Insider: How Salesforce plans to help customer service adapt to a post-pandemic world

Quick take: A story from Insider titled “The head of Salesforce’s largest business explains how the cloud giant plans to help customer service adapt to a post-pandemic world”  highlights Service Cloud growth and how it will be a huge asset for customers during the transition to a new normal. The coverage focuses on Salesforce’s announcement of the next generation of Service Cloud — technology to support changing customer service expectations and provide connected, personalized service from anywhere on one digital engagement platform. 

According to Insider:

• “As of last year, Service Cloud became Salesforce’s biggest business unit — larger even than Sales Cloud, the first product Salesforce built…Over the past year [Salesforce] has redesigned its customer service tool, which helps organizations allow customer service agents to work remotely, use artificial intelligence to speed up calls, and start in-person interactions online.”
• “When the pandemic hit last year, companies were desperate to retain their existing customers and they needed a way to offer customer service digitally once in-person interactions became restricted.”
• “Companies have to rethink how to train agents that might never step foot in a call center. To that end, Salesforce is adding a new Service Cloud feature that allows users to connect any phone service they use, including personal phones, to Service Cloud to record customer service calls. Previously, agents could only record calls if they were using Salesforce’s own phone service in Service Cloud, which is powered by AWS’s Amazon Connect. By recording the calls, agents can use Service Cloud’s artificial intelligence-powered analysis to bring up relevant details or instructions in real-time. Supervisors can also gather data from all the calls their agents conduct to figure out if there’s a common customer issue arising.”

More on the news: Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce Service Cloud, has written a column on Salesforce Newsroom focused on the digital transformation of customer service and the relaunch of Service Cloud. “The state of service has changed and many of the changes will be permanent,” she writes. Don’t miss the full column.