Driven by an increasingly connected world, Salesforce has released its Service Cloud Intelligence Engine, which the company says will provide better customer service via intelligent business processes, intelligent workload management, and a contextual omnichannel customer view.
Michael Ramsey, vice president of service cloud product management at Salesforce, says that the company is laser-focused on the "next wave or evolution in terms of systems of intelligence. We have a lot of information about [our] users, customers, [and their] specific issues. The technology is getting better and better, and we can do some really powerful things with that data.
"This is happening within the context of the explosion of the Internet of Things and the sheer volume of connected devices that is going to happen over the next several years. When we look at this, we [ask] 'What does it actually mean to take advantage of this data and delivering more intelligence?' We look for real metrics, like what we [can] do to make a real difference to reduce customer attrition," Ramsey continues.
To achieve those results, the Salesforce Service Cloud Intelligence Engine incorporates three main components. The first, intelligent business processes, is the capability to dynamically push work to the right employee, based on an employee's skill set, customer history, or case history. This is where the solution differentiates a task, whether it's a phone call, video, or Web chat. "This covers any interaction with a customer, but it also could be a customer case that it not a direct interaction with the customer, but it's getting escalated. Maybe it's about an SLA violation," Ramsey says as an example. "We still need to get that issue, that piece of work, to the right person so that they can do something about it."
Intelligent workload management is another feature of the solution. It automatically distributes and manages work across a company's service organization and pool of agents. Companies can define the time capacities of individual agents. Users can see what workloads agents have and if they have any availability to take on additional tasks.
Workload management also provides the ability to differentiate between different kinds of channels. For example, a video call or voice call may consume an agent's entire capacity while he deals with that one piece of work. But an email or a social media post, for instance, may indicate that the agent has the availability to handle more than one issue at the same time.
"There's an ability to distribute and prioritize work across your agents and also across channels or even nonchannels of other kinds of work they are doing," Ramsey says.
With omnichannel customer service, context has become king, which Salesforce targets with the third component of the solution. Ramsey explains that the technology supports the classic 360-degree view of all interactions across channels, but the solution goes one step further by maintaining context as the customer and agent move across channels.
For example, a customer might start off in an asynchronous channel such as Twitter, tweeting about an issue they're experiencing. But in order to help the customer, an agent may need to go to an assistive real-time channel, such as Web chat or voice.
"A lot of power [of this solution] comes from the fact that we have customers running critical multiple processes on our platform. That may be standard processes like case management, but it may also be processes that are integrated with [the] back office. We're in a unique position where we can enable those as well," Ramsey says. "A lot of our differentiation [of Salesforce Intelligence Engine] also comes from the fact that we are built on the Salesforce1 platform, which supports multiple capabilities."