Dive Brief:
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Cloud-based customer service software maker Samanage announced it received a $20 million investment, half of which came from Salesforce, according to a press release. Other investors included Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Ventures, Marker LLC, and Vintage Investment Partners.
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The company also announced the launch of its enterprise product in the Salesforce AppExchange. The Samanage app enables users to manage service interactions with employees, customers and field service agents in Salesforce's Service Cloud.
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Samanage CEO and founder Doron Gordon said working with Salesforce will accelerate his company's customer service software to enterprise customers and allow them to pursue larger customers.
Dive Insight:
Hitching to more established players like Salesforce can help companies like Samanage scale more quickly than they can on their own. The fact that Salesforce is investing in Samanage is an additional vote of confidence that the two products will work together well and enable enterprise customers to achieve more.
Salesforce appears to have a renewed interest in customer service functionality. In December, Salesforce launched LiveMessage to help automate customer service activities. LiveMessage supports conversations through SMS/MMS and Facebook Messenger, thereby allowing service reps to manage messaging traffic just like any other customer interaction in Service Cloud. The concept is to improve the customer experience by meeting customers where they are, while enabling agents to respond more easily, no matter how they are contacted by the customer.
