For the fourth consecutive year, Salesforce is a Leader in the Gartner CRM Customer Engagement Center Magic Quadrant. Gartner has positioned salesforce.com highest for ability to execute and furthest for completeness of vision in the Leaders quadrant. Thanks to all of our great customers for helping show the world how the Salesforce1 Platform and Service Cloud can deliver amazing customer support.

Until 2013, Gartner referred to the Customer Engagement Center as “Customer Service Contact Centers.”¹  Gartner realized a shift in the market, since the world is more mobile and social and in doing so, renamed the magic quadrant. 

What is the Customer Engagement Center? Gartner defines the Customer Engagement Center as a set of applications and technologies that provide customer service and support regardless of the channel.  The goal of the Customer Engagement Center is to offer service and support across the channels as well as pro-active customer service.

Recently, I attended the Gartner360 Summit in Orlando to learn about the future of CRM. Leigh McMullen, Managing Vice President, Office of the CIO Research at Gartner, during the keynote on day one said, “Customer Service is hard.”²  However, if we do it right, customer service is a differentiator. Gartner touched upon a few ways to stay ahead of your competitors by offering mobile customer service, social customer service, and connected devices. Here’s how the Service Cloud is helping customers get ahead.

1.  Mobile Customer Service

According to Gartner, at least 60% of the Internet of users will opt for mobile customer service applications as their first option by 2015.³

Salesforce is reaching into the future and providing customers with mobile app support with the launch of Salesforce1 Service Cloud SOS. Service SOS, similar to the Amazon Kindle Mayday button, is the latest breakthrough innovation for mobile customer service.  With new live video support and on-screen guided assistance, companies will be able to deliver instant and personalized customer service within any mobile app. Allowing you to support every customer anytime, anywhere. Find out more on the Salesforce1 Service Cloud SOS announcement.

2.  Social Customer Service

Hung Le Hong, Gartner Vice President and Fellow, stated, “Every interaction with an individual will also be an interaction with an individual’s social graph.”⁴  He stressed the need for organizations to track and influence on social networks.

Salesforce understands the importance of listening and engaging in social conversations. Service Cloud and Radian6 enables companies to capture conversations across 650M social media sources, allowing you to prioritize and assign tweets or Facebook messages to the right people at the right time.

3. Connected Devices

Gartner stated, ongoing customer engagement would be digitally built into certain products, i.e. receive a tweet when your child’s diaper needs a change.⁵

The future is now and customers are waiting for more connected devices. We’ve all heard about the connected toothbrush or car. How about the connected solar panel? Astrum Solar, whose mission is to spread solar power to the rooftops of America, is connecting solar panels to Salesforce. This integration allows them to immediately detect any changes impacting the guaranteed power generation levels they provide to their customers and dispatch a field service engineer to address the issue, even before their customers detect a problem. Why do they like connected devices? Because they allow them to meet an emerging consumer expectation of proactive customer service.  This capability helps them further differentiate Astrum Solar from their competitors.

To read the complete, complimentary Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Centers, download the report here.

The above Magic Quadrant graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from salesforce.com.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.