Salesforce.com Inc. is taking social media analytics beyond the marketing department with a new iteration of its Social Studio that promises to help professionals in other parts of the business gain a better understand of customers, too. The move follows barely a month after IBM teamed with Twitter Inc. to try to reach a similar goal with its Watson-powered analytics platform.

Social Studio merges some of the more strategic technologies Salesforce obtained through the numerous acquisitions it has made in recent years under a unified interface for exploring brand engagement across various online channels. The upgrade adds a listening engine to the mix that the company says taps into more than a billion websites ranging from major destinations such as Twitter to low-profile vertical communities.

Organizations can utilize new integration with the Salesforce Service Cloud to selectively route information about issues and complaints from those sources to customer care representatives, which makes it possible to nip a problem in the bud before it spirals out of control. Social Studio now also hooks up to the company’s lead management platform to make data about prospects available to sales at the same time as marketing.

According to Salesforce, that opens the door for organizations to be more responsive  to new opportunities, identify leads earlier and engage people more effectively using contextual information from around the web. Not leaving its core audience out of the loop, the company is also making it possible for marketers to take advantage of that data from within its Social.com service, which has been enhanced with capabilities for identifying to performing content published via Social Studio and double down on the key metrics involved to amplify that success.