The most significant product advancement associated with the campaign is the company's newly released Telephony API tool kit, which allows its sales automation software to integrate with products from partners, including Avaya Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Alcatel SA, Aspect Communications Corp. and Genesys SA.
The goal is to enable customers to connect software for autodialing, call routing and other functions with Salesforce.com's repository of customer contact and history information.
Patient Care Inc. CIO Marty Howard selected Salesforce.com last year to power a call center centralization project at his home health care agency. The West Orange, N.J., company in May opened a central facility for fielding customer calls from its 25 branches. Howard said he considered CRM systems from vendors such as Siebel Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Onyx Software Corp. but went with Salesforce.com because of the low capital investment required.
He then picked hosted call center White Pajama Inc. and data integrator Above All Software Inc., both Salesforce.com partners, to round out the system.
"It turns out we were a Supportforce customer before I knew what that was," Howard said. He said he's pleased with how the centralized contact center system is working. "I'm very happy, and it's unusual for me to be very happy with a vendor," he added.
Howard declined to comment on Patient Care's budget for the center but said he's spending less on the hosted software's monthly subscription costs than he would have on maintenance alone for a traditional, on-premise system. He's also spending less on administration. Patient Care has about 180 users on its Salesforce.com-based system and spends less than four IT hours per week working on the system.
In contrast, the company spends 55 IT hours weekly maintaining homegrown operations software supporting a similar number of users, Howard said.
Supportforce.com is available now and is included in Salesforce.com's core product suite, which starts at $65 per user, per month.