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All right.
Hello and welcome
everyone to our session today
all about how to provide
AI-first service in 2025.
We are so excited for you to be
joining us
as we dive deeper
into the future of customer service.
My name is Christina Keohane,
and I'm on the Service Cloud product marketing team,
and I'm very happy to be joined
by two incredible leaders.
First off,
we have Kishan Chetan
who is the EVP and GM of Service Cloud,
and we have Gal Oron
who is the CEO of Zoomin,
our strategic Salesforce partner.
So Gal, Kishan thank you so much for being here.
First off, how are you both doing today?
I'm doing great. Thank you Christina,
thank you for hosting us.
I’m very well. Thanks for asking.
Hi Christina. Hi Kishan.
Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Amazing.
Yes. Thank you again for both joining us.
I'm really looking forward for this conversation.
It’s on a great topic. And again,
appreciate you both being here.
I'd love to talk a little bit about what
the future of service looks like.
And looking ahead to 2025,
what are some of the key trends that
you both foresee in customer service?
And as a follow up question to that,
you know,
how is Zoomin partnering with Salesforce
to really make these evolving demands?
So, Kishan, I'll pass it to you first
and then, Gal,
I'd love to get your perspective as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think look,
our perspective is,
customer service is really in the on
the cusp
of one of the biggest opportunities
for transformation for service leaders.
It's, it's
really a fantastic time
to be a leader
in customer service,
because, you know,
you get to imagine a world where
all of your service starts
to become far more proactive
from reactive.
Imagine a world
where you have digital agents
powered by AI,
which you know,
need to be powered by knowledge.
Working along with human agents
to truly provide
differentiated service.
So the human agent
can actually focus on the harder stuff,
which, again,
needs a lot more knowledge to help go
solve and help
build relationships with customers.
And all of this really helps kind of,
you know, move
service from being a cost center
to more more of a profit center
and help drive growth.
In fact,
when we looked at our state of service,
report that, you know, Salesforce does,
one of the key trends was,
increasing kind of, you know, objective
for the service teams
to focus on growth and revenue
and driving a lot more proactive service
and using AI in a bigger way.
So I think that's where, you know, that's
like really excited about some of the key
trends and service that we are speed.
And as I said,
you know,
in order to do great AI,
whether that's AI for digital agents
operating autonomously,
tackling, you know,
some of the easier problems
or for human agents
to be far more productive,
you need to have good knowledge.
You need to have knowledge of like,
what do the products do?
What do the services do?
what are the policies
of your organization?
And the reality of the mattress?
That knowledge is just not in one place.
It spread all over,
all over
in different silos and files
and SharePoints and whatever. Right.
And bringing it all together
and providing like the right insights to,
you know, the agent,
is super crucial, right?
Whether that's customers
looking for help on a self-service side
or an agent in a contact center
looking for information.
People want answers, right?
They don't want links.
They don't read through
a lot of documents.
And they want this,
like underline
powering the answers
to come from everywhere.
So that's the reason why Zoomin
is very crucial
for us
as a part of our overall knowledge story.
and, you know, for
AI to be successful again,
to repeat, for the AI to be successful,
having knowledge is crucial.
And the reality is
knowledge is everywhere.
And bringing it
all into one place in Salesforce
so you can go execute
that is very important.
And that's where Zoomin plays
a fantastic part.
So I couldn't agree with you more, Kishan.
We're in a difficult market, and,
the combination
of tough economy and demanding customer.
It's hard to navigate.
The way I see it.
Last year was,
pretty much a year of PoCs
regarding to AI.
Companies were playing with
AI pretty much like a science project.
And today, companies understand that
AI is the key to scale.
Now, if we
we go back a few years
to the peak of the tech crisis.
Companies including us were asked to
prioritize efficiency
pretty much over anything else.
And today, I think we all realize that
AI is the,
in many ways, the answer to our prayers.
I mean, it makes doing more
and doing better
was less actually achievable.
I think it's not surprising.
I actually also read about this
in a recent Forbes article.
Service is the number one area
for enterprises AI spend.
Almost 60% of the companies
are explicitly investing
in active service projects,
which I think it's,
it's an amazing figure.
The other trend
that I want to talk about,
I think is a huge one,
is that AI is
pretty much hitting the data wall,
and differentiation in AI moves
from the AI technology
to the data fueling it.
If you look into it, core AI
technology is commoditized
and becoming
better, cheaper, faster
every day, every week.
Vendors are quickly adding more and more
AI features.
But if you dive into this,
AI is only as good as the data
that's being fed with.
You can actually see those companies
just hitting the data wall.
I mean, they're using
the best engine out there,
but a lot of the time
there are just aren't
seeing the impact they were hoping for.
And the big thing here
is that with the commoditization
of AI infrastructure
and the emergence of shadow
AI anywhere in the enterprise,
the only asset
that can make them uniquely stand out
is their proprietary enterprise data,
and especially knowledge.
Only once they're able
to plug in their own data,
that's when they can maximize
the potential of the technology.
And that's how I see the new frontier
for customers and for vendors.
How can you easily bring the right data?
So AI provide the best bang for your buck?
I mean,
Gal, couldn't agree more with you.
I mean,
any AI discussion
I've had with any service leader
or any organization
turns into a data discussion.
And one thing to kind of like, you know,
totally agree with that, and one thing
to also add a little bit
in the context of service, it's data
and it's unstructured data,
which is like super, super critical
because a lot of like the
the purpose of knowledge
that lies within an organization
is like in documents,
on websites and manuals
or in like text messages
and notes on like,
you know, case objects, etc.
that ability to like
take that data
and do something with it, that's great.
I mean, like,
you could have the best AI tech,
but if you don't have the right data,
how even to actually have
the right personalized
service conversation.
So couldn't agree
more on the data part
because, you know,
if you want to go drive,
better digital agents
and human agents being productive
and working together
without data and unstructured data,
they just can't work.
So totally agree with that.
Thank you Kishan.
Christina, you also mentioned
the Unified Knowledge Partnership
and what Kishan mentioned
basically leads to this.
So first, we are very, very
proud of this partnership.
Salesforce is
definitely leading the world
in terms of AI in general
and specifically AI for customer service.
And Einstein for service
has been fastest to market.
And that's very, very impressive.
So we have witnessed this speed
firsthand as a Salesforce partner.
And we've been amazed
by the pace of innovation
of Einstein and Data Cloud over the last
two or so years.
Now, when you look at the Service Einstein,
you have over 20
predictive and generative capabilities
that are completely changing
the way
customers are self serving
and support reps are handling cases,
but you can give customers
the best enterprise
AI in the world.
If they're not able to easily connect
their proprietary enterprise knowledge,
the AI results are
just not going to be there.
They're going to be too generic
and therefore the value is very,
very limited.
And then you find yourself in a place
where you have customers
which are using this great engine,
but are just choking it
by not having the fuel they
they already have
and built in their company
and it just waiting to be used.
And that's exactly what this partnership
between Salesforce
and Zoomin is, is all about then.
With Zoomin, Einstein
just got even smarter.
Now every Salesforce customer
can easily get Einstein
to ground on their knowledge
and get really, really specific and grab
an answer instead of generic ones.
And all of that from their confluent
from their SharePoint,
Google Drive, documentation site,
customers forums.
So in essence,
we're able to give Einstein the fuel
it needs to be even greater
than what it already is.
I think that is amazing.
First off,
both of you,
thank you so much for sharing those key trends.
Everything that you mentioned,
obviously from data,
bringing it together,
the data really does fuel the AI.
So I think these are great
for the audience to hear.
And in addition, obviously
bringing in all those
knowledge, resources and structure
at the unstructured data
also fuels,
you know, customers
being able to help themselves.
And and you both touched on this around
self-service really being something
that is also shifting
the service, you know, strategy
today, with a lot of customers
preferring self-service
as that first line of support.
So I'd love if
maybe you could each elaborate a little bit
more on
how you think,
or how you recommend organizations
start to think more about
evolving their self-service offerings
to meeting,
like everything
that you just mentioned
about coming with AI in 2025.
So Gal, if you want to
maybe a little bit of flavor
and then we'll pass it back to Kishan.
Christina that's a great question
because I think that those organizations
who want answered
this question will just stay behind.
And to me,
it all starts with the emphasis on trust.
In general,
trust is achieved
by consistency and accuracy.
And in my opinion,
customers are just not going
to truly adopt self-service
if they don't trust the answers
that they're being given
are the most accurate
and up to date ones.
And as I said earlier,
trust is only possible
when you're leveraging the right data.
And the other part
is that
organizations will get self-service
closer to the product.
In the past,
product would largely be separate
from the service experience.
I mean, you would use the product,
hit a wall and then go to a support site.
That was that was the past.
But the more and more companies
implement Smart Copilots
in their products today,
and these copilots are pretty much
all encompassing.
I mean, they will guide you
through the product,
recommend relevant help
content, allow you to submit cases, and
and even offer you to automate your work.
So in the past, for example,
a customer would be wowed
if they could just say,
how do I set up a template?
And then they would get an answer detailing
this process of the template set up.
But today, that's just not enough.
I mean, savvy companies are already
introducing next generation
of in-product service.
So now when a customer will ask
how do I set up a template?
The in-product Copilot
will not only answer the question
based on the company's knowledge,
but would actually offer you
to do the work for you
and to set the template for you.
So in essence, today service,
whether it's assisted or unassisted,
is now
has a much deeper, broader
context that just wasn't there before.
Kishan, what about you?
Yeah, no, I mean, look, I agree
with a lot of the points
that Gal made, but the headline,
I think
if you don't offer
compelling self-service,
then you're getting left behind
because you're
just not providing enough service
and you're not scaling.
And, you know,
there's a lot of other aspects
associated with self-service
because often it's associated with cost.
But it's not just cost.
It's actually meeting the customer
where they are.
Like when I want to find out information
about something,
I might get that inspiration
to find that information
at 10 or 11 in the night.
Maybe that's my problem.
But, you know, at that point of time,
I want to have somebody
in the contact center.
I want to find information
when I want to find it,
where I want to find it.
So that becomes very important.
But if we took a step back,
I think the way
customers use self-service
really depends on their business, right?
Like if you're in a business like,
you know, you're in logistics or,
you're in delivery or you're in, retail,
you want to find out information
about your order or what you placed.
That's fantastic for self-service,
make it really easy
to find the information.
And trust is really important.
So if I find out information
about my order.
But it's the wrong order
or the wrong product or the,
you know, the self-service
agent can't understand that
I'm looking for this product
and it's asking me for like a 12
digit order ID,
then, you know,
that's not really effective.
So,
in those examples,
the usage and the usability
becomes really important.
And the ability for the self-service
to have good human like conversations
makes it much more relatable.
Now, there are certain industries
where you want self-service,
but you want that to be also
very closely and nicely
married to assistant service,
because you want to use a self-service
as like a portal to get them in.
But after that, you perhaps
want to have a rep to go build,
better relationships drive more.
So in that case,
the self-service
also being very seamlessly engaged
with assisted service.
But both of them
saying the same thing, like,
if I'm looking for a question
about a product on a website, or on a,
or on a digital agent,
I should get the same answer
as I would from a human agent.
And I think having that,
consistent kind of service across
the board becomes very important.
So depending on your business,
you know, having meeting the customer
in the right channels
where they are
giving them faster answers,
not making them do additional work
like hitting links, etc.,
and then also having thinking
of your self-service holistically,
not just as a separate department,
but really
as a part of your entire
customer service.
So that you know
you have a holistic view of
like how you do
customer service
and how you do assisted service
becomes really crucial.
And I think that's
how companies
should start thinking about, service.
But I think just to reiterate it,
AI is going to be a key
part of self-service,
giving trusted answers in the
is going to be super crucial.
And you can provide
all of these trusted answers
in the right context
only if you have the right knowledge
beneath it, with data from,
you know, your CRM
as well as unstructured data
within CRM or anywhere else.
And that's where,
you know, Salesforce plus Zoomin
really comes into play and can be
can be a
really differentiated solution
to help out with this transformation.
I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into
Unified Knowledge specifically
and overarching,
you know,
how do you see Unified Knowledge
really helping empower your organizations
to meet those customer
expectations next year,
and to kind of double tap into that?
How does Unified Knowledge
really help bridge that gap
between those various data silos,
and what have we seen
so far as successful
after implementing Unified Knowledge
and this partnership coming together?
I mean, I think, look,
the Unified Knowledge,
like one of the biggest values
is truly bringing all of these
disparate sources of knowledge
and information across the organization,
whether it's in like, you know,
you know,
a SharePoint or a OneDrive or,
or a box, whatever it is.
Right.
Or in Cheetah, brining it all together,
that makes a huge difference.
But it's not just that.
It's taking that
and gathering insights from that, right.
Because quite often unstructured
data could have like an image
with some text on it
and that text could be really valuable.
So how do you
not only, like
get this data together,
but how do you get the right
kind of extract
the right insights over that data
so that that will be valuable
for the user?
And then finally, like making sure that,
that Unified Knowledge
manifests itself in the flow of work.
So that means that
if I'm in a self-service,
if I'm a consumer
looking for a self-service experience,
then I find the right answers there.
If I'm a human agent
providing service,
that I find the right answers
right in my console.
So having Unified Knowledge
manifests itself
right in the flow of work
so that it's seamless
for the user becomes super important.
I mean, we've had some fantastic,
customer stories, like,
I'm sure Gal will have a whole bunch,
but I think it's a real value.
is, you know,
I keep hearing it from our customers.
Several of our customers
are are growing really well,
and they just can't hire
quick enough to grow,
you know, to keep up with
the growth that they have.
So they have to do better self-service
or make agents productive.
We have customers
who have seen almost 90% productivity
in tasks like responding to a customer.
So basically,
what used to take
ten minutes
to respond to a customer query
because you had to look at like
all of these different places,
even do a swivel chair
like Gal was speaking about,
but actually get that all in one place
so they can respond quickly in a minute.
That makes a huge difference, right?
Both to customer satisfaction
as well as like
your own productivity
and ability to scale.
So it's really strong,
business metrics
where we are seeing Unified Knowledge
like truly power, both self-service
as well as assisted service.
Amazing. Thank you Kishan and Gal,
love to get your thoughts as well.
Unified Knowledge is
something we're all very proud of.
And Kishan, you're the proud father of all of this.
So Unified Knowledge
just went GA a few weeks ago
GA, general availability.
And it's been amazing.
And we have hundreds of company
already seeing the value of Einstein
augmented by their own
enterprise knowledge.
Now, if I go all the way back
to when we did the initial pilots
to the GA now.
We've seen amazing results
from many companies,
including companies like Unity, ARM, Sonos.
If I think get Unity as an example,
these guys are developing
the infrastructure
used by game developers to build the most
exciting game that we all love,
and know.
I mean the game that my kids love,
and know,
and their customers
are just very smart people.
They're technical, they're sharp,
and they require
quick and accurate responses.
To me, looking at
Unity, the most amazing figure
is that by using the combination
of Einstein Service Replies
and Unified Knowledge,
Unity reduced the time
it took to compile
a reply from 15 minutes to 1 minute,
and the result is the support
groups can now focus
on the higher value task,
and that means
better service to customers,
but just as important,
also a more fulfilling, morale boosting
role for the reps themselves,
which is very, very important today.
This is just,
you know, just the beginning.
it's great
to see
the success of Unified Knowledge so far
and just excited to see where
it can take us moving forward.
So thank you
both for sharing those insights
as we start to wrap up our session today,
one thing I'd love to leave
the audience with is just general advice,
from obviously
two really great leaders in service,
what you're seeing every day,
what advice would you give organizations
that are just looking to integrate
AI into their customer
service strategy effectively?
I actually think it's easier
now to implement AI for customer service,
but you just have to be smart
and disciplined.
And Kishan,
I think we both have seen organizations
do it very, very well.
So I have just two pieces of advice.
The first one is their own
avoid building in-house
if you can get it from your vendors.
Yes, there are some domains
where AI model
have to be extremely specialized
and trained to provide substantial value.
But generally speaking,
customer service is not one of them.
And I've seen companies
spend a fortune and waste
months and months
of building internal service,
AI implementation and training model
just to find out one morning
that the new model that just released
by OpenAI is getting better results
out of the box
compared to the precious science project
that we had.
And I think that's
just the way it is now.
LLMs are becoming
faster, cheaper,
better every day,
so you should expect
your existing vendors
to give you all that.
If they can't or they're too slow.
I would just look for another vendor.
And the second advice is around
getting your data ducks in a row.
And what I mean by that,
in making sure that the mature data
integration is ready either before
or during the implementation of AI.
Don't allow a lag period
where customers are interacting
with an immature AI assistant,
because that's the exact recipe
to lose your customers
spec as they'll immediately
go somewhere else.
Thank you Gal, appreciate that.
And Kishan, what about you?
Great advice Gal?
I mean, we've been speaking
to a lot of customers and,
in several cases, the same customers.
I think, look.
Great points from Gal.
I think a few
couple of things that I would
I would mention.
One is, look,
there's a lot of,
you know, pressure
and focus on AI all the way from,
you know,
the C-suite and, you know, energy
that's coming all the way from your CEO,
like likely service leaders
and IT leaders are hearing it.
but all of you also come
with understanding of what the ROI is.
And that's where I really want
to emphasize
on the fact that,
you know, there's AI
which has different flavors,
starting with projects that are
more turnkey, like take Salesforce,
they have like very clear
out of the box
AI that's delivered as a part of service, right.
Whether that for service replies,
whether that's for summarization,
whether that's in self-service
agent assisted service,
that makes it very easy.
But at the same time,
when you do internal
these out of the box solutions,
all these do it,
with with a platform approach as well.
What I mean by that is having the right
data, as Gal was saying,
bad data,
you know,
you won't get like really good AI.
Second, provide the ability to like,
you know, fine tune
things just a little bit.
Not fine tune
the LLM models, but,
you know, fine tune
your implementation. Have the right,
experience, use
some of the platform capabilities,
like our prompt builder is fantastic.
And you might want to have
something specific for your business,
but doing it on Salesforce
platform will really reduce
the time it would take to code it.
But it becomes much more of configuration
and uses all of your data.
So turnkey AI solutions.
Right data in place,
but don't do a grand unification
of a data project right upfront.
You might have to do some of it,
but you can do it in pieces.
Get the right sources of knowledge
which are most important together
with Unified Knowledge.
Turn on the turnkey solutions.
Make sure that your users are
very involved.
They, you know, deliver value from it
and you clearly articulate the ROI.
And then with the platform approach,
if you need to do incremental changes
or incremental enhancements,
you can do it quickly.
And then over time,
you can start to kind of do
these bigger transformational
AI projects, which are super crucial,
but show success to your business
and your leaders
on how you can turn on
AI and get good business
value rather quickly,
and having the right turnkey solutions
and having the right data.
But based on the right,
you know,
Einstein 1 platform in our case
can really help to drive that changes.
Again, Kishan, Gal,
thank you both
so much for joining today
and for sharing such great insights
with our audience.
It's been such a wonderful partnership
with Zoomin and Salesforce
and I truly look forward to the future
and how we're going to continue
to help our customers
and their customer service
experiences in 2025.
And I want to thank everyone on the line
for joining today
for tuning into this session.
You can check out
more amazing service
content on Salesforce Plus,
and definitely stay tuned
for future content coming forward.
couple things
I did want to share with everyone.
If you haven't already,
we really recommend that you join
our Service Blazer community.
This is a great place
to network, meet,
and collaborate with service leaders
just like yourselves
to learn from one another.
So join that Service Blazer community
when you can. It's a great place.
I'm wearing the sweatshirt today.
I really love our community.
And then also if you want to learn
more about Unified Knowledge
and the new innovation that we launched
just a couple months ago,
check out our recording
of our virtual event,
Smarter Service Starts with Knowledge.
You can find this on demand
on Salesforce Plus,
and you can learn even more
about that product innovation
that Kishan and Gal
we're talking about today.
So thank you again
all for joining
And have a wonderful rest of your day.
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How to Provide AI-First Service in 2025
Special
Watch how Salesforce and Zoomin are partnering to help service teams create a foundation for their organization’s AI journey. Join EVP & GM of Service Cloud, Kishan Chetan, and CEO of Zoomin, Gal Oron as they share best practices and tips for how your org can prepare for the future of AI-first service.
Starring
- Kishan ChetanEVP & GM, Service Cloud, Salesforce
- Gal OronCEO and Co-Founder, Zoomin
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