

Customer relationship management software giant Salesforce.com Inc. is giving small and medium-sized businesses new ways to communicate with their customers with its Salesforce Essentials product.
Salesforce Essentials is a more lightweight version of the company’s main product, designed especially for SMBs. The new capabilities include integrations with popular social media channels such as Facebook Messenger and Instagram, plus new chat and phone services.
“We all expect real-time instantaneous communication today — whether it’s with our family, friends or favorite brands,” Marie Rosecrans, senior vice president of Salesforce Essentials and SMB, said in a statement today. “Now Salesforce Essentials is giving small businesses the tools needed to manage customer communications across all those channels in one centralized spot.”
Salesforce Essentials already integrates with the main Facebook service, but what’s new is its support for Facebook Messenger. So when customers contact a company via Messenger, this will be sent directly to a relevant employee via Salesforce Essentials, allowing them to jump into the conversation quickly.
Salesforce Essentials is also adding support for Instagram and YouTube, allowing employees to quickly respond to new comments on their social media posts through the Salesforce platform.
The new channels are included in the current subscription fee for Salesforce Essentials. For additional users, the Facebook Messenger integration will cost $15 per user per month, while the Instagram and YouTube channels are priced at $25 per user per month.
Meanwhile, for companies that wish to set up a direct communications channel via their websites, Salesforce Essentials is adding a new chat widget option. This works in much the same way as the Messenger channel, routing conversations to available employees as soon as a chat is initiated by someone visiting a business’ website. The widget also provides employees with a view of the customer’s profile so they can see previous interactions and capitalize on possible sales opportunities. It’s also priced at $15 per user per month for additional users.
Finally Salesforce is adding a new tool called Lightning Dialer for Essentials, which it says is an “out-of-the-box call center solution” that provides customer profile information and automatically logs calls. Lightning Dialer for Essentials is currently available to users in the U.S. and Canada, priced at $2 per 100 minutes.
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