Salesforce Simplifies 'Obama for America' 2012 Presidential Campaign Operations

By Nathesh, TMCnet Contributor

The ‘Obama for America’ 2012 presidential campaign reportedly ran its central operations leveraging the features of Salesforce in order to engage with millions of voters and volunteers.

Salesforce claimed that its Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Chatter and Salesforce Platform simplified the presidential campaign’s constituent correspondence, contact center, battleground state budget management and surrogate event management operations.

During the campaign that lasted over 13 months, Salesforce.com’s (News - Alert) cloud computing platform was instrumental in helping the campaign seamlessly handle over 5.7 million voter inquiries and 1.5 million voter contact records. The Election Day of 2012 alone saw an enormous spike of over 80,000 inquiries. With Salesforce, the campaign team was able to deploy a massively scalable solution without purchasing or maintaining costly software, hardware or infrastructure.

Michael Slaby, chief information and innovation officer for the ‘Obama for America’ presidential campaign, remarked, “Key to the campaign’s success was a technology platform that allowed us to engage with constituents and make data-driven decisions in real time. In addition, Salesforce massively scaled to meet our real-time engagement and decision-making needs.”

Salesforce.com acknowledged that the campaign represented a talented group of technology innovators working together. The company’s social and mobile cloud technologies powered many of the functions that were central to the first campaign that was built for the social era.

Salesforce.com explained that with the Salesforce Service Cloud, one can transform customer experience and build great customer connections and completely change the look and feel of customer service ranging from contact center to self-service communities, social media and beyond.

For instance at the Democratic National Convention, the Salesforce Service Cloud was used in quickly ramping up volunteers as the campaign’s primary contact center agents. Volunteers managed to login using VoIP technology to instantly become contact center agents, and Service Cloud’s visual workflow and call scripting features ensured that no hindrances occurred during that process.

Salesforce Chatter is the social tool that helps people and companies work better together and the Salesforce Platform lets users create transformative social and mobile apps.

Salesforce Chatter helped the campaign collaborate with information in the budgeting app and make vital decisions more quickly, while the Salesforce Platform was leveraged by the campaign to build a custom app for surrogate engagement of requests and event management.

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