Microsoft extends social drive with Moxie partnership

Microsoft has partnered with enterprise social network firm Moxie Software to offer its Dynamics CRM customers increased collaboration capabilities.

The news of the partnership follows Microsoft's acquisition of social firm Yammer for $1.2bn in June, and the acquisition of Skype for $8.5bn last year, as the Redmond giant steps up its battle with Google to provide business users with collaborative enterprise software.

Moxie Software will provide Dynamics customers with its Spaces tool, an offering launched in March this year to integrate customer communication channels with internal employee collaboration.

The Spaces tool offers customers an Expert Connect feature that that allows cross-departmental collaboration for customer service, IT, human resources, sales and marketing. It aims to ensure accurate information is shared through all customer communication channels, whether by chat or social media.

For example, if a customer asks a question on chat and the support centre does not know the answer, the query can be escalated to to elsewhere in the organisation.

This also allows Dynamics CRM to be used as the single source for all customer and interaction data, according to Microsoft.

Meanwhile, the Knowledge Spaces' search engine gives customer service agents access to the right information quickly.

"Moxie's multi-channel and knowledge base solutions coupled with Microsoft Dynamics CRM capabilities empower our customers to provide a great customer experience," said Craig Dewar, Microsoft Dynamics CRM product marketing director.

"Having the right tools not only means enabling high productivity for customer care teams-but more importantly, it means transforming the workforce into a market intelligence network."

Moxie Software made headlines at the end of last year when Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems' former chief executive, took a job at its board of directors.