South African Tourism Uses Service Cloud 2 to Assist Soccer Tourists

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud-computing company, has revealed that South African Tourism, the official customer-service host for the world?s largest soccer tournament, is leveraging the power of Salesforce.com?s (News - Alert) Service Cloud 2 customer-service and support applications to provide location-based information to more than 300,000 international visitors expected to arrive in South Africa to watch the tournament. Visiting soccer fans may now use Twitter and Google (News - Alert) to find top accommodations, tourist attractions and services of interest in South Africa anytime, anywhere.
 
Alex Dayon, executive vice president of CRM, Salesforce.com, said that South African Tourism has embraced Cloud 2, the next cloud-computing paradigm, in order to help the hundreds of thousands of international visitors who may need important information in real time when they visit South Africa. The adoption of Service Cloud 2, he said, allows South African Tourism to deliver top-shelf customer service with modern social features to help these guests enjoy the best travel experience possible.
 
According to William Price, global manager of E-Marketing, South African Tourism, they wanted to create amazing experiences for their guests when they arrived. Since travel is a social experience like no other, the aim was to provide top customer service with relevant, easy-to-access information in real time to help these guests find the best of what there is to see and do in South Africa. Service Cloud 2, said Price, is able to allow South African Tourism to engage visitors in familiar ways and allows the organization to do so without requiring expensive and complex software.
 
Service Cloud 2 was chosen because of its ability to enable world-class customer service experiences. Its mobile and social features allow South African Tourism to extend these experiences to even more visitors via Twitter and Google. Visitors may now be able to contact South African Tourism to request advice regarding travel, restaurant suggestions and hospitality advice, among other things, by tweeting questions to @gotosouthafrica on Twitter. South African Tourism agents will instantly be able to craft responses via Service Cloud 2.
 
In addition, South African Tourism is also to deploy Salesforce Ideas and integrate them with an iPhone (News - Alert) app to enable it to gather visitor feedback in real-time, access important information about stadiums and games, add to the collective knowledge available, and crowdsource ideas to enhance the experiences it offers customers. This replaces a paper-based survey that was deployed in the past, and also offers South African Tourism a chance to identify and address issues instantly. Also, the company is now able to support common languages spoken such as English, Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and French.
 
Before the move to Service Cloud 2, South African Tourism managed customer service with an in-house Excel-based system, but realized the need to craft a contact center solution to better deal with the immense size of the event and meet modern travel and information needs. An enterprise solution was judged particularly attractive because it could easily be ramped up for the games and would be flexible enough to ramp down after the tournament without costly hardware, software and infrastructure maintenance which was a key factor in the decision to choose Service Cloud 2 over Oracle and Microsoft (News - Alert) offerings.
 
Read more on Salesforce.com in an article by Brendan B. Read to know how it has become an iconic firm by taking underexploited methods, most significantly cloud computing, marrying them to existing solutions, in its case CRM applications and successfully developing them to meet present and future business needs.

 

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