Providing customer care on mobile devices is about to get a lot easier if Salesforce.com Inc. has its way with the new embedded implementation of its Service Cloud that debuted this morning. It’s an ambitious expansion of the native support feature that rolled out last year in what can retrospectively be seen as an effort to test the waters.

The trial was apparently a success. Salesforce Service for Apps complements the live help desk, which is modeled after Amazon Inc.’s famous Mayday button, with an embedded chat client that allows users to ping an agent without leaving the affected app. From the other end of the line, the agent can view relevant details about the user in order to quickly put their problem into context.

That saves a great of valuable time, allowing support staff to move onto the next customer  faster while sparing the user being helped at the moment of extra questions that make the problem resolution process more tedious than it normally would be. Salesforce hopes to extend those benefits to voice support as well through an embedded tap-to-call feature that similarly provides contextual information for every ticket.

To address situations where even that isn’t enough and the user can’t fill in all the details necessary for the agent to support their problem, the cloud giant is also offering organizations the ability to handle additional input from the mobile device on which the engagement is happening. That can include most of everything from location data and camera footage.

Agents can use that information to quickly escalate cases to the appropriate subject matter experts, functionality that Salesforce.com sees coming handy in all kinds of scenarios. A municipality, for example, could let residents submit pictures of potholes or broken signs and have their location automatically attached to the message.

Salesforce.com clients with more routine support delivery requirements, meanwhile, can try and help their users solve issues on their own using the embed knowledge base that rounds out the toolkit. A scaled-down implementation is also being released in conjuction for the small- and medium-sized businesses using the company’s Desk.com service.

Photo via CWCS