Salesforce is announcing a significant upgrade to its product, “Service Cloud 2,”  adding additional functionality in three areas of the product. The  idea behind the Service Cloud is to capture crowd sourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet and use them for commercial customer service, potentially replacing traditional on-premise contact center technologies which are disconnected from on-demand knowledge that can be found in the cloud.

Here are the new innovations that Salesforce has packaged in Service Cloud 2:

Salesforce Knowledge: Powered by technology Salesforce acquired through Instranet,  Salesforce will offer clients a knowledge base platform, which will allow customer service agents to quickly tap into a SaaS knowledge database. Built on top of the Force.com platform, Salesforce will provide businesses with the technology to organize customer service information into organized repository, making it easy for reps to quickly find the right answer for an inquiry.

Google search will be integrated and easily accessible in the platform. Salesforce says that businesses can easily deploy changes into the knowledge base and extend the platform to mobile devices and other websites. The knowledge base is price at $50 per user per month and will be available on the Service Cloud 2 in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Salesforce Answers: From the its initial launch, the Service Cloud has leveraged crowdsourcing to incorporate knowledge into the platform, but with this new release, Salesforce is helping businesses looking to the web for answers. Online forums and social networks, like Facebook, hold a vast amount of knowledge from consumers.

Salesforce Answers will create a customizable website that will facilitate question and answer conversations and will filter the knowledge created on Salesforce Answers directly into the Service Cloud’s knowledge base, ensuring that customers, agents and partners will all have access to the best knowledge available. Answers will also allow companies to set up a Salesforce Answers community directly on a Facebook company fan page that will import knowledge into the Service Cloud. For example, on Dell’s Facebook Fan page, questions and answers answered by the Facebook community will be imported into the Answer base in the Service Cloud. Salesforce Answers is will available in the first half of 2011.

Salesforce for Twitter: Salesforce was one of the first CRMs to integrate with  and leverage Twitter back in March but has added to this functionality in the Service Cloud. Similar to the feature added earlier this year, users will be able to search Twitter in a real-time stream, will be able to monitor and track particular conversations in Twitter around a search term. And users can Tweet directly from the Service Cloud.

The Service Cloud will now let businesses create a Twitter handle for customers to directly Tweet their customer service issues to. When a customer complains to the handle on Twitter, a customer service case is automatically created in the Service Cloud, letting the representative respond to the customer’s questions in a timely manner, linking back to the Knowledge Base. Salesforce for Twitter is available today for free on the Force.com AppExchange.