My colleague Bob Warfield asked me a great question last week, my second as head of Marketing at Helpstream. He asked, “Do you feel like the luckiest guy on the planet today?”. What Bob was referring to was the announcement by Salesforce.com of their new Service Cloud offering. Bob, who is familiar to many of you, has written a terrific piece on this topic in his SmoothSpan blog that is well worth reading.

The Salesforce.com Services Cloud offering essentially allows companies to capture their customers’ service-related interactions on the web, via Facebook or Google, and funnel them through to their agents via the Salesforce.com customer support application. What makes me excited as the new marketing executive here, is that one of the largest enterprise software “brands in the cloud” has essentially validated what Helpstream has been saying for sometime now – that customers not only would prefer to self serve via web-based communities, they are in fact already doing so. So from my perspective, this news is not only good for the market and for us, it’s tremendously good for customers as it will accelerate the implementation and adoption of solutions that better enable community-based customer service.

One of the historical raps on community/web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 solutions has been the need for a compelling use case and measurable ROI. We have long held, and Saleforce now agrees, that customer service is a very viable enterprise application of community. The more that companies enable their customers to self-serve via communities, the more efficient and effective companies can be in delivering customer support. No one will argue today the need for cost savings and efficiencies. Using Helpstream, companies today can reduce customer service costs by 30% while at the same time driving improved customer service levels and higher customer retention. Feel like a win:win in a tough economy? It does to me.

It will interesting to track the market interest this announcement generates over the coming year and how Salesforce and others will flush out their offerings. With over 130 customers and nearly 300,000 users, Helpstream understands that companies want a holistic solution, one that tightly integrates community with best practice customer service processes. If the primary benefit of community-based customer service is to enable customers to solve problems themselves, before engaging an agent, Saleforce and others will need to do more than simply capture customer interactions on the web and associate them with a customer record. Companies will not want solutions that increase the data loads on their agents, rather they will want solutions that allow them to monitor activities in their community, leverage solutions the community develops organically, and engage agents when the community can’t otherwise create or find the solutions it needs.

Oh, and I believe that companies will want to integrate community-based support solutions with systems they have already deployed, which is why we have a strong partnership with Oracle today and are developing integrations with existing Salesforce customers as well.

So to answer Bob’s question, “I indeed feel like a very lucky guy”, and I am excited to be an active participant in the development of this market.