Creating the ultimate customer experience is no easy feat, irrespective of the industry or company-specific caveats. With artificial intelligence tools, options, and use cases evolving at record speed over the past year, it’s no wonder that more and more Salesforce customers’ curiosity peaks around how exactly these innovations translate into their CRM to ultimately elevate customer interactions.
One of the many potential answers is Agentforce Service Agent. In this post, we’ll deep dive into how you can get started, try out your use case, and how it benefits your team.
How Can Service Agents Help?
Agentforce Service Agents act as an additional team member, extending availability while accommodating customer requests at any time of day, around the clock. These AI-powered agents can be customized to align with your company’s policies, way of working, and even take action to complete a wide range of tasks, varying from the simpler instruction sharing to actually making changes across your systems.
By employing agents, humans can continue focusing on escalations and complex decision making, all while the customers can receive instant support – no delays, no back and forth, and most importantly, suitable for even the most intertwined support processes which heavily rely on documentation.
As a clear evolution from the well-known chatbots, autonomous agents empower your organization to scale rapidly, without compromising on quality or data security. What if you could experience all these, in your own instance, for free?
Get Started With Salesforce Foundations
If you are already a Sales or Service Cloud Customer on an Enterprise Edition or above, Salesforce Foundations can become your free gateway to experiencing the true power of Customer 360, right within the same trusted and deeply unified platform.
- Agentforce: 100,000 flex credits, Agent and Prompt Builders, Sales and Service Agents.
- 200,000 Einstein Requests.
- Service: Service Console, Case management, Knowledge, Macros.
- Sales: Sales Console, deal management, quoting, meetings.
- Marketing: 2,000 monthly email sends, drag-and-drop email builder, built-in analytics.
- Commerce: 1 D2C Digital Storefront (for U.S. only), managed checkout, merchandising tools, Pay Now secure payment link, Commerce Cloud analytics.
- Data Cloud: Unified profiles, data services, and storage credits, 10,000 annual segmentation credits.
- Salesforce Platform: Salesforce Platform login license, 600 annual logins with 30,000 credits, Agentforce extended to occasional users.
Keep in mind that after enabling Foundations, the entitlements can be monitored with ease directly within Digital Wallet Consumption Cards – this ensures that you have visibility into your consumption and can adapt accordingly, by providing a production and sandbox breakdown.
Create and Customize Your Agent
Before creating an agent, make sure that Einstein is turned on within Einstein Setup. This setting applies to everything you may want to leverage generative AI for within Salesforce, be it agents or just prompts, for example. When it comes to Agentforce specifically, it also needs to be turned on within the dedicated Setup page named Agentforce Agents.
While it may not be mandatory depending on the use case, it would be a good idea to also set up Data Cloud before proceeding. This grounds the agent even further with unstructured data such as written documentation, and taps into additional functionality.
By choosing to create a new agent, you will be redirected to a step-by-step, intuitive interface that will allow you to iron out everything that should be input from the get-go. You will need to add a description and determine the role of the agent, as well as provide information about the company and choose or create the agent User.
The building blocks of Agentforce agents are Topics and Actions. These ensure that the agent operates within the guardrails you set in the form of instructions and that the agent will only make the changes it is authorized to make.
The easiest way to think about these is that Topics are the jobs to be done, such as managing reservations, and each Topic can have one or more Actions related to it for the agent to actually complete the job. The decision-making process is ensured by the instructions provided, as that is how the agent will know when to make use of each capability. Make sure to take a look over the best practices for writing the instructions before starting to make changes.
When creating the Service Agent, you can choose to add the out-of-the-box Topics and related actions, but since every business is different and has its own processes, tailoring the agent is key to obtaining the desired responses and behavior. Within Agentforce Builder, you can either start tweaking the existing Topics and their instructions or create your own, and also add or remove actions as needed. Custom actions can be easily created on the fly, as long as an available Prompt Template, Autolaunched Flow, API, or Apex invocable method exists.
The main advantage of an autonomous agent is availability, especially when it comes to simple scenarios (such as a booking cancellation). Instead of having to navigate through different tabs and screens, customers can easily provide the booking reference and ask the agent to cancel it, all within the conversations screen, with natural language, powered by Agentforce and Flow.
Similar to any other change you make within Salesforce – especially when it’s customer facing – agents should also be properly tested to ensure everything works as expected. While you can always chat with the agent within Agent Builder and review its reasoning and choices within the Plan Tracer (middle section within the builder), Agentforce Testing Center allows you to cover more scenarios and easily pinpoint the failures for further testing and tweaks.
When creating the test, you can set the conditions by easily applying the context variables, and you can opt to upload the test cases as a .csv file following the provided template. You can also use AI to generate a set number of test cases for one or more of your topics. Once the evaluations are selected and the test is run, you can focus on any failed tests and make changes accordingly until the desired output is achieved.
Following the customization and testing. When the agent is ready to go, it’s time to make it available across your preferred channels for your customers to start interacting with it. This could mean connecting it to Messaging, or directly to Email, leveraging Omni-Channel Flows for routing to and from the agent.
Translate More Use Cases into Agents
Agentforce Agents can help your organization deliver outcomes no different than your team would, across different channels, in a multitude of unique scenarios. Irrespective of the tasks you will decide to explore, Salesforce Foundations credits should be sufficient to get you started. You can start driving long-term value with hybrid teams today, where service reps and agents work together towards delivering a top-notch customer experience, faster than ever before, and around the clock – here are a few tips to get started!
While exploring Agentforce, you can also choose to use the functionality for your internal users in order to assess both sides of the coin – an enhanced customer experience with the Service Agent on one side, and a seamless user experience within your CRM with a Service Assistant or an Employee Agent on the other. All in all, there are as many possibilities as there are processes within your org.
Final Thoughts
Humans and agents can drive success together, and Salesforce Foundations is here to ensure that more Salesforce customers can experience Agentforce and Service Cloud innovations at no additional cost, within their own org and setup.
Whether you’re an existing Sales Cloud customer on an Enterprise edition or above, or a new customer looking forward to purchasing Enterprise Editions, the Foundations offering is a clear path to experience other products and features without the hassle of having to make any purchasing decision.
Are you already making use of Salesforce Foundations? Let us know about your experience in the comments section below.
