Salesforce Adds AI and Automation to Service Cloud

Salesforce has added artificial intelligence-powered workflows and contact center innovations in Service Cloud.

New workflows built into the Customer 360 platform enable customer service teams to predict, route, and solve customer needs. Additionally, the platform is adding digital contact center innovations for video, chat, voice and workforce engagement.

"The businesses that have thrived over the last 18 months are those that embraced digital tools to deliver excellent customer and employee service experiences with trust and transparency," said Clara Shih, CEO of Service Cloud at Salesforce, in a statement. "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."

The new AI-powered workflows and automation empower service teams to respond to major incidents, automate how cases are routed, and eliminate repetitive tasks that bog agents down. New workflow capabilities include the following:

• Customer Service Incident Management accelerates resolution for major incidents, by helping companies detect, diagnose, and respond to service disruptions, proactively notify customers of a problem, and triage increases in cases, as well as provide transparency for customers and the operations teams working to resolve the root problem.
• Swarming automatically brings together designated internal and external experts in Slack to collaborate and solve major incidents and escalations.
• Integrations with partners such as PagerDuty, Datadog, Jira, and Cadalys.
• Omnichannel Flow built on Salesforce's workflow platform to create complex rules based on CRM data for routing cases, calls, messages, and chats across the service team and other departments. With OmniChannel, Einstein Case Classification, and Einstein Article Recommendation in Flow, Service Cloud can now analyze incoming cases and automate routing to the best queue, agent, or process  and auto-respond to customers with relevant articles.
• Robotic process automation capabilities for Service Cloud from the recent Servicetrace acquisition enable service teams to automate repetitive tasks such as look-ups and write-ins across legacy systems that lack APIs.

New digital contact center capabilities include the following:

• Einstein Conversation Mining helps continuously improve and optimize self-service channels and knowledge bases using natural language processing to identify the most common types of interactions with customers.
• Messaging for In-app and web now enables customers to start a persistent messaging experience, like SMS and WhatsApp, directly in a mobile application or on a website and pick the conversation up where it left off.
• Visual Remote Assistant now enables two-way video and audio for face-to-face conversations between agents or field technicians and customers,
• Workforce Engagement Intraday Management enables companies to close the gap between forecasted work and actual staffing needs.
• Service Cloud Voice brings together phone, digital channels, and CRM data in one central workspace for service agents. Service Cloud Voice now integrates with 10 partners on the AppExchange.