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Salesforce announced Wednesday that Salesforce Essentials will be improved with new ways for companies to communicate directly with their customers. The CRM platform for SMEs will support integrations with social media channels and new chat and call services.

We all expect real-time and immediate communication to be possible with our family, friends or favorite brands today, says Marie Rosecrans, SVP for Salesforce Essentials and SMB, in a statement. Now, Salesforce Essentials gives small businesses the tools they need to manage customer communications across all those channels in one central place.

In social media, Salesforce will extend its existing link with Facebook pages and Twitter with links to Messenger, Instagram and YouTube. So if a customer sends a message via Messenger, the message can be linked via Salesforce Essentials to an employee who can then have a live conversation with the customer. For Youtube and Instagram, employees receive notifications via Essentials and can respond to them via the platform.

The Instagram and YouTube channels are now available for $25 per user, per month. The Facebook Messenger feature is also available, with one license included and $15 per additional license per user, also per month.

Chatting and calling

Essentials now also allows SMEs to add a Salesforce chat widget to their website. This allows conversations with customers to be directed to available employees. An employee can manage multiple different chat calls from Salesforce. The new position also gives the employee a complete overview of the customer profile, including information such as previous interactions and open sales opportunities. This chat feature is now available, and uses the same pricing model as the Messenger feature.

In addition, Salesforce introduces a feature for SME employees to call with Lightning Dialer for Essentials, a turnkey call center solution built right into Essentials. Lightning Dialer displays the customer’s profile and account information, and automatically logs calls. Lightning Dialer for Essentials is only available in the US and Canada for $2 per 100 minutes. Whether this function will also be available outside North America is not known.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.