by twieberneit | Mar 20, 2019 | Analysis, Blog |
The News Today Salesforce announced the next release of its Service Cloud. It brings together more Einstein AI as part of the Service Cloud and adds Quip to it. This enables more agent empowerment and efficient work. In order to augment the tools with the necessary knowledge and soft skills, Salesforce also just launched Trailblazers for the Future, a program that is targeted towards increasing the soft skills of service managers and service agents. Einstein now is delivering reply suggestions as well as article suggestions to inquiries that the service representative can easily use to reply to questions. At the same time Einstein suggests so called next best actions that are designed to help increase satisfaction and unearth cross- and upsell opportunities. Additionally, Einstein now optimizes case routing leveraging machine-learning processes on the inquiry to find the ideal queue for processing it. Additionally, Salesforce embedded the collaboration tool Quip into the Service Cloud to increase productivity and to increase service agents’ access to knowledge. The press release is here but for your convenience you can read it below. The Press Release Salesforce Empowers Service Agents with Einstein AI and Quip for Service Service Cloud expands Einstein AI portfolio with new intelligent recommendation and routing capabilities so agents can spend more time where it matters most — building customer relationships and solving complex problems New Quip for Service boosts agent productivity with incident swarming and cross-team collaboration available directly in the agent console SAN FRANCISCO—March 19, 2019—Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, today announced new artificial intelligence and productivity solutions that empower customer service agents...
by twieberneit | Jul 23, 2018 | Analysis, Blog |
The News A few days ago Salesforce released a new iteration of its Service Cloud Einstein after infusing its artificial intelligence, Einstein, into the Service Cloud in February 2017. This release comes with three major enhancements to the Service Cloud: Einstein Bots for Service Lightning Flow for Service Einstein Next Best Action Einstein Bots for Service is providing the ability to easily configure chat bots that enable instant response to customers and a seamless handoff to customer service agents. Lightning Flow for Service gives companies the ability to automate processes with contextual, step-by-step guidance for fulfilling requests and resolving issues, using a graphical interface. Einstein Next Best Action is delivering intelligent recommendations and offers on any channel to increase customer satisfaction. While Einstein Bots for Service and Lightning Flow for Service are in General Availability since July 11, 2018, Einstein Next Best Actions will remain in a Pilot phase for some more time. The reason for this is that Salesforce wants to be double sure that this functionality is reliable. It needs a good amount of data and a good training set. And Salesforce cannot look into the data. The bots themselves do need to get trained and, once active, take feedback from the service agents. All three features work hand-in-hand. Salesforce uses a credit card scenario to make this point. When a customer goes to the web site for help the chat bot takes over and gathers the necessary contextual information and then escalates the issue to a customer service agent who continues the chat at the position the chat bot exited with all information available. A Lightning...
by twieberneit | Jun 14, 2018 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On June 13, 2018, during its annual Connections event, Salesforce announced a number of additions to their marketing cloud and their ecommerce and service clouds. The announcement goes into three main directions: Based on the strategic alliance that Google and Salesforce entered into in November 2017, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud will get a deeper integration with Google Analytics 360. Starting now it will be possible to combine Google Analytics 360 data and Salesforce Marketing Cloud data in a single customer journey dashboard within Marketing Cloud. Conversely, Google Analytics 360 can now leverage Marketing Cloud campaign data to better deliver targeted content to consumers. Both integrations enable a deeper understanding of customers and their behaviours. Later, in Q3 this year, Salesforce plans to offer a beta release of an integration that enables marketers to create audiences in Analytics 360 and to activate these audiences for engagement within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud Einstein gets a segmentation and a split capability. The segmentation ability enables the uncovering of patterns in consumer behaviour and the discovery of new audiences that then can get reached with personalized messages. The split capability enables marketers to create unique personalized journeys for each customer with simple means, getting an optimized path for them, based on the marketing objective. There are a number of innovations to enable engagement across touch points. First, Salesforce announces their B2B ecommerce ability, second the new interaction studio that enables the creation of contextually relevant engagements and experiences in real time and third, the broadened availability of Service Cloud LiveMessage in 17 more countries. Live Message enables companies to...
by twieberneit | Mar 9, 2018 | Analysis, Blog |
The News A few days ago Salesforce announced an update to its sales cloud that features Einstein powered predictions, insights, and productivity. The press release is linked above or alternatively you can read it below, along with some comments of mine. Salesforce is (again) addressing the three main issues that plague CRM implementations since Tom Siebel coined this term. Let me paraphrase them> Salespeople do not find the time to do their job, which is selling. Instead they are spending an inordinate amount of time entering data that supposedly only helps their management controlling them a little more. Sales managers do not have enough visibility into what is going on in their area of responsibility, what their team is doing (and why), whether they are doing the right thing. The same problem, of course, applies to the Head of Sales, just at a bigger scale. Sales operations is charged with creating meaningful reports that tell the one single truth. This they need to do using data that resides somewhere, data that is distributed, instead of some central consolidated place. Data that is essentially not fully trustworthy. Salesforce is doing this using a triple of features: The Salesforce resident AI: Einstein to help sales persons identify the most promising opportunities to work upon The Salesforce Inbox that increases productivity by attributing emails to the right accounts as well as connecting to the calendar Sales Analytics to help salespeople and their management to visualize, interpret, and use the available data The Press Release Ask any rep what their favorite part of the day is, and chances are that their answers...
by twieberneit | Nov 13, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
Now that the major waves of Dreamforce 2017 have settled, the announcements and a good part of the running commentary has been delivered, it is time for me to have a look at my pre-Dreamforce predictions. Having been briefed before the event but unluckily not been able to attend (nor having had the time to write this piece earlier, I now have the advantage of having had more ‘thinking time” and can put the main announcements that we were briefed on into a bigger picture. On the backdrop of an IDC study (sponsored by Salesforce) that postulates 3.3 million new jobs and an overall GDP impact of 859 billion dollar by 2022 in the “Salesforce economy”, the announcements basically revolve around one single topic: How to enable the employees (of Salesforce customers and partners) to deliver to this magnitude. They were around Easier consumption of AI technology with Einstein, and improved IoT support, Opening up Trailhead to Salesforce customers in order to support company specific learning maps Enabling Lightning, as the platform to become fully themed, i.e. embrace the customers’ brands. Although technologically different I club the ability to create and easily upload branded mobile apps to the app stores into this Collaboration using Quip, the software that Salesforce acquired about a year ago, and a new partnership with Google And in order to emphasize on the fact that they are serious about enabling people individually, Salesforce resuscitated the dot com prefix “my”. Thus myEinstein, myTrailhead, myLightning, mySalesforce, myIOT and mySalesforce got born. A topic that might be slightly overlooked is covered by two sentences in the announcement of...
