Salesforce is launching new AI tools for the telecoms industry with five new prebuilt AI agents as part of a suite named Agentforce for Communications.
The CRM company’s customers are saying that using Agentforce has led to $5.6M in savings; more than 300 hours freed up for staff; 87% of customers’ FAQs being resolved; and average call handle times being cut by half.
5 New Prebuilt Agents Explained
Agentforce for Communications aims to replace manual processes like data retrieval for telecoms employees through the use of five new pre-built agents.
The Billing Resolution Agent can provide deep analysis on bills by harmonizing fragmented data from third-party systems. This, Salesforce says, delivers clarity for consumers and eliminates needless exchanges where AI tools or human employees don’t have the proper context to resolve issues. With the billing agent dealing with these issues, more time is freed up for service reps to tackle high-priority escalations, Salesforce says.
The second prebuilt agent, the Service Level Objective (SLO) Insights Agent, helps with delivering promised services like fiber uptime or repair speeds, running comparisons on real-time network usage against compliance targets. Account owners are provided with a breakdown of the root causes behind failures.
Agentforce’s new Quoting Agent helps sales reps come up with complex quotes quickly, based on customizable business rules and logic. By applying the customer’s pricing accurately, high fallout rates can be avoided, and the “hassle of manually building a quote” need not mean that orders fail in the middle office because of technical incompatibility, Salesforce says.
The Site Grouping Agent allows for the automation of configuring quotes and applying common offers for big deals. The Agent takes natural language instructions and suggests groupings based on location and serviceability at certain spots. Multisite quotes can thus be created quickly and accurately, without employees having to sort through spreadsheets.
Finally, Salesforce’s Guided Selling Agent instantly generates “technically valid” upsell and cross-sell quotes for field service technicians when they visit customers, allowing them to suggest personalized recommendations while on-site.
Summer Collins, Chief AI and Data Director, One NZ, said that use of Agentforce resulted in a 4x increase in engagement over traditional digital and physical channels.
Pablo Silva, Director, Customer Fulfillment, at Telecom Argentina company Personal, said that the company uses Agentforce to “guide technicians in real time”, proactively detecting and resolving service issues, targeting a 20%-30% reduction in support calls.
Ryan Asdourian, EVP and Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, Lumen Technologies, said: “Our transformation from a legacy telco to a modern technology company required us to dismantle decades of technical debt and a ‘Frankenstein’ infrastructure.”
He added that building an “agentic enterprise” on Salesforce has meant moving to “radical automation”, saving $5.6M in the first year alone, with Agentforce saving more than 300 hours of productivity from staff every week.
Marco Gaeta, Chief Information Technology Officer, Telepass, said that autonomous agents are resolving 87% of customers’ frequently asked questions and reducing average call handle times by 50%.
Final Thoughts
Those are some strong metrics cited by the customers, but a hint of skepticism is always welcome for these reviews. Firstly, Salesforce has put forward these customer success stories itself, so there’s an obvious selection bias element there.
Second, methodology isn’t explained in many of them – we’re lacking some context on what baseline was measured, the time period over which it was deployed, and whether these were pilots or full-scale deployments.
Announcements of new Agentforce capabilities and features are hardly rare coming from Salesforce these days, but what sticks out is that common theme which has underlined so much of the discussion around AI in recent years: “Freeing up time” for employees. Salesforce executives often talk about “humans and agents working together”, and that’s the company’s consistent messaging about what an “agentic enterprise” looks like.
In any case, Salesforce is positioning Agentforce for Communications as an essential tool for telecoms companies to save hundreds of hours in employee time, cut millions of dollars through efficiency boosting, and handle a huge amount of customer queries.
