Salesforce.com, the company determined to move organisations large and small to an on-demand, "no software" approach to customer relationship management (CRM), is now targeting call centres and help desks as well.
A new hosted service called Supportforce.com will manage customer service and support functions using the same approach as the CRM service - browser-based access to customer information, managed through Salesforce.com's servers.
"We're basically doing what we've done for salesforce automation, but for customer service and support," says Salesforce.com chief executive Mr Marc Benioff.
Supportforce.com, which sees Salesforce.com partnering with industry stalwarts such as Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel, Genesys and Aspect Communications, is the first new service from Salesforce.com since its high-profile, early summer initial public offering.
Salesforce.com has been one of the true dotcom success stories, using a business model many initially scoffed at - ASP, or application service provision. With ASP, clients can use applications held elsewhere, typically paying a flat rate (in the case of Salesforce.com, €70 monthly) to access the application and their own company data via a Web browser.
But ASP-model businesses hadn't been doing particularly well when Salesforce.com came on the scene five years ago. Going against the existing, rather moribund ASP trend, Salesforce.com introduced low-cost access in what had been a high-cost market, and started to snap up customers from big software company competitors such as Siebel, Oracle, SAP and PeopleSoft.
Mr Benioff describes the traditional route of buying software, then hardware, then networking equipment, then hiring systems integrators to link it all together, as being like buying car parts from separate places then hiring someone to put them all together. Going with Salesforce.com, he says, is opting to buy the whole car.
But many firms are still too fearful of not having all those parts under their own roof, managed in house, in the traditional manner. However, Salesforce.com has proven it can prise clients from the older approach, including big enterprise customers. Although it started with the notion of going after the small to medium-sized company market with a modestly priced service, Salesforce.com added in an enterprise version, at about twice the cost of the regular suite.
The company now has about 12,000 customers, with 185,000 paying subscribers. Mr Benioff predicts half the users of Supportforce.com will be drawn from users of the existing salesforce automation offering, with the remainder coming in as new clients interested specifically in the new suite.
With Supportforce.com, Mr Benioff hopes his company will capitalise on the growing trend towards outsourcing call centres and other customer service divisions. An employee can be anywhere, working from home, or in another country - with a PC, laptop or device such as a Blackberry, handheld computer, or a voiceover IP phone - and customer information can be delivered directly to the employee, he says.
The company will once again be going up against software vendors such as Oracle, Siebel and SAP with its new offering. "There are solutions that do customer service automation, but they haven't really worked for a lot of customers," he says.
The problems are typically software problems, which is why he hopes the Salesforce mantra, "the death of software", will continue to lure new customers in.
