Salesforce for Twitter

We’re excited about Salesforce for Twitter. We first saw it at Dreamforce a few months ago and recently spent some time using the product.

The product has a lot of potential for helping companies better understand their Twitter community and use Twitter to improve customer service while reducing customer service costs.

Here are some of our observations of Salesforce for Twitter:

Some of the standard reports and dashboards Salesforce for Twitter provides are:
– Tweet volume trend
– Tweet volume by type
– Tweets by Search Term
– Top Negative Customer Tweets (based on Tweet sentiment)
– Top Customer Tweeters

Tracking Tweet sentiment is time consuming: To track sentiment requires that someone look at every Tweet and categorieze it as positive, thumbs up, or negative, thumbs down, or neutral. This is done by clicking a button and will take some time if going through hundreds of tweets.

Reports and work flow automation can be leverage by creating searches based on keywords in a Tweet, for example, show me all Tweets last month in which someone tweeted that my company was “great,” or that said my product “does not work.”

This reporting capability is useful for helping to maintain your online reputation and responding quickly to dissatisfied customers.

Customers are becoming more likely to complain about bad service on Twitter where the power of their complaint is greatly magnified over leaving a phone call. Companies like Dell and Comcast have dedicated customer service people who respond to Tweets all day.

Recently I resolved an issue I had with Dell, that had been festering for more than two years, by Tweeting what the issue was and making very clear I was dissististfied with Dell’s service. Within a few weeks I had the issue resolved. What could not be resolved via email and phone calls over two years was solved by a few Tweets.

Tweets can be converted into Cases, so your account managers or customer service people can address the concern and progress can be tracked, along with Tweet history. Tweets can be categorized to help you analyze the root cause of an issue so you can take action to prevent more negative tweets in the future.

Tweets can be moved into the Knowledge Base, so you can leverage your Twitter community to better educate your customers and provide content that can be used to help customers solve their own problems. Capture knowledge from Tweets and move it to a self-service web portal and you have a system where customers help other customers.

Tweets can be added to a Campaign.

Tweets can be turned into Contacts or Leads.

Tweets can be responded to by sending a Tweet within Salesforce which then becomes part of that conversation’s activity history.

Twitter for Salesforce is free through the App Exchange and requires you be on Salesforce Enterprise Edition or above.

Want to receive our list of more than 50 Salesforce best practices? Sign up here.

StarrForce is a Salesforce.com registered consulting partner who provides Salesforce support and implementation services to maximize your Salesforce investment.