Salesforce moves bigger into customer service for apps

Your apps are about to become Salesforced.

Today, the customer-handling giant announced a private beta of Service for Apps, a new lineup of functionality out of its Service Cloud. It’s also making its mobile SOS service — an Amazon Mayday-like button for calling up a one-way video stream of a live customer service agent — generally available.

SOS had been in a pilot beta since April of last year. A Desk.com version for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is also moving into a private beta. Service for Apps is available only for iOS apps during this phase, which the company said will last six to nine months. Service Cloud’s mobile web customer service launched in early 2013.

Marketing data provider Comscore has found that 88 percent of users’ mobile time is spent in apps. Industry research firm Gartner says that 20 to 40 percent of customer interaction with a brand takes place via mobile on average, although many companies are finding that most of their customer activity is mobile-based.

And few — under five percent — of mobile-based, customer service issues are simply resolvable, single questions.

The feedback to the SOS beta phase bears that out, SVP of product marketing for Service Cloud Sarah Patterson told me, as clients reported they wanted more functionality.

She cited a recent personal experience when she tried to use an unnamed airline’s app to reschedule a canceled flight as she sat in the airport. But the app was poorly designed, without the functionality to reschedule flights and even without a tap-to-call function. She had to write down the customer service phone number she found in the app.

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Salesforce’s beta version includes instant messaging with an agent inside the app, with context provided to the agent, such as which game level a user is having trouble with.

There’s a tap-to-call that similarly includes the surrounding context, like the canceled flight info. A knowledge base offers access to articles and FAQs inside the app and the ability to convert the best crowdsourced answers into articles.

Users can create and track their own cases, complete with automatic location info and the ability to add photos snapped with their phone’s camera. Salesforce gave the example of a citizen using a city’s 311 app to send a picture and a location of a street pothole in order to generate a case.

The SOS live video stream supports screen-sharing, and can be used by, say, a field service tech to talk to an expert back in the office.

Although Amazon got a head start on the idea of a live video stream with an agent, Patterson noted that Salesforce’s new functionality will offer the only SDK for embedding a live video agent into any app.

To date, she said, most customer service efforts in apps have been custom-built or limited.

“We haven’t seen companies on the market with this range,” she said. “No one has built [this kind of] solution to hook into their CRM, with this breadth.” Service for Apps draws on, and adds to, your profile in an accompany CRM, which can be Salesforce’s or someone else’s.

Since app design is fairly non-standardized and there is a large inventory of confusing or badly designed apps, a key question is whether opening up new channels of customer service essentially opens a world of hurt for contact centers.

For instance, Patterson couldn’t reschedule her canceled flight through the app, which meant a customer service needed to do that. She pointed out that the need isn’t new, even if it will be now directed toward agents.

“If a customer has a question, they have a question,” Patterson noted.

Yet self-service web sites seem to have evolved more or less as part of online access to customer service. Apps, each with custom designs, have catching up to do until they reach a similar self-service level. But, if apps follow the path of sites, the ones with the best customer experience win.

In the meantime, get ready, contact centers.