South African Tourism Catapults Customer Service to Cloud 2 for World’s Largest Sporting Event with Salesforce.com

World’s largest soccer tournament hospitality host South African Tourism deploys Service Cloud 2 to deliver amazing customer service to more than 300,000 international visitors

Visiting soccer fans can now use Google and Twitter for location-based customer service and find the best services, accommodations, and attractions anytime, anywhere

SAN FRANCISCO, June 9, 2010 – Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM] the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced that South African Tourism, the official customer service host for the world’s largest soccer tournament held every four years, has made social customer service available to more than 300,000 visitors from around the world with Service Cloud 2, salesforce.com’s customer service and support applications. Service Cloud 2 enables South African Tourism to provide real-time, location-based information on the hottest services, accommodations and attractions surrounding the world’s biggest sporting event of the year.

Comments on the News
• "While it hosts the world’s biggest sporting event of the year, hundreds of thousands of visitors from six continents will descend upon South Africa with millions of questions about where to stay, where to eat, what to do and what to see," said Alex Dayon, executive vice president of CRM, salesforce.com. "South African Tourism has embraced the next cloud computing paradigm, Cloud 2, to deliver today’s world-class customer service with modern social features to global visitors in a way that is familiar and intuitive to them so that they can have the best travel experience possible while in South Africa."
• "When the world comes here for the games, we want to create amazing, life-changing experiences," said William Price, global manager of E-Marketing, South African Tourism. "With travel being a social experience unlike anything else, we want to provide amazing customer service with relevant, real-time, and easy-to-access information that helps people find the best there is to see and do in South Africa. Service Cloud 2 lets us not only leverage social media platforms to engage visitors in a way that is familiar to them, but also quickly reorients our organization and operations to meet that opportunity without the cost and complexity of software."

Hosting World’s Largest Sporting Event Requires Modern Customer Service
• Prior to the Service Cloud 2, South African Tourism managed customer service using an in-house system based on Excel. South African Tourism recognized that it needed a contact center solution to support the immense scale of the event and meet the modern travel needs of visitors.
• Enterprise cloud computing was particularly attractive to South African Tourism because it would enable the organization to rapidly ramp up for the games and provide the flexibility needed to ramp down after the tournament without the ongoing burden of costly software, hardware and infrastructure maintenance, a key factor in its decision to deploy the Service Cloud 2 over offerings from Microsoft and Oracle.

With Service Cloud 2, Customer Service Goes Social at World’s Largest Sporting Event
• South African Tourism chose Service Cloud 2 for its ability to enable the world-class customer service experience international visitors expect. With the Service Cloud 2’s social and mobile features, South African Tourism can extend this experience to more visitors through popular consumer sites like Google and Twitter. For example, visitors can contact South African Tourism for local restaurant suggestions, hospitality advice and expert travel tips by tweeting their questions to @gotosouthafrica on Twitter and a South African Tourism agent will instantly see their questions and be able to respond to them within the Service Cloud 2.
• South African Tourism is also deploying Salesforce Ideas so it can gather visitor feedback on their stay in real time and crowd-source ideas for enhanced customer experiences. Salesforce Ideas replaces a paper-based survey, which South African Tourism used to audit the overall experience for visitors; however, now, with the social features of Service Cloud 2, South African Tourism can identify and address issues as they are reported vs. learning about them in a historical analysis.
• South African Tourism is integrating Salesforce Ideas with an iPhone app so visitors can quickly access pertinent information about games and stadiums and add to the collective community of knowledge available in the cloud. In addition, South African Tourism can now support languages most commonly spoken by visitors, including Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
• As a result, South Africa’s visitors from 32 nations who are expected to fill 120,000 hotel beds and eat hundreds of thousands of meals over the course of the games can now connect with the customer service host anytime and anywhere to find answers to questions such as "Where’s the best place to grab a late meal near Soccer City?" in Johannesburg or "Where’s the best nighttime hot spot near Ellis Park?" via Google and Twitter and on smart phones.

About Service Cloud 2
Now that social networking usage has surpassed e-mail as the preferred way to communicate, customers expect the same real-time information from organizations that they get via Facebook, Google and Twitter. The Service Cloud 2 is the next-generation platform for amazing customer service that empowers organizations to meet that opportunity. With the Service Cloud 2, organizations can deliver real-time, location-based customer service loaded with the social features made popular by consumer networking sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter to create modern customer contact centers with the scale, reliability and proven case resolution processes of traditional contact centers.

Additional Resources
• South African Tourism and Service Cloud 2 experience: http://www.salesforce.com/crm/customer-service-support/service-cloud-sat-story.jsp
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About South African Tourism
South African Tourism is the National Tourism Authority of South Africa, tasked with promoting South Africa globally as a leisure and business tourism destination.