Salesforce.com is using artificial intelligence (AI) to add an ounce of prevention to customer service.
This week the San Francisco-based customer relationship management (CRM) giant released Service Cloud Einstein, a new platform that lets companies use artificial intelligence to streamline the increasingly labyrinthine paths required to deliver the omnichannel experience consumers demand without disrupting the process for either users or businesses, by giving them a set of AI-based tools they can use to ensure customers receive the best available care without anyone – caller, call centre supervisor, call centre employee – lifting an extra finger.
“With Service Cloud Einstein, every service employee gets smarter and has access to the insights needed to resolve any service issue quickly and… deliver a connected, personalized customer experience,” Salesforce wrote in a Feb. 13 press release.
The three components of Service Cloud Einstein include:
Einstein Supervisor, which gives contact centre supervisors real-time data such as agent availability, queue length, and estimated wait times, which they can then use to assign more attendants or increase customer satisfaction in other, more unexpected ways.
For example, by observing that a majority of calls are coming from customers who purchased a specific dishwasher model, a call centre supervisor could discover that every case involves a dishwasher made during a three-month period at a single factory. The supervisor could then alert management, who could then notify other affected customers and begin deploying other employees to fix all of the potentially affected dishwashers – thus preventing a potentially much larger issue.
Einstein Case Management, which uses machine learning to automatically classify and escalate cases as they arrive, often while attaching relevant information such as articles or videos that might help agents resolve the issue.
For example, a disgruntled customer calling a networking device company could be asked a series of basic questions by a bot, such as the reason for their call or the serial number on the affected device. After gathering this information, Einstein Case Management could then know the customer’s home networking gateway isn’t working, and some possible reasons this could be the case, before routing the call to the next available agent with sufficient knowledge – ensuring the first voice a customer hears is one who can solve their problem.
According to Salesforce, this process increases not only customer satisfaction but agent job satisfaction, since it means agents can spend more time resolving customer issues and less time asking routine questions.
Finally, Intelligent Mobile Service allows companies to provide mobile employees with an iOS– or Android-based connected service app that allows them to deliver personalized service anywhere
For example, a solar panel repair request can intelligently be assigned to the best person for the job based on expertise and proximity. The app then provides the assigned field technician with the customer’s history, their service issue, and the parts required to resolve the job. The technician can then be sent wherever the parts are available, before arriving at the customer’s house with everything needed to fix their solar panels.
As for pricing and availability, Einstein Supervisor combines Salesforce’s existing Omni-channel Supervisor product with its Analytics Cloud Service Wave analytics app and Smart Data Discovery, all of which are generally available already.
Einstein Case Management will be available in a pilot version later this year, at which time pricing will be announced, while Intelligent Mobile Service, also referred to as Field Service Lightning, was released on Feb. 13 and starts at $150 USD per user, per month for organizations that have at least one Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition Service Cloud license.
To learn more about Service Cloud Einstein, you can also visit Salesforce’s Service Cloud website.
