In the spirit of CRM systems acting as unified platforms for sales, marketing, customer service and now social media, Helpstream announced last week that they are adding marketing automation integrability to their social CRM offering. Helpstream’s CEO, Bob Warfield, says that active customer service communities pave the way for a focus on marketing, and using social media streams helps sales teams assess the customer voice and identify leads.
Helpstream’s latest release provides productized integrations with marketing automation solutions from Marketo, Infusionsoft, and others; companies can integrate Helpstream CRM with any marketing automation provider. The social marketing includes: “overhead” cloud feeds enabling users to integrate any social network, Twiter monitoring, and a “mention this” function that pre-sets Twitter responses.
Tech pundit and president of The 56 Group, Paul Greenberg, thinks this is a smart offering, noting that in an age where SaaS vendors are emphasizing customer service in the cloud, Helpstream is augmenting their line by providing a workflow engine in addition to their community platform. In many ways, this puts Helpstream in direct competition with bigger CRM providers like Salesforce.com, Oracle, and of course Lithium, who’ve already added social CRM capabilities.
[Photo courtesy of transformingbusiness.]