The News
Today Salesforce announced the next release
of its Service Cloud. It brings together more Einstein AI as part of the
Service Cloud and adds Quip to it. This enables more agent empowerment and
efficient work. In order to augment the tools with the necessary knowledge and
soft skills, Salesforce also just launched Trailblazers
for the Future, a program that is targeted towards increasing the soft
skills of service managers and service agents.
Einstein now is delivering reply
suggestions as well as article suggestions to inquiries that the service
representative can easily use to reply to questions. At the same time Einstein
suggests so called next best actions that are designed to help increase
satisfaction and unearth cross- and upsell opportunities. Additionally,
Einstein now optimizes case routing leveraging machine-learning processes on
the inquiry to find the ideal queue for processing it.
Additionally, Salesforce embedded the
collaboration tool Quip into the Service Cloud to increase productivity and to
increase service agents’ access to knowledge.
The press release is here
but for your convenience you can read it below.
The Press Release
Salesforce Empowers Service
Agents with Einstein AI and Quip for Service
Service Cloud expands
Einstein AI portfolio with new intelligent recommendation and routing
capabilities so agents can spend more time where it matters most — building
customer relationships and solving complex problems
New Quip for Service boosts
agent productivity with incident swarming and cross-team collaboration
available directly in the agent console
SAN FRANCISCO—March 19, 2019—Salesforce
[NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, today announced new artificial
intelligence and productivity solutions that empower customer service agents to
focus more of their time on the
human side of service — tasks that require social intelligence, critical
thinking and creative problem solving skills. As customer service rapidly
evolves from a reactive back-office function to one that impacts every stage of
the customer’s journey, service agents are continually asked to do more. With
new AI-powered recommendations, automated routing, and embedded productivity
and collaboration capabilities, Salesforce is reimagining the agent experience
to meet the needs of today’s connected customer.
From Case-Centric to Customer-Centric: The Service
Agent’s Role is Evolving
Service agents are
on the front lines of all customer interactions, from the moment a consumer
begins researching products all the way through to post-sale support. And while
agents have historically not had the necessary resources to deliver world-class
customer experiences, that is now changing.
According to the third edition of the Salesforce State of Service report released today, 82 percent of
service leaders acknowledge their company’s customer service function must
transform to stay competitive, and 77 percent of service organizations plan to
make significant investments in agent training this year. This is causing a
dramatic shift in the service agent’s role, with 71 percent saying their jobs
are more strategic than just two years ago and 75 percent saying their organizations
now view them as brand ambassadors by their companies.
Making Agents Smarter with Einstein for Service
Over the last
three years Salesforce has embedded new AI capabilities into Service Cloud —
such as Einstein Bots and Einstein Case Classification — to make the agent
console more intelligent and the agent’s job easier. Building on this, the AI
innovations being announced today are:
● Einstein Reply Recommendations uses natural language processing to
instantly suggest the best responses to agents over chat and messaging, so they
can save time and improve the quality of replies to customer inquiries. And
using a machine learning model that learns what has worked over time, Einstein Article Recommendations
automatically recommends the best knowledge articles to agents, giving them the
information they need to solve cases quickly.
● Einstein Next Best Action leverages business rules and
predictive intelligence to suggest the best course of action at the point of
maximum impact during agent-customer interactions, helping to increase customer
satisfaction and uncover cross-sell opportunities.
● Einstein Case Routing fully automates the routing process
with machine learning that filters cases to the right queue or agent based on
preset criteria, such as who is best qualified to solve them based on expertise
or past outcomes.
Making Agents More Productive
with Quip for Service
Agents often spend more time hunting down answers than
focusing on customer engagement given how difficult the collaboration process
can be — corralling input from multiple teams, hunting for answers or
documentation, and switching between multiple applications when doing so. Now
with Quip for Service, agents have a productivity and collaboration tool
embedded directly within the agent console:
● Quip for Service enables
agents to co-author documents, bring in subject matter experts across the
business to swarm on complex problems, and have live collaborative
conversations directly within the case record.
● Admins can build and
easily publish flexible Quip templates in the agent console, as well as
customize them based on different use cases and specific organizational needs.
Einstein AI and Quip for
Service in Action
Together, these new features will fundamentally change
how service agents get their work done. For example, when a customer contacts a
manufacturer about a malfunctioning refrigerator, Einstein Case Routing will
automatically complete the case details and route it to the right agent for
faster service. Einstein Article Recommendations will then automatically
provide the agent with knowledge articles containing technical details on how
to fix the product. Alternately, if the customer reaches out via chat, Einstein
Reply Recommendations will instantly suggest responses to the customer’s questions
to the agent. Should the agent need to enlist product experts across the
company to help fix the refrigerator, Quip for Service allows them to
collaborate directly in the agent console, then capture that solution to be
used again in the future. Finally, based on the conversation and the customer’s purchase history, Einstein
Next Best Action flags that the customer qualifies for a free extended
warranty, then walks the agent through the registration process. All of the
guesswork is removed, and both the customer and agent have a better overall
experience.
Skilling Up the 21st Century Workforce
Empowering
companies with the right technology only solves part of the challenge, as
access to training is another significant obstacle customer service
organizations face. To address this, Salesforce offers training programs and
networking opportunities that provide managers and agents with the skills they
need to bring their contact centers into the digital era and accelerate their
career growth. These include the Trailblazers for the Future regional workshops
hosted by Salesforce employees and customers, Trailhead content on service
related issues, Service Cloud Specialist Certifications, and direct access to a
community of 25,000+ service agents. Learn more at: https://www.salesforce.com/events/trailblazers-for-the-future/
Comments on the News
● “We are living in a new
age of service where today’s customer expects great experiences at every stage
of the buying cycle and across any channel, making the agent’s role more
critical and more challenging than ever before,” said Bill Patterson, EVP and GM, Service Cloud,
Salesforce. “With these innovations we are empowering agents to rise to the
occasion with a console built for modern customer service that is intelligent,
collaborative and connected.”
●
“At Overstock we are constantly looking for new technologies
that will help us continue to adapt to our customers’ needs and deliver
personalized experiences,” said Kamelia Aryafar, Chief Customer and Algorithms
Officer, Overstock.com. “Einstein AI has shown in our pilot tests that it has
the potential to help us meet those needs by recommending offers and perks that
our care associates can offer customers based on their shopping history and
past interactions. Ultimately, Salesforce is helping us provide our customers a
more personalized, human experience.”
● “Tapping into Einstein
helps us get maximum value from the information stored in our Salesforce CRM,
and with that data we have been able to optimize all of our customer service
department’s internal processes,” said Zenconnect CEO Yann Mercier. “After
implementing Einstein AI to automatically classify cases, our customer service
agents saw 25 percent productivity gains, freeing them up to focus on higher
level projects.”
Salesforce Empowers Companies to Transform Customer
Service
Service Cloud, the
world’s #1 customer service platform, empowers every service employee from the
contact center to the field with the innovative tools, unified data, and
embedded training needed to deliver world-class customer service. Across every
channel — whether it’s messaging, communities, chat, phone, in-person, or IoT
signals — Service Cloud is enabling Trailblazers to put the customer at the
heart of every service moment and deliver personalized, consistent,
transformative experiences.
Additional Information:
● Get more details on the
State of Service report at: www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/03/customer-service-trends.html
● Learn more about Quip for
Salesforce in this blog post: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/03/introducing-quip-for-salesforce.html
Availability and Pricing
● Einstein Next Best Action
is generally available and included within Service Cloud Einstein, an add-on to
Service Cloud, for $50 per user per month.
● Quip for Service is
generally available and included within Quip Enterprise when added to Service
Cloud for $25 per user per month.
● Einstein Article
Recommendations, Reply Recommendations and Case Routing are currently in pilot.
Pricing information will be made available at general availability.
The Bigger Picture
These times are characterized by the fact
that products and services are becoming increasingly interchangeable. As a
consequence, companies need to find another means of distinguishing themselves
from their competition.
This other way is the ability to engage in
a way that results in positive experiences.
On the other hand, the profession of
service agents is surely one of the more stressful ones, albeit crucial for
experiences. Service agents need to balance a high degree of empathy,
knowledge, and the ability to deal with simple and complex topics in parallel.
At the same time the range of topics they
need to cover is increasing and service becomes less of a post-purchase only
offering. Customers demand – and have the right to demand – answers at nearly
every place and time of their individual customer journey.
The way to address this double challenge is
to empower service agents by not only giving them responsibility but also
authority and room to take decisions.
In order to be able to this one needs to
give them two things:
·
Agents need the right tools
that help them concentrate on the tasks where humans excel by offloading those
that are dull and repetitive. Solving these is something the machine excels in.
·
The second thing, an agent needs
is ready access to education and knowledge. This means training and an
available network of knowledgeable colleagues.
My PoV and Analysis
With this release Salesforce continues on
the track that was paved last July, when the company infused
Einstein into the Service Cloud. And they strengthen the Service Cloud by
giving service agents what they need to be successful, with Trailblazers for
the Future being the icing on the cake. This type of crowdsourcing is a stroke
of genius. Einstein takes away the duller parts of the work by suggesting replies
and knowledge articles, which can be directly incorporated into the chat.
According to Peter White, Sr. Director Product Management, Einstein learns from
service agent interactions to improve reply accuracy, i.e. Einstein takes into
account which or whether suggested replies are used.
The addition of Quip to the Service Cloud
is important for the ability to deal with more complicated inquiries/incidents.
It allows the access to and documentation of additional knowledge and therefore
may speed up the resolution of a service case.
However, there are caveats. Using a
collaboration tool like this has the potential of disrupting the experts that
get asked and who may or may not have the time to reply to inquiries. Secondly,
it is important that the documents that get created through Quip are used by
Einstein in order to be able to suggest more reply and possibly articles in
reply to a customer inquiry.
Which leads me to two ideas that might
improve the Service Cloud even further.
·
It would be interesting to add
the ability of suggesting the best matched expert to be contacted via Quip. Based
upon knowledge ranking Einstein should be easily able to do this. Sources for
this could include answers given by the persons, amongst others. All in all
this could result in something that is similar to the ranking that is used in
communities. Combined with an availability status the quality of replies could
even increase while the whole inquiry process becomes less disruptive to the
workforce.
·
Based upon the constant
creation of new codified knowledge it might be interesting look into the
ability of creating micro articles, which then are combined into an
individualized whole article that then is given back to the customer. This way,
the relevance of replies increases, which in turn results in higher customer
satisfaction.
As said, these are ideas. Overall I was
impressed by what I have seen and got told. It is clear that Salesforce will
continue to stay one of the top contenders when it comes to service
functionalities.
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