Salesforce 'reimagines' its Sales and Service Clouds with new apps

Salesforce is reinventing two of its clouds.

The company announced today the release of Sales Cloud1 and Service Cloud1. Both are groups of new mobile apps, based on the existing Sales and Service Clouds, that push forward the company’s goal of optimizing itself for the age of social, mobile and cloud.

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The idea, Sales Cloud SVP of product marketing Mark Woolen told VentureBeat, is to “reimagine” the Clouds as “smarter, faster and connected” collections of services for smartphones and tablets.

Sales Cloud1 features several new apps — Today, Tasks, Notes, Events, and Sales Path. “We’ve taken what used to be a [data] field, and split it into an app,” Woolen said.

Today offers top tasks, dashboards, scheduled meetings, and weather, among other data intended to prep a sales rep for the next prospect meeting. Tasks, drawing on customer records in Salesforce, can become an action item with a swipe.

Notes automatically connects to contacts or accounts when a user jots down those names, and those notes can then also turn into tasks on a To Do list. Events tracks meetings, and Sales Path is dedicated to tracking a deal through its stages — including recommendations for sharing a presentation or looping in an identified expert.

Salesforce also announced a new partnership with Thomson Reuters, which will provide additional business data to a mobile sales rep as background for a meeting.

The reinvented Service Cloud1 includes SOS for Apps, a customer service mobile app — it’s now in a pilot phase — that client companies can add to their own apps.

Like Amazon’s Mayday button on its Fire smartphone, SOS’s customer service features include a one-click live video connection to a help desk.

The newly revised Agent Console, including a tablet-optimized version, pushes content that the system considers relevant to the issue at hand. It can also overlay a live depiction of what the end-customer is seeing in the SOS app on a smartphone or tablet.

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Service Cloud1 also has “instant service communities,” templates that Salesforce’s Community Cloud powers and which can become self-service, on-demand communities for specific customer needs.

For small-and-medium-sized businesses, Salesforce is also announcing its Desk1 customer service app, an optimized Salesforce-synced app from the company’s existing Desk.com offering.