Salesforce has announced their next wave of Service Cloud additions, which focus on incident management, extended Salesforce Flow automation, and voice/video/text capabilities. These will be showcased in the Service Cloud 360 keynote at Dreamforce ’21.
Did you know that 78% of consumers have needed to contact companies multiple times to address a single concern? Surging customer requests have resulted in shortages in available agents.
Hot on the heels of Salesforce’s Slack integrations announcement last month that followed a “remote, digital-first world” theme, let’s see how Service Cloud will power proactive, effortless experiences for service agents and their customers.
Service Cloud Automation Tools – Predict, Route, and Solve
The first set of innovations are automation tools to predict, route, and solve customer needs so agents can focus on delivering more personal service.
Customer Service Incident Management
Automatically connects multiple service cases on the same issue/incident (eg. a mass power outage). Teams can better classify and prioritize which to resolve first, based on impact and urgency.
Incident Management Swarming in Slack automatically brings the right experts into a single Slack channel to quickly take action and notify multiple customers simultaneously with status updates.
Partner integrations, such as PagerDuty for AIOps, will enable monitoring and alerts to provide a comprehensive incident management solution.
Incident Management generally available Winter ‘22; Swarming in Slack generally available Spring ‘22.
Extended Flow Automation
Flow brings a deeper level of process automation, and is easier for admins to connect processes across service channels and external systems.
Coming to Salesforce Flow:
- Intelligently triage cases (Omnichannel),
- Apply complex routing requirements — including skill-based, queue-based, and direct-to-agent routing (Einstein Case Classification),
- Auto-respond to customers with helpful articles to deflect cases, and drive self-service (Einstein Article Recommendations).
Omnichannel Flow generally available Winter ‘22, Einstein Case Classification and Einstein Article Recommendations in Flow in pilot Winter ‘22.
Robotic process automation capabilities (RPA) for Service Cloud
Service teams will be able to automate repetitive tasks such as look-ups and write-ins across legacy systems that lack APIs, thanks to the Servicetrace acquisition.
Generally available 2022, TBD.
Voice, Video, and Text Capabilities
New voice, video, and text capabilities let customers reach out in the most convenient channel for them.
Einstein Conversation Mining
Uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify the most common types of interactions with customers and recommend how to optimize their processes, self-service channels, and knowledge base.
In pilot Winter ‘22
Messaging for In-app & Web
Customers can start a chat over SMS, WhatsApp, in-app, or on a website and pick the conversation up where it was left off (even if the window is closed/toggle between app and browser, there’s no need to repeat contact information or restate the problem).
Generally available Spring ‘22.
Visual Remote Assistant
Two-way video and audio between agent or field technicians and customers, creating stronger relationships and personalized experiences for consultations with everyone from financial advisors, to doctors, to mechanics who can troubleshoot car problems remotely.
Generally available today.
Workforce Engagement Intraday Management
Closes the gap between forecasted work and actual staffing needs. Companies can improve customer experience and agent morale by adjusting employee schedules when things don’t go as planned, like if there is a severe weather incident and call volumes spike.
Generally available Summer ‘22.
Service Cloud Voice
Updates will bring together phone, digital channels, and CRM data in one central view for service agents. More information will be revealed at Dreamforce…
“The businesses that have thrived over the last 18 months are those who embraced digital tools to deliver excellent customer and employee service experiences with trust and transparency. With new AI and process automation for Service Cloud, as well as Slack to provide a digital hub to quickly resolve issues across teams and departments, we’re giving agents more time to focus on providing human-centric service and giving customers fast, proactive service to build trust and loyalty” Clara Shih, CEO of Service Cloud, Salesforce
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