On a recent trip to the East coast, I enjoyed a healthy dose of humanity while troubleshooting a home-repair issue.  We’d assembled an able-bodied team of my sister, brother-in-law, and me to fix a noisy, leaky radiator in my nephew’s room.  After numerous attempts to fix the problem ourselves and with building management, we turned to the web.  Much to our delight, there were not only ample resources out in the cyber community, but actual fix-it warriors who made it their mission to help us solve our problem quickly.  Within minutes of posting our issue, people from all over responded with suggestions on how to resolve it.  It was enlightening, and even inspiring, to get such an overwhelming response.

In today’s swiftly advancing technological world, more and more people are turning to the web for advice on everyday problems, from a leaky radiator to a computer error.  With the growing appeal and popularity of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, people have increasingly begun to use these sites as forums for discussing issues, rather than calling customer support lines for answers. Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud, which launched in January, enables users to find and manage customer service conversations in the cloud through blogs, forums, search engines, and social networking sites, and assemble that data in a knowledge base that can be used by customer service agents.  Furthermore, salesforce.com added a Twitter integration to the Service Cloud earlier this year, which allows you to search for relevant “tweets” on a particular topic, track responses, and respond through the company’s Twitter account, all within salesforce.com.  As someone who was recently enlightened by my fellow philanthropists on the web, I, for one, am very excited about the Service Cloud.  And here’s to no more leaky radiators too.

For more information on MK Partners and how we’re solving our clients’ business problems through salesforce.com, find us on Twitter and Facebook.