Salesforce launches Twitter CRM application

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The application, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, which today revealed it was bringing forward plans to charge commercial users, is designed to help companies find customers who are going to the Twitter community to solve product problems rather than calling customer service.

Salesforce said that Comcast and Dell have already signed up for CRM for Twitter.

With the software, clients can search for tweets on their products and companies, look through a database for answers and keep track of the "conversation level" on a certain topic or product.

It costs $995 (£686) a month for five agents and five business partners, and support for 250 customers.

Salesforce introduced this social networking approach to customer service with the launch of its Service Cloud in January. It renamed its customer-service application line to include not just call centres, e-mail, and chat, but also an application to let companies find and help their customers with product issues on Facebook.

Alex Dayon, Salesforce CRM's vice president of customer service and support, said that with the abundance of social-media tools on the web, people are turning to "crowdsourced" help with customer service issues.