Service Assistant: The Newest, Game-Changing Agentforce Skill

Regardless of industry or company size, customers expect to receive fast and accurate responses when it comes to support cases. Traditionally, customer service reps have had to spend time analyzing customer information and history – as well as any documentation – to return to the customer with a useful response. But what if reps had instant access to all the necessary information to help their customers immediately?

In this post, we will explore the newest out-of-the-box assistive capabilities Salesforce has developed for Service Cloud customers, as well as how they integrate with other products and functionality to enhance both the customer and the agent experience.

Agentforce for Service

In this new era of autonomous agents, Agentforce for Service is the first generally available Salesforce AI agent that automates the customer support process across key digital channels – all while being grounded in your company’s data to provide accurate responses around the clock.

While this AI agent can be everything you need, it is by no means the only tool that customers can leverage to infuse generative AI and supercharge their processes.

In real-life business scenarios, not all cases can or should be automated, as there are many situations where Salesforce customers prefer their support teams to engage directly for a more personal experience.

Repetitive and simpler cases, such as providing basic troubleshooting steps, can easily be handled by autonomous agents. However, Agentforce can do much more to augment human agents and boost their productivity – that’s where Agentforce for Service’s new out-of-the-box skill, Service Assistant, comes into play.

What Is Service Assistant?

The Agentforce for Service new skill, Service Assistant, is an assistive agent designed to save time for human service reps by leveraging Agentforce generative AI. It offers both a summary and a clearly outlined plan based on customer history and context to resolve and close cases faster than ever before – without having to leave the Case Record Page.

Following a successful pilot at the end of last year, Service Assistant will be available as a standard Lightning component to be added on the Case Record Page and is scheduled to go live as part of Salesforce’s Spring ‘25 release in February 2025.

Service Assistant combines the capabilities of CRM, Agentforce, and Data Cloud to offer a comprehensive experience for agents, management, and Salesforce professionals. This means that each service plan will be grounded in your organization’s knowledge base and data, which will be protected by the Einstein Trust Layer every step of the way – all while being personalized for each customer and case and adhering to company policies.

As you may already be aware, this is by no means the first assistive functionality available in Salesforce. Chances are, you have already used Next Best Action. The addition of new Agentforce capabilities is a clear improvement and evolution into an even more personalized approach to the same process of recommending suitable next steps to agents.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect is that the formulaic output and predefined rules are being replaced with a more dynamic and context-grounded output, which can be easily configured to offer far more flexibility.

Additionally, while Next Best Action would output one single step for agents to action, Service Assistant uses pre-defined topics, instructions, and actions to generate easy-to-follow multi-step plans, as well as enhanced analytics capabilities. All in all, it is a significant change worth exploring, even in comparison!

Supercharge Your Support Process With Step-by-Step Guidance

If we are to look at the highest level, an action plan is displayed on the Case record for your service agents to use to accelerate case resolution and assist the customer service reps.

What happens behind the scenes and in front of the agent is much more than just a list of items. These are the capabilities that make Service Assistant the next best thing to consider for your support organization.

Service Assistant:

• Analyzes case data and accounts for all of the customer’s engagement history and context. Has the customer reached out about this problem before? What solution have they been offered? What product or service are they using?
• Identifies a potential solution for the agent, minimizing any additional research time. Has this problem existed before? Is it covered in any Knowledge Article?
• Offers a summary and breaks down the solution in a step-by-step fashion directly in the agent’s flow of work on the case. Any new or more experienced human agent can generate a plan after reviewing the summary by (1) clicking the Draft Plan button, which (2) reveals the necessary steps to successfully close the case.
• Easily communicates with the customer through the built-in Einstein Email Summaries feature, which becomes available if they add the Email quick action to their Action Launcher Deployment and click on it (3). This can be done at any point during case handling.

Now that you’ve seen the agent experience, let’s take a look behind the scenes. You’ll see that Service Assistant leverages the same building blocks as Agentforce Service Agent. It is based on a set of topics, instructions, and of course, actions. While less complex and repetitive topics can be handled by Agentforce Service Agent, Service Assistant empowers customer service representatives to get the best of both worlds – a personalized plan suggestion and steps powered by Agentforce paired with human interaction.

Note that for Service Assistant, Agentforce instructions and actions make up the steps you saw in the example plan above. This means that your organization has the full flexibility of defining the desired process exactly as you need, and based on company guidelines to ensure policy compliance. Service Assistant dynamically matches the incoming case to the appropriate topic and displays relevant plan instructions based on case context and customer engagement history.

Salesforce has also accounted for an admin-friendly way to determine which cases should be using Service Assistant with the out-of-the-box Check Service Plan Eligibility flow template that will be delivered along with this feature.

This Autolaunched Flow will allow you to select the exact criteria which will determine whether the assistive agent generates the plan, allowing you to control the use of LLM calls and reduce unnecessary costs. The criteria can include a case’s origin, type, owner – practically anything you may consider from the Case object. You can find a breakdown of all the elements in the template and what can be configured here.

All that remains is for your customer service teams to enjoy the new Service Plans on eligible Case records, as part of the experience they are already familiar with, while Agentforce’s reasoning engine provides them with the most suitable plan for their current case, based on the processes and steps you chose to include within the instructions, topics, and actions. Additionally, your service teams can provide feedback for each plan, which your organization can use to further enhance the process and output.

Analytics

If the above functionality caught your eye, there is one more aspect you should be aware of: the readily available insights you can access when using Service Assistant. The in-depth reporting capabilities allow managers to deep dive into the service plans’ performance, efficiency, and of course, the positive or negative feedback provided by human agents on the output they were presented with.

Since a clear goal in support organizations is to reduce AHT and increase CSAT, real-time analytics can help you measure the impact Service Assistant has on the team’s KPIs and how much time is being returned to the team through its use. You can also further analyze Service Assistant performance by manipulating the raw data to create custom reports and dashboards suitable for your organization’s needs.

What’s Next?

It should come as no surprise that Salesforce’s AI offering will encompass more and more functionality, and Service Assistant is no exception. While the guidance plans you saw above will become generally available in the Spring ‘25 release, they are just the first iteration of what this product will be able to help your team achieve long term.

Actionable Plans and Conversational Plans are on Salesforce’s roadmap for Service Assistant, designed to further boost productivity with executable steps and provide flexible options allowing companies to choose the option that best suits their needs: whether it’s a simple guidance, a semi-automated, adaptive plan leveraging service rep input, or a turn-by-turn plan that dynamically updates based on real-time context. Since these are subject to change, make sure to keep an eye out for updates! 

Summary

The Salesforce Spring ‘25 release comes with great functionality waiting for you to explore. If Service Agent productivity, accelerated agent onboarding, or compliance are top priorities for your organization, Agentforce for Service’s new skill, Service Assistant, is certainly worth exploring – alongside the entire AI offering for Service Cloud.

With the possibility to accurately assist your support teams with clearly outlined plans and even automated actions (if desired), Service Assistant can be the key to resolving cases faster and enhancing customer and agent experiences, all while providing full visibility into key performance metrics.