Concept: Salesforce has announced contemporary AI-powered automation and digital channel technologies for Service Cloud to boost features for service agents and customers. The first group of tools attempts to forecast, route, and address customer demands, while the second set — audio, video, and text capabilities for digital contact centers — allows consumers to contact them via the channel that is most convenient for them.

Nature of Disruption: The new Customer Service Incident Management tool in Service Cloud automatically links service cases that are related to the same issue, allowing teams to prioritize based on priority. Partner integrations power monitoring, alerts, and remediation pipelines, such as bringing the relevant specialists into a Slack channel to take action and inform customers on the resolution progress. Expanded automation with Flow, another new Service Cloud feature, gives service teams a greater degree of process automation by connecting operations across channels and external systems. To deflect cases and drive self-service, flows combine AI capabilities to triage cases, apply routing requirements, for instance, skill-based, queue-based, and direct-to-agent routing, and auto-respond to customers with articles. The Einstein Conversation Mining tool, which is optional, leverages natural language processing (NLP) to identify the most prevalent sorts of client interactions and makes recommendations for optimized operations, self-service channels, and other knowledge bases. Asynchronous messaging moreover joins Service Cloud’s call center solution, allowing consumers to start a chat in-app or on a website and continue up where they left off. The Visual Remote Assistant from Service Cloud now supports two-way video and audio for face-to-face conversations between agents and clients. For service agents, Service Cloud Voice updates bring together data from phones, digital channels, and customer relationship management in a single perspective.

Outlook: Customer service has perhaps grown more crucial than ever amid the pandemic. Customers are more inclined to buy from brands that provide excellent customer service. Many clients, on the other hand, would never do business with a company again after only one bad encounter. Salesforce announced new Sales Cloud capabilities for digital channels, including AI-powered insights and self-service choices, the day before the Service Cloud upgrades. Slack connection with Salesforce’s Customer 360 platform has been tightened, while Salesforce and Amazon have expanded their relationship to offer connectors and no-code apps.

This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk