The News
On June 17, 1019,
Salesforce announced an enhancement of its customer service
abilities by adding further channels for customer service and adding chatbot
capabilities to these channels. This has the goal of offering the ability to
create a more seamless service experience by offering engagements on the
channels that consumers use. For your easier reference here comes the
announcement.
Expanding our Digital Customer
Service Capabilities with New Channels and Bot Innovations
Author: Meredith
Flynn-Ripley, VP of Digital Engagement, Service Cloud
Disconnected
customer service experiences are still far too common. Almost everyone has had
to repeat basic information during routine interactions with companies, or
found themselves unable to get answers to fairly simple questions on the
channel of their choice. In fact, only 16%
of consumers say companies excel at delivering connected experiences.
I am happy to
report times are changing, for two reasons. First, companies are realizing
service can be their main competitive differentiator, and second, today’s
empowered and vocal consumers refuse to tolerate bad service. 57%
of customers will stop buying from a company not because
they don’t like their product, but because a competitor provides better
service. Today’s customer demands service on their terms, uses an average
of 10 different channels to connect with companies — including messaging, chat, social, email
and phone — and expects a personalized and consistent experience across all of
them, every single time.
Salesforce empowers
companies to deliver on these expectations, with a complete customer
service platform that powers connected customer experiences across channels from one
central console. And today I’m excited to announce new innovations in Service
Cloud that make every digital customer service interaction seamless regardless
of whether you are interacting via the web, messaging apps, chat or otherwise.
Expanded reach across digital channels
Say goodbye to the
static “Contact Us” page. Our new channel menu gives customers an easy way to
start conversations with companies on their preferred messaging and chat
channels like, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or web chat, as well as
traditional channels like voice. It can be embedded anywhere in a website
including high traffic areas like checkout or home pages. And the channel menu
can be set up with as little as four clicks, letting companies avoid expensive
and time-consuming development work so they can get up and running right
away.
And, with our newly
added support for WhatsApp and WeChat as well as existing channels like
Facebook Messenger and SMS, companies can reach more customers through
messaging than ever before.
Automate service with Einstein Bots in more
places
Einstein Bots are
now available on multiple new messaging channels including SMS, Facebook
Messenger and WeChat. Einstein Bots empower companies to scale their digital
customer service by responding to customers immediately, automating routine
service requests, gathering basic information and seamlessly handing off the
conversation to human agents. And because they are connected to CRM data and
processes, and powered by machine learning and natural language processing,
Einstein Bots learn your business and get smarter over time.
With Einstein Bots,
you don’t have to be a data scientist to take advantage of cutting edge AI
capabilities. We’ve made the setup process easier than ever, with a new map
view that gives admins a visual guide to help design conversations, ensuring
customers won’t get stuck in a dead-end during a service interaction. Dynamic
routing directs customers to a specific queue based on their conversation,
ensuring customers are on the best path to quick resolution with the right
agents. And a new exact match capability lets admins quickly create intent
models that train Einstein Bots to quickly recognize what customers are asking
for and help them instantly.
These new
capabilities are making the service experience completely seamless. For
example, a customer looking to replace a credit card can go to their bank’s
website and easily access the channel menu. From there, they select the
messaging app they prefer, and once in that messaging app, an Einstein Bot can
quickly walk the customer through the card replacement process, handing off the
interaction to a human agent at any point if necessary.
This is just the
latest in a series of recent customer service AI innovations. In March we announced new AI-powered recommendation and routing
capabilities that make the service agent console more intelligent and the
agent’s job easier. And in April we announced an integration with Google’s DialogFlow that
extends the power of Einstein Bots.
Check this out
at Salesforce Connections 2019
These and other new
innovations will be on display this week at Salesforce
Connections 2019, the digital marketing, commerce and customer service event of the
year. Mark your calendar for the Service Cloud keynote, taking place Wednesday,
June 19, at 10 am Central.
● For more information about how Service Cloud
can help you reach customers across digital channels, go to www.salesforce.com/digital-channels
● Learn about Trailblazers for the Future, our training
program that gives contact center managers and agents the soft skills to keep
the human side of service alive in the digital era: https://www.salesforce.com/events/trailblazers-for-the-future/
Availability:
The Channel Menu
will be in pilot by Winter 2019. Messaging support for WeChat and WhatsApp, and
Einstein Bots for Facebook Messenger and WeChat are all now in pilot. All other
features listed are generally available.
The bigger Picture
The customer service
market is very contested. Apart from the tier one vendors there are a good
number of specialists which have their roots in developing solutions to enable
a seamless, cross channel customer service. There are the likes of Freshworks, Helpshift, Intercom, to name just very few. Most of
these smaller vendors are rightly positioned as best-of-breed vendors. Nearly
all of them claim their ability to easily integrate into an already existing
CRM system. Many of them harmonize with more than one of the top-tier CRM platforms
(aka suites). Whether the integration claims are right or wrong, and mostly
they are right, kinda sorta, this ability creates a serious threat for the
suite vendors, as there are enough companies that run multi-vendor strategies.
And once a vendor has a foot in the door it has drastically improved its
ability to increase the foot print, which usually goes on cost of the platform
vendor’s potential foot print.
Therefore it is
paramount for the platform vendors to offer functionality and services that are
good enough and come at a reasonable price point. And in contrast to other
business areas like e.g. marketing it is very easy to show value in customer
service.
MyPoV and Analysis
The basic assumption
that underlies this announcement is spot on. Customer service is still
adversely affected by lacking channel integration. This makes engagement
difficult for both sides as an ongoing interaction in context is made more
difficult than necessary. The result is a poor customer experience, as the sum
of all individual experiences is poor.
Today’s customer
expects to be able to be engaged with a brand/business a seamless, channel
agnostic way. As I have said and written before, operationalizing Paul Greenbergs very valid definition of customer engagement:
Customer Engagement is the ongoing interaction
between company and customer using contact points that are offered by the
company and chosen by the customer.
This basically means
that companies are wise to offer those contact points (which is more than
described by the term touch points that has been usurped by marketing)
that are preferred by their customers. As they are businesses they also need to
do this in an efficient way. A Salesforce research found that customers use ten
different channels to communicate with companies and that consistency across
these channels is paramount for them.
Times and again there
are studies finding that customers leave a brand for reasons of poor
experiences. While I do not fully agree to these studies (most of them are
commissioned or conducted by vendors) it can be safely assumed that extreme
experiences – good or bad – create lasting memories and therefore impressions
and that the most recent experience is the one that has the potential of
overriding older impressions. This is where customer service that can be easily
found and resolves customer issues with minimal friction for the customer comes
into play. It either corrects a poor experience or confirms an already good
one.
This is partly
addressed by this announcement and the underlying release. Partly, because
Salesforce will make it easier to engage on an increasing number of
communications channels, especially chat based ones that get increasingly
important. Salesforce also demonstrates some scenarios that stretch across
channels, like engaging via a web chat and then informing the customer about
the upcoming appointment or allowing to change it via text messages. However,
the caveat is that the second part of the conversation that uses the other
channel – the information about the upcoming appointment – is initiated by the
bot, and not by the customer. I haven’t seen a scenario yet that allows the
customer to (arbitrarily) change the communications channel with the AI, not a
human agent, keeping track of the context. While this might be a stretch goal,
it is exactly where we need to get to.
This announcement is
not breaking news, but streamlining and an iterative improvement of Salesforces
already strong platform. Having said this, there are some useful enhancements,
including the upcoming channel menu, the additional channels, and the enhanced
visual conversation builder to define conversation flows. This drastically
reduces the need for data scientists when building AI capabilities inside the
company. Here Salesforce clearly closes a gap to specialists, like Cognigy or the former Recast.ai (now a part of SAP as SAP
Conversational AI), to name only two of them.
A good next step for
Salesforce could be the building of ontologies for specific topics and the
ability to help customers and agents to index and search structured and
unstructured documentation, like e.g. empolis does, which can lead to dramatic
improvements of search results and speed, which results in better experiences.
I’d also like to see a tighter integration between customer service and field
service, maybe even including a crowdsourcing capability, like the one SAP
acquired from Coresystems. This would fit well into Salesforce being a platform
company and into the trend of building ecosystems and even temporary ecosystems
to address customer issues. Einstein might even be a helper in lining up the
right partners.
Finally, let me
formulate a wish, which maybe comes from my German roots: Some of the topics
that were announced here are in pilot or will come later this year only. This
attempt at freezing a market only shows that the company is not ahead of the
curve here. I wish this kind of pre-announcement would not be applied that
much.
Just for the record:
Not only Salesforce exhibits this not so customer centric strategy.
But maybe Salesforce
wants to be better than the rest of the pack.
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