Salesforce.com and Cisco Partner to Deliver the New Face of Customer Service

Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 and Cisco’s Unified Communications combine to deliver a complete cloud computing solution for customer service

SAN FRANCISCO . – Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing company, and Cisco [NASDAQ: CSCO] today announced a combined solution to deliver a complete contact center in the cloud. The Cisco and salesforce.com Customer Interaction Cloud brings together salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Communications. The solution empowers small and medium sized companies to run their customer service completely in the cloud. Salesforce.com and Cisco share a vision about moving technology into the cloud and leveraging social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google to deliver services to their customers where they are already collaborating.
Cisco and Salesforce.com: Delivering the Contact Center in the Cloud

* The combined solution utilizes a connector to integrate salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Contact Center’s functionality. This allows customers to use the salesforce.com CRM application as their primary agent desktop while retaining full Cisco Unified Contact Center capabilities to operate a customer care or support center in any industry.

Through this offering, salesforce.com and Cisco are addressing a growing demand for cloud computing-based customer service solutions in the SMB market.
* With the Customer Interaction Cloud, agents may become more productive, and customers can use the cloud to achieve a more rapid time to value with no hardware, no software, no data centers and no telephony equipment to install.
* The solution was built to focus on organizations with 30 to 300 reps or agents and reflects both high market demand from prospects as well as requirements from existing customers.

The Future of Customer Service

* Cisco has led the way in expanding the scope of customer care with the introduction of ground-breaking products such as Cisco Unified Contact Center which delivers intelligent contact routing for all media, call treatment, and network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI) over an IP infrastructure. This helps enable companies to rapidly deploy a distributed contact center infrastructure.
* Organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud to answer their customer service questions. Today, 50 percent of all service conversations take place in the cloud. The Service Cloud 2 lets companies join the conversation with their customers, by providing a cost-effective solution that unites the contact center and the cloud to establish a new model for customer service. 8,000 companies have already selected the Service Cloud 2 for their customer service operations
* Built on the Force.com platform, the Service Cloud 2 transforms customer service through the power of cloud computing, and brings together industry leading cloud computing platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to capture every conversation and utilize every community expert in the cloud. By capturing these conversations, the Service Cloud 2 empowers companies to deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners regardless of location or device - ensuring that the quality of customer service can be consistent across every channel.

Enabling Transformation from Cisco Unified Contact Center to Customer Collaboration

* Cisco Collaboration Solutions improve and accelerate rich personal, team and customer experiences to help organizations drive innovation and improve decisions while building trust and accelerating team performance.
* Customer care has seen significant changes in the last 10 years—with new capabilities such as multi-channel contact and introduction of IP-based contact centers—and customer service organizations are now looking to take this to the next level by forging collaborative relationships with their customers and elevating their customer care. This transformation to Customer Collaboration recognizes that customer interactions can take place anywhere online, in social media, blogs, wikis, forums, and online search.
* Cisco’s Collaboration Solutions and Cisco Unified Contact Center help companies smoothly integrate inbound and outbound voice calls with Internet applications such as real-time chat, web collaboration, and e-mail. Organizations can support customer interactions regardless of which communications channel the customer has chosen.

Availability

* The solution is currently scheduled to be generally available in the first quarter of calendar year 2010.
* Salesforce.com and Cisco will each be offering the combined solution for sale. Details of pricing can be found on Cisco’s and salesforce.com’s respective websites.