With Agentforce, support from Endress+Hauser is even more precise — just like their products.

As product complexity and customer demand grew, Endress+Hauser needed to make answers easier to find.

Endress+Hauser provides process and laboratory measurement technology, automation solutions, and services for many industries, including food and beverage, water and wastewater, and life sciences. With 17,000 employees across 125 countries, their technology touches 5.3 billion lives daily – and counting.

Each year, Endress+Hauser handles more than 95,000 support cases, with 51% of daily inquiries coming in by phone — many involving highly specific technical questions. With over 1,200 product families in millions of variants, each customizable for unique industrial environments like chemical plants or wastewater systems, no two customer setups are exactly the same. “We sell high-tech devices, and it’s not always just plug and play,” said Kai Weber, Head of Department Service Inhouse at Endress+Hauser Germany. “Customers are relying on measurement, and it really needs to be 100% accurate.”

For example, if a customer calls about a flowmeter used in a pharmaceutical plant, the support engineer must sift through over 32,000 knowledge articles and thousands of technical documents spread across manuals, PDFs, and SharePoint sites. “No human is able to read through thousands of articles and give an answer quickly,” said CRM AI Program Manager Larissa Gulyayeva.

Beyond service, Endress+Hauser’s service engineers are under growing pressure to provide fast, accurate, and personalized guidance for increasingly complex products and an overwhelming amount of technical information. Most devices are tailored to a customer’s specific environment, requiring deep, application-specific expertise. New hires, in particular, face steep learning curves with the depth of knowledge and product specificity required.

In addition, a wave of company retirements threatened to take decades of product knowledge with it. “We are facing more and more not having enough professionals,” said Weber. “We need to address this issue in combination with people getting older on the customer side, which means they also lose employees and knowledge.” 

Facing workforce shifts and rising expectations, Endress+Hauser saw an opportunity to rethink how to deliver high-touch service through knowledge, expertise, and technology.

The customer can ask questions in natural language like, “I need help with my flowmeter,” or “I got an alert from my IoT platform saying my sensor is showing irregular temperature readings.” Agentforce will then pull relevant content from knowledge articles, summarize the content, and recommend a next step. If the issue requires a live service engineer, Agentforce schedules a customer callback and creates a case in Service Cloud, including the full conversation and proposed call time, so the service team can seamlessly follow up.

“Agentforce is always available, 24/7,” said Larissa Gulyayeva. “It can provide support anytime, anywhere in comparison with a human that obviously has sleep time, meetings, trainings, coffee time, and lunchtime.”

With Agentforce, Endress+Hauser expects to handle 50% of customer service inquiries — around 47,500 cases yearly — autonomously and they project a 30% productivity gain for its service team. “We invest a lot in knowledge management,” said Kevin Geiger, Head of Department Applications, CRM. “And now with Agentforce, we can make this available to our customers.” What was once only accessible to service people is now in the hands of customers, empowering them to find answers on their own, anytime, leading to faster response times and an improved overall customer experience.

Looking ahead, the goal is to give every customer access to top expertise for every inquiry — helping customers solve issues faster while empowering Service with more time to focus on complex challenges. “With Agentforce, we can give customers better information from the start,” said Drew Barss, Director of Lifetime Services Processes and Systems. “It makes us much better at supporting them from the beginning.”

Agentforce will deliver AI-powered sales intelligence for Endress+Hauser global sales. 

With sales and support in over 125 countries, Endress+Hauser knows firsthand how complex the sales process can be, and how critical it is to equip every seller with the tools to succeed. That’s why they plan to roll out an Agentforce-powered “Sales Agent” designed to boost efficiency, improve forecasting, and help salespeople close deals faster.

Available directly within Sales Cloud, Agentforce will give salespeople an instant assistant they can chat with during every stage of the sales journey. Whether a salesperson wants to prepare for a meeting, quickly get up to speed on an account, or get the latest guidance on how to effectively position a product, Agentforce will be there to help.

Salespeople can ask things like, “What’s the last order this customer placed?” or “What are this product’s strengths over our competitor’s?” Agentforce will tap into Endress+Hauser’s Sales Cloud data — including opportunity history, service issues, call transcripts, and surveys — to respond with useful, real-time insights. It will also pull in Endress+Hauser’s own policy documents and sales best practices from their standard Salesforce knowledge base. 

When preparing for calls, sellers can simply ask Agentforce instead of digging through different tools or asking their manager. For questions like, “What should I know before meeting with this account?” Agentforce will instantly deliver a summary of the customer’s recent orders, service cases, and opportunities to grow the account. The sales staff can even listen to the summary aloud via text-to-speech during their commute. And after sales calls, Agentforce can draft a follow-up email based on the conversation, recommend relevant products, and log the interaction in Sales Cloud, all with just a few prompts.

With this sales agent and their service agent, the company can expect a 212% return on investment over three years. Together, these AI-powered agents will streamline both sides of the customer experience — resolving issues faster and helping sales close deals more efficiently — making Agentforce a critical driver of Endress+Hauser’s global growth.

Endress+Hauser has trusted Salesforce Professional Services for over 13 years with their platform implementation, making them the obvious choice to run Endress+Hauser’s
Agentforce pilot. Working directly with Professional Services gave them early access to expert guidance and made the project a true team effort across Endress+Hauser’s business and IT teams and Salesforce experts. Together, they got Agentforce off the ground quickly and effectively.

Since Endress+Hauser had already built up a rich library of Salesforce-managed knowledge and years of service case data, they had the right foundation to get value from Agentforce fast. But the goal wasn’t just efficiency. Endress+Hauser also wanted to improve employee experience, helping everyone unlock their potential with complex, rewarding work while Agentforce handled routine issues. 

With these goals in mind, Endress+Hauser had their first agent in place for testing after only one month — and learned three important takeaways in the process: 

1. Train your agent like a new hire.

Endress+Hauser treated Agentforce like a new teammate, not just a tool you could turn on and expect to work perfectly. From the beginning, they focused on teaching the agent how to answer questions in the right way, what kind of tone to use, and which parts of long help articles were most important. They gave real examples of customer questions so the agent could learn how to respond like a helpful team member. The team carefully checked the answers it gave, looking for anything that was confusing, too general, or didn’t match what customers needed. If the agent gave a weak or wrong answer, the team fixed the instructions and tested it again.

They kept track of every change using a shared checklist, and nothing went live until it was fully reviewed. But during this training, the team also discovered something else — that many of the knowledge articles Agentforce used were outdated or too hard to understand. That made it harder for both people and the agent to find the right answers. So the team took time to clean up those articles, rewrite parts, and organize the information better. This restructuring of their existing content ensured Agentforce had clean, accurate information to draw from. 

Just like any new hire, Agentforce improved with hands-on training, regular feedback, and better resources. The more it learned, the more consistent it became at delivering clearer, more accurate answers with every iteration.

2. Setting guardrails to deliver consistent, trusted support.

Because Agentforce talks directly to customers, Endress+Hauser knew it was important to set up strong guardrails from the start. They gave the agent clear rules about what kinds of questions it was allowed to answer and tested it by asking tricky or off-topic questions to see how it would respond.

To keep Agentforce focused, Endress+Hauser made a few important choices. First, during the pilot, they limited the agent to just two tasks: sharing helpful articles and scheduling callbacks with service engineers. This narrowed focus ensured the agent stayed within its area of expertise. Second, they tested the agent’s answers using a checklist of approved questions and expected responses. If anything was off, they rewrote the prompt or adjusted how the question was asked. The team reviewed the changes to make sure everything made sense before going live.

These careful steps made a big difference. By setting clear guardrails and giving the agent a focused role, Endress+Hauser made sure Agentforce stayed on track and delivered consistent, accurate answers. Testing, reviewing, and fine-tuning along the way helped the team catch problems early and make smart improvements. 

3. Design prompts for better responses.

As Endress+Hauser continued to improve Agentforce, they discovered the way a question is asked can really change the answer the agent gives. Even small changes in wording like “How do I set up my pressure sensor?” versus “What’s the installation process for my pressure sensor?” could lead to different responses. Because of this, prompt design quickly became one of their main focuses.

To help the agent understand real customer language, the team created a list of sample questions with different ways people might ask the same thing. They used this list to test the agent, making sure it could recognize and respond to questions no matter how they were phrased. When they noticed issues or confusing answers, they would go back and rewrite the prompts to be clearer. Sometimes that meant changing the order of the words or using simpler language.

The team learned that good prompt design isn’t a one-time task. It takes paying attention to patterns, testing different versions, and making small changes that lead to more reliable answers. Over time, this process helped Agentforce have smoother, more accurate conversations with customers, no matter how the question was asked.

For Endress+Hauser, the real power of Salesforce lies in its ability to deliver a limitless workforce that provides the right knowledge to the right person at the right time through the combination of Agentforce and Data 360. Equally important is that the Headless 360 platform is built to be open and flexible, supporting Endress+Hauser’s business-critical systems that are not native to Salesforce. Whether it is SAP for order and customer data or IoT instrumentation insights from Heroku, Endress+Hauser can bring essential information into one unified platform and unlock new value from existing investments. Both digital and human workers can now take action on real-time insights from these systems, such as installed base, delivery status, and product history, to serve customers around the world with greater transparency, efficiency, and personalization.

“We’re a global company and one of our strengths is that we’re across the world but we can be consistent in our delivery everywhere,” said Barss. “That transparency of data, transactions, and customer touch points is one of the big gold nuggets from Salesforce.”

By giving teams the tools and knowledge they need, Endress+Hauser is helping customers enhance their own products and processes and shaping a more efficient, reliable future for industrial automation.