Facebook recently acquired Kustomer, an innovative CRM provider founded by Salesforce alumni, in what could be become an interesting counterpoint to Salesforce.com’s purchase of Slack. Salesforce has long viewed strong collaboration features as essential elements in their various Sales and Service Cloud products. Slack represents an enterprise-class solution for business and development users necessary to further Salesforce Platform growth. Slack combined with an expected relaunch of the Heroku-AWS product signifies SFDC’s expanding “Developer Cloud” product strategy.
Facebook likewise has long desired to provide a platform capability to expand beyond their social media roots. Strategically, Kustomer, in the words of Facebook, “brings customer conversations from various channels together into a single-screen view. It helps businesses automate repetitive tasks so their agents can maximize the time and quality of interactions with customers.” Kustomer is integrated with Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp to deliver a robust customer 360 experience.
It will be interesting to see how Facebook and Salesforce redefine traditional customer relationship management into a a comprehensive social selling experience.