Salesforce Service Cloud updated with AI-powered workflows

Recent acquisitions of Slack and Servicetrace appear to be paying off.

Chat with MarTechBot

Salesforce announced updates to their Service Cloud, including workflow tools powered by AI and contact center solutions.

The new workflows are built into the Customer 360 platform assisting customer service teams. Predictive capabilities allow reps, in some cases, to flag a problem before a customer is aware of it. The release also includes innovations for digital contact centers for video, chat, voice and workforce engagement that accounts for both the customer side and service employees.

New Salesforce Service Cloud Features

The new Customer Service Incident Management offering from Salesforce gets out in front of service issues by allowing teams to identify and track incidents, and manage them from a single screen. This cuts down on making customers more frustrated when agents don’t have visibility into the full customer experience. Additionally, the AI in this tool uses automation to point out incidents based on a high volume of calls that come in about a particular issue.

Customer Service Incident Management also includes “Swarming,” allowing the customer service team to bring in internal and external partners to collaborate on a problem or incident, using Slack. Robot process automation capabilities (RPA) for Service Cloud come courtesy of Salesforce’s recent acquisition of Servicetrace.

Why we care. There are at least two trends in this release that marketers should keep an eye on. One, customer service is a crucial place where brands can gain a competitive edge. It also remains an important channel or channels (chatbot, SMS, etc.) where marketers can engage customers and develop a relationship with them.

In the technology space, this is also an important sign that workflow is paramount for marketing teams and organizations overall. Swarming is one example of how Salesforce is putting its acquisition of Slack to work. In some form or another, work-from-home and other remote work collaborations are here to stay.


About the author

Chris Wood
Staff
Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country's first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on "innovation theater" at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.

Get the must-read newsletter for marketers.