Salesforce adds AI so customer service can be more human
- Summary:
- Salesforce adds new AI features and Quip collaboration to its Service Cloud so customer service can go beyond solving cases to building relationships
Interestingly, Salesforce is also stepping up its support to help organizations adjust to these changes in the nature of customer service. Called Trailblazers for the Future, this venture into change management provides interactive Trailhead learning content to develop new skills, along with access to a 25,000-strong community of like-minded service agents, and a program of in-person regional training workshops. It's a recognition that rolling out new technology is futile unless people acquire the new skills they need to make effective use of it.
There's something of an arms race going on in the realm of customer service, as organizations invest in meeting the expectations of digitally savvy customers for responsive service. As Walchuk puts it:
Service is now part of every interaction people have with companies ... All those interactions, they expect to be fast and easy.
Every time they have a great experience, that raises the bar for every other business.
That arms race is good for Salesforce, as its recent financial results showed, with Service Cloud growing 25% over the year, compared to just 13% growth for Sales Cloud. At $3.6 billion annual revenues compared to $4 billion, Service Cloud is breathing down its sibling's neck and looks certain to overtake it sometime during the current year.
Adding AI and collaboration
Today's Service Cloud announcements add new AI capabilities and also bring Salesforce's collaborative document platform, Quip, into Service Cloud.
- Einstein Reply Recommendations and Article Recommendations, introduced today in pilot, use natural language processing to analyze customer enquiries and instantly suggest the best responses or most suitable knowledge articles for a given interaction.
- Einstein Next Best Action, first announced last year and entering general availability today, applies predictive intelligence and business rules to suggest appropriate actions to the agent, such as a relevant promotion or potential cross-sale.
- Einstein Case Routing, now in pilot, brings end-to-end automation to the existing process of directing cases to the right queue or agent based on preset criteria. Whereas routing previously required manual intervention, those decisions can now be made automatically through machine learning.
- Quip for Service, now in beta, brings the productivity and collaboration tool directly into the agent console. While Service Cloud has always had Chatter as a collaboration channel, Quip provides a richer context, giving agents the ability to co-author documents with subject matter experts from across the business, leaving an audit trail of the conversations directly within the case record.
My take
Connected customers expect to be looked after in a way that simply wasn't possible in the old disconnected world — part of what we call The XaaS Effect, with its emphasis on continuous improvement. It's no surprise that Salesforce is having to up its game with these new additions to Service Cloud.
For many customers though the biggest challenge is the change of mindset, culture and process that has to accompany the new technology. It's incumbent on vendors to help that adjustment, and it's good to see Salesforce invest in the Trailblazer initiative to that end.