A new report released this week by leading global business consulting firm Bluewolf, and sponsored by NewVoiceMedia, reveals that organisations are increasingly investing in omni-channel cloud customer contact solutions across the service industry.

Further reinforcing the importance of integrated omni-channel communications solutions for elevating the customer experience, Bluewolf’s ‘The State of Salesforce’ report finds that 64 percent of companies will have three or more contact channels integrated with Salesforce Service Cloud in the next year. Email remains the predominant integration (60% currently integrated, 19% plan to integrate) but telephony is quickly catching up with nearly half (44%) of businesses benefiting from integrated voice and an additional 42 percent planning to integrate the channel within the next year. Just 17 percent of businesses currently have integrated social media, yet an additional 36 percent plan to within the next year.

“Customers expect companies to engage with them on the channel of their choosing. Leading companies are rapidly innovating their service organisations to meet this customer expectation”, said Bob Furniss, Customer Care Practice Director at Bluewolf. “’The State of Salesforce’ report found that 64 percent of companies will have three or more customer service channels integrated with Salesforce within the next year. Solution providers like NewVoiceMedia give enterprises a competitive edge by integrating and translating customer data stored in Service Cloud into intelligent action to better engage, route, and service customers”.

Bluewolf’s report also indicates that 70 percent of businesses are diverting budget from on-premise technology to cloud solutions – leading to 46 percent of C-level executives claiming that Salesforce has measurably improved their customer experience. 71 percent of budget owners are planning to increase their spend with salesforce.com over the coming year, with 12 percent of those influencers increasing budgets by more than 50 percent.

Now in its third year, ‘The State of Salesforce’ report evaluates how companies use, innovate, and prioritise spending on Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM platform. Using data gathered in collaboration with the MIT Sloan School of Management and based on insights from more than 1,000 salesforce.com customers worldwide, Bluewolf’s 2014-2015 report dives deep into the business impact being realised by enterprise organisations using Salesforce and its leading role in driving digital transformation and customer engagement.

“Today’s customers are constantly changing their preferred contact channel based on where they are and what they’re doing, so it’s not surprising that organisations are increasingly seeking to meet this demand by investing in omni-channel contact centre solutions”, said Jonathan Gale, CEO at NewVoiceMedia. “Using our technology, companies are able to use the rich customer data stored in Salesforce to make intelligent decisions on how to handle, treat and route customer interactions – regardless of channel”.