Salesforce Service becomes Botty

The News

On June 17, 1019, Salesforce announced an enhancement of its customer service abilities by adding further channels for customer service and adding chatbot capabilities to these channels. This has the goal of offering the ability to create a more seamless service experience by offering engagements on the channels that consumers use. For your easier reference here comes the announcement.

Expanding our Digital Customer Service Capabilities with New Channels and Bot Innovations

Author: Meredith Flynn-Ripley, VP of Digital Engagement, Service Cloud

Disconnected customer service experiences are still far too common. Almost everyone has had to repeat basic information during routine interactions with companies, or found themselves unable to get answers to fairly simple questions on the channel of their choice. In fact, only 16% of consumers say companies excel at delivering connected experiences.

I am happy to report times are changing, for two reasons. First, companies are realizing service can be their main competitive differentiator, and second, today’s empowered and vocal consumers refuse to tolerate bad service. 57% of customers will stop buying from a company not because they don’t like their product, but because a competitor provides better service. Today’s customer demands service on their terms, uses an average of 10 different channels to connect with companies — including messaging, chat, social, email and phone — and expects a personalized and consistent experience across all of them, every single time.

Salesforce empowers companies to deliver on these expectations, with a complete customer service platform that powers connected customer experiences across channels from one central console. And today I’m excited to announce new innovations in Service Cloud that make every digital customer service interaction seamless regardless of whether you are interacting via the web, messaging apps, chat or otherwise.

Expanded acquire throughout digital channels

Say good-bye to the static ?Contact Us? Page. Our new channel menu gives clients an easy way to begin conversations with companies on their desired messaging and chat channels like, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or net chat, in addition to conventional channels like voice. It can be embedded anywhere in a website together with high web site visitors areas like checkout or domestic pages. And the channel menu can be set up with as low as four clicks, letting corporations keep away from high-priced and time-ingesting development paintings that permits you to upward thrust up and taking walks right away.

And, with our newly delivered aid for WhatsApp and WeChat further to present channels like Facebook Messenger and SMS, corporations can reach greater customers via messaging than ever before.

Automate carrier with Einstein Bots in extra locations

Einstein Bots are honestly to be had on a pair of latest messaging channels along with SMS, Facebook Messenger and WeChat. Einstein Bots empower groups to scale their virtual customer support via responding to clients proper now, automating recurring provider requests, accumulating basic facts and seamlessly handing off the conversation to human retailers. And because of the reality they are linked to CRM facts and techniques, and powered by using manner of device gaining knowledge of and herbal language processing, Einstein Bots examine your company and get smarter over the years.

With Einstein Bots, you don?T ought to be a records scientist to take gain of cutting aspect AI competencies. We?Ve made the setup system less complicated than ever, with a brand new map view that offers admins a visual manual to help design conversations, ensuring customers obtained?T get caught in a dull-cease in the course of a carrier interplay. Dynamic routing directs customers to a selected queue primarily based on their verbal exchange, ensuring customers are at the pleasant route to short decision with the proper entrepreneurs. And a brand new specific fit functionality shall we admins brief create rationale fashions that educate Einstein Bots to short apprehend what clients are soliciting for and help them at once.

These new abilities are making the issuer revel in sincerely seamless. For instance, a customer trying to update a credit score card can go to their bank?S net web page and with out difficulty get admission to the channel menu. From there, they pick out the messaging app they choose, and as quickly as in that messaging app, an Einstein Bot can speedy walk the purchaser thru the card alternative technique, handing off the interplay to a human agent at any issue if important.

This is just the latest in a series of recent customer service AI innovations. In March we announced new AI-powered recommendation and routing capabilities that make the service agent console more intelligent and the agent’s job easier. And in April we announced an integration with Google’s DialogFlow that extends the power of Einstein Bots.

Check this out at Salesforce Connections 2019

These and other new innovations will be on display this week at Salesforce Connections 2019 , the digital marketing, commerce and customer service event of the year. Mark your calendar for the Service Cloud keynote, taking place Wednesday, June 19, at 10 am Central.

For more information about how Service Cloud can help you reach customers across digital channels, go to www. salesforce.com/digital-channels

Learn about Trailblazers for the Future, our training program that gives contact center managers and agents the soft skills to keep the human side of service alive in the digital era: https://www.salesforce.com/events/trailblazers-for-the-future/

Availability:

The Channel Menu may be in pilot thru Winter 2019. Messaging help for WeChat and WhatsApp, and Einstein Bots for Facebook Messenger and WeChat are all now in pilot. All exceptional capabilities indexed are normally available.

The large Picture

The customer service market is very contested. Apart from the tier one vendors there are a good number of specialists which have their roots in developing solutions to enable a seamless, cross channel customer service. There are the likes of Freshworks, Helpshift, Intercom, to name just very few. Most of these smaller vendors are rightly positioned as best-of-breed vendors. Nearly all of them claim their ability to easily integrate into an already existing CRM system. Many of them harmonize with more than one of the top-tier CRM platforms (aka suites). Whether the integration claims are right or wrong, and mostly they are right, kinda sorta, this ability creates a serious threat for the suite vendors, as there are enough companies that run multi-vendor strategies. And once a vendor has a foot in the door it has drastically improved its ability to increase the foot print, which usually goes on cost of the platform vendor’s potential foot print.

Therefore it's miles paramount for the platform companies to provide functionality and offerings that are right enough and are available at an cheap price point. And in evaluation to one of a kind business regions like e.G. Advertising it's far very smooth to reveal rate in customer service.

MyPoV and Analysis

The easy assumption that underlies this statement is spot on. Customer company is still adversely stricken by lacking channel integration. This makes engagement difficult for both factors as an ongoing interplay in context is made greater hard than critical. The result is a bad consumer enjoy, because the sum of all individual reviews is horrible.

Today’s customer expects to be able to be engaged with a brand/business a seamless, channel agnostic way. As I have said and written before, operationalizing Paul Greenbergs very valid definition of customer engagement:

Customer Engagement is the persevering with interaction amongst corporation and consumer the usage of contact factors which can be furnished by the commercial enterprise organization and chosen with the aid of the purchaser.

This basically means that companies are wise to offer those contact points (which is more than described by the term touch points that has been usurped by marketing) that are preferred by their customers. As they are businesses they also need to do this in an efficient way. A Salesforce research found that customers use ten different channels to communicate with companies and that consistency across these channels is paramount for them.

Times and yet again there are studies finding that clients depart a emblem for motives of negative studies. While I do now not fully agree to these studies (maximum of them are commissioned or executed with the resource of carriers) it is able to be accurately assumed that extreme reviews ? Appropriate or bad ? Create lasting memories and therefore impressions and that the most present day enjoy is the handiest that has the functionality of overriding older impressions. This is in which customer service that may be without problems determined and resolves patron issues with minimum friction for the client comes into play. It both corrects a terrible experience or confirms an already true one.

This is in part addressed through this announcement and the underlying release. Partly, because Salesforce will make it much less complex to have interaction on more and more communications channels, specifically chat based ones that get more and more important. Salesforce also demonstrates some scenarios that amplify throughout channels, like appealing through a web chat and then informing the client approximately the approaching appointment or permitting to change it through textual content messages. However, the caveat is that the second one a part of the communication that uses the opportunity channel ? The statistics approximately the imminent appointment ? Is initiated by way of using the bot, and now not by way of the consumer. I haven?T visible a scenario however that lets in the patron to (arbitrarily) change the communications channel with the AI, no longer a human agent, preserving music of the context. While this might be a stretch intention, it is precisely wherein we need to get to.

This announcement is not breaking news, but streamlining and an iterative improvement of Salesforces already strong platform. Having said this, there are some useful enhancements, including the upcoming channel menu, the additional channels, and the enhanced visual conversation builder to define conversation flows. This drastically reduces the need for data scientists when building AI capabilities inside the company. Here Salesforce clearly closes a gap to specialists, like Cognigy or the former Recast.ai (now a part of SAP as SAP Conversational AI), to name only two of them.

A suitable subsequent step for Salesforce might be the building of ontologies for specific topics and the ability to help customers and dealers to index and are seeking for established and unstructured documentation, like e.G. Empolis does, which could cause dramatic improvements of seek results and pace, which results in better research. I?D additionally want to see a tighter integration between customer support and area company, possibly even which include a crowdsourcing capability, like the one SAP obtained from Coresystems. This may healthy properly into Salesforce being a platform company and into the fashion of building ecosystems or even transient ecosystems to deal with consumer issues. Einstein may additionally also be a helper in lining up the proper partners.

Finally, allow me formulate a want, which possibly comes from my German roots: Some of the topics which have been announced proper right here are in pilot or will come later this 12 months best. This try at freezing a market most effective shows that the employer isn't earlier of the curve right here. I need this form of pre-assertion would possibly now not be applied that a whole lot.

Just for the file: Not most effective Salesforce exhibits this not so consumer centric approach.

But maybe Salesforce desires to be better than the relaxation of the percent.

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