Salesforce has pioneered itself as Agentforce’s ‘customer zero’ ever since the beginning, with Agentforce now behind the operation of the CRM giant’s Help page. A page with plenty of traffic, and a solution that has since resulted in over 1.5M support requests being handled by artificial intelligence.
But, success like this often leads to an Icarus-esque approach of flying too close to the sun, and Salesforce found this out when it removed the search functionality from the Help page entirely – leaving all requests in the hands (or code?) of Agentforce.
What Happened?
On September 29, the search functionality on the Salesforce Help page was quietly removed, which quickly resulted in a help request ticket popping up on IdeaExchange – Salesforce’s official community request forum.
Salesforce MVP Tom Basset, the person behind the ticket, wrote:
“Search has been replaced with Agentforce which can produce unreliable results and takes longer to find the information you need. Turning Search back on would enable a UI that can be used to find trusted results and would give the power back to users as to whether they want to search using text or a conversation.”
News of this quickly got around, with the ticket itself obtaining 714 votes. Amit Singh, a responder on the thread, wrote: “Salesforce is trying to feed Agentforce to everyone and this is one of their immature product that they have released just to showcase that they are in the AI race. Many customers have stopped using Agentforce.”
Christina Gray, another responder, wrote: “Agentforce need not replace everything. Bring back the standard search. If it ain’t broke..”
“By Salesforce removing the search functionality from the Help site, it leaves Agentforce as the only way to get answers,” wrote Sarah Orens, another responder. “My experience with Agentforce has been less than stellar – conversations often take longer than necessary, and I rarely get the specific information I’m looking for on the first try.”
Heard Loud and Clear
Last Friday, Bernard Slowey, Salesforce SVP of Digital Success, wrote back in the thread to explain that Salesforce had heard the message “loud and clear.”
“We know how important Salesforce Help is to your daily work,” he wrote. “The decision to remove the search bar was based on data analysis that showed an average of only 1.7% of Help sessions engaging with search, with trends pointing down. With our focus on enhancing the Agentforce experience and a belief that we could streamline the customer journey, we felt this was a logical step forward.
“You’ve made clear that even with low usage, the search bar is a critical tool for many of you, and that removing it created friction in your workflow. We hear you.”
He explained that search functionality would be returning to the Help page and that, over time, the goal was to implement search functionality directly in Agentforce.
As of the time of writing, the original search bar is not yet back, and a ‘Search with Agentforce’ option remains.
The Lessons Learned
Bernard insisted that Salesforce had decided to remove the search bar from the page, as less than 2% of Help sessions were engaging with the search. However, as customer Jason Clark put it in the thread, it could be possible that a lot of sessions start with Google Search and progress from there, where additional internal search functionality is needed.
Not only that, but according to Salesforce, the way requests are handled has been somewhat split, as over 1.7M requests have been handled by Agentforce, but over 1.3M requests have been handled by humans.
Could this move have been to try and improve Agentforce usage numbers by leaving customers with just one viable option? Possibly. But at least for now, the community has made it clear that this is not an option.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce is undoubtedly facing monumental pressure to solidify Agentforce as a functional, purposeful tool – this much we can infer. But removing functionality without taking into consideration the needs of the different levels of the ecosystem is definitely not the best way to approach this.
However, Salesforce’s response was quick and indicated that the cloud giant is listening, which indicates that community feedback is valued – something that a lot of people will be observing and looking for as we approach Dreamforce.
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