When Salesforce.com bought crowdsourced business contact database Jigsaw for $142 million earlier this year, the CRM giant said that it would combine its suite of applications with Jigsaw’s model for the automation of acquiring and keeping up-to-date business contact data. Today, Salesforce is unveiling Jigsaw’s deep integration into the company’s platform, Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM.
Jigsaw will now deliver real-time updates to contact and company information within Salesforce CRM through communication platform Salesforce Chatter. Jigsaw, which uses a Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model to bring in data around business contacts, has been incorporated into CRM applications to provide on-demand data, and analytics on the health of data and on usage.
Jigsaw also provides customers with the ability to see how much data is being actively managed by Jigsaw, and visual reports on how much data is correct, out-of-date or dead in the data graveyard. And Jigsaw leverages Chatter to identify changes to contact and company data in the Salesforce CRM, update and then publish the changes in Chatter in real-time, giving sales reps the ability to see when data is outdated or updated.
Currently, Jigsaw has a database of more than 22 million business contacts and 4 million company profiles that are continually updated by a community of more than 1.4 million individuals. Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is priced at $29 per user per month on top of existing CRM use charges.
In the past, we’ve been a bit critical of Jigsaw’s model because the company would pay people simply to upload other people’s contact information, possible causing a privacy fiasco. Jigsaw has changed its model since then: people can now see if their personal information has been uploaded, and there is a process to have it removed, at least temporarily. And users are no longer paid cash to upload contacts. Instead they receive points that can be used to download contact other people’s contact information.
This additional feature should only help boost Salesforce’s ever growing revenue. The company saw record sales for the most recent quarter, adding added 5,100 paying customers during the quarter.
