As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency and customer alignment, we’re excited to bring you a new content series on IdeaExchange to keep you informed and engaged with our evolving cloud product landscape. The series, composed of a newsletter and supporting webinar, will provide updates on upcoming cloud product developments. Webinar details will be shared soon. Stay tuned for more cloud content to come!
The Eagle has landed. The future of customer service is “finally” here, and it’s powered by a new generation of AI. At Salesforce, we’ve increased our investments to capitalize on this opportunity, to help you accelerate and deliver exceptional service experiences that build lifetime customer loyalty, powered by AI + Data. Let’s take a sneak peek at the recent and upcoming innovations in Service Cloud. To learn more, check out our roadmap sessions at Dreamforce!
It has never been harder to be a service leader. Customer expectations are higher than ever, and every service leader is being asked to do more with less. AI offers the possibility to help service teams be more proactive and productive, but in conversations with service leaders around the world, persistent barriers stand in the way of teams fully capturing the benefit: Siloed data, fragmented knowledge, and disconnected channels challenge nearly every service team. Helping you overcome these barriers and capture the benefit of AI+Data service automation is what has driven and reshaped the Service Cloud roadmap all year.
The Story of Summer ‘24: Laying the Groundwork for the AI Revolution
Our Summer ‘24 release was all about improving the productivity of your human agents, increasing the value of your customer engagement, and optimizing your service performance. You’ve been using our agent-assist AI with more languages, more channels, and knowledge from more sources. You’ve expanded your customer engagement with unified messaging for WhatsApp, BYO Channels, bots with generative answers, and responses from mobile. You’ve been improving your service operations with Einstein Conversation Mining, faster Service Intelligence insights, Business Rules Engine, case resolution predictions, and generated survey summaries. You’ve been taking your Service Cloud implementations from “Good to Great” by discovering capabilities to meet your business goals. As you’ve been improving your service maturity by gathering your knowledge, activating self service, deploying a digital channel, and turning on agent-assist AI, you’ve been getting ready for the next step in AI+Data Automation.
Winter ’24: Agentforce Powered by Unified Knowledge on Data Cloud
In Winter ‘24, we are taking the next step forward in the AI revolution, moving from predictive and generative AI to autonomous AI agents with the launch of Agentforce. Here’s the tl;dr: Agentforce Service Agents will be able to not just answer questions but take trusted action on behalf of your customers. Save your human agents for the highest value and complex issues– they’ll now have Agentforce Service Planner available to generate a plan for rapid resolution. Both Service Agent and Service Planner will run on a common set of Service Topics, Instructions, and Actions, grounded on Knowledge, now on Data Cloud.
Did we get your attention? Well, here are the details of what’s coming in October:
Deploy digital agents on channels for self service. The Agentforce Service Agent delivers conversational self-service autonomously over digital channels, even those carried by our partners. It is easy to set up with pre-built templates– just use natural language to define your Service Topics, give specific instructions for how to handle each one, and arm it with the right actions starting with the ability to reliably answer questions grounded on knowledge. The “Answer Questions with Knowledge” action works out of the box, with Knowledge now on Data Cloud, support for easy file upload, and easier knowledge import via Unified Knowledge.
Agentforce Service Agent is built to work on our powerful digital engagement channels, including Messaging for In-App and Web, WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger,and Apple Messaging for Business. And now our newest native channel: LINE, the most popular messaging app in Japan and other countries. You can now bring Digital & Voice channels from our CCaaS partners into Service Cloud Voice and Digital Engagement, and will soon be able to run Agentforce Service Agents on these channels as well. These channels support more than Service– you can now send service and messaging messages on the same SMS numbers with Unified Conversations, and use Digital Engagement with Sales Cloud (Pilot). And your team can engage with their customers from anywhere with the Beta of Omni Mobile.
Voice remains the highest volume service channel– Service Cloud Voice is adding role hierarchy-based reporting, multi-party conferencing, headset call controls, ring groups, and dynamic call controls. You will be able to route Amazon Connect Voice calls inside Salesforce, for Unified Routing for Salesforce Channels (Pilot).
Elevate teams to trusted advisors. Your service teams will be armed to handle even the most complex and important issues for your customers. The pilot of Agentforce Service Planner will start to bring together our agent assist AI by generating a multi-step plan for how to take a customer case to resolution. Einstein Article Recommendation will be able generate recommended replies on Voice and Messaging, and you can use prompts to quickly update the tone or style of your knowledge. Service Email Assistant leverages Prompt Builder to propose generated replies to service reps in the Service Email Composer. And Enhanced Conversation Intelligence Rules allows you to use Einstein Intent and Sentiment to adjust the service your teams are delivering in real-time.
Turn Insights into Action. Our new Customer Experience Intelligence solution gathers and transforms quantitative and qualitative CX signals into insights that will help you improve CSAT. CX Intelligence empowers teams to understand and improve customer sentiment, feedback surveys, CSAT and churn data.
One more thing: Employee Service. Now you can use the same powerful Service Cloud platform that you use to deliver great customer experiences to also deliver great employee experiences. The Employee Portal is a modern, easy-to-use AI-powered employee self service experience. The HR Service Console is an omnichannel workspace and automation platform for employee support issues. A pre-built Workday Integration syncs employee data from Workday to deliver a 360 degree view of each employee for faster, more tailored employee service.
Beyond Winter ’24
As we look to early next year, we see improvements across the Service Platform, from Self-Service to Digital Channels to Service Rep Productivity to Supervisor Insights to Data and Knowledge— all with an eye to accelerating AI+Data-powered Service Automation. Here’s what we have in mind for you:
Agentforce & Self Service. We will expand the channel reach of Agentforce Service Agent. It will be able to autonomously generate and send replies to customer emails, guided by the same Service Topics, Instructions and Actions. And not every Self-Service experience will be conversational– the Service Agent will be able to update the content of a self-service help site or portal, for a fully synchronized CX. And conversations won’t just contain text– Agentforce will be able to understand images, files, and even video.
The next step is self-service for Voice, aided by the integration of the acquisition of Tenyx, an innovative provider of generative voice agents. Voice will also be enhanced with multi-party voice conferencing, skills routing, and the GA of unified routing.
Service Rep Productivity. We will GA the Agentforce Service Planner to assist service reps, and enhance it with dynamic plans that change as the conversation with the customer unfolds. We will add these real-time plans for more channels. We will bring generative Service Replies to email, traditionally the most time consuming channel. And we will bring the Agentforce assistant to help your Slack swarms on cases and Slack Record Channels be even more productive.
Supervisor Insights. We will be bringing Agentforce to Supervisors, with an assistant to help understand and improve your service operations. This is especially critical as supervisors increasingly manage hybrid teams of human and digital agents– we will provide enhanced monitoring tools to make this easier. We’ll empower service leaders with out-of-the-box Tableau Einstein analytics apps to optimize service operations and improve customer satisfaction. And our My Service Journey Roadmaps will get more prescriptive, so every company can build a business-case driven roadmap to improve their service maturity with Service Cloud.
Data and Knowledge. Unified Knowledge on Data Cloud enables knowledge to break out from the article– we’ll be bringing the breakthroughs from Salesforce Research’s Project Atlas to represent your knowledge as a connected graph in Data Cloud, improving the accuracy of RAG across the portfolio. You’ll also be able to manage feedback on knowledge-grounded content to continually improve the quality of your Knowledge Base.
That’s a lot. Please stay in touch as we embark on this journey together, shaping the landscape of customer service for years to come!
Resources
The Salesforce Service Cloud Cloud team invites you to join our Dreamforce session on the Roadmap to AI-First Service on September 18, 2024, at 4:00 PM PT. We’ll show you all these awesome improvements coming to Service Cloud. Register now to join us!
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