Introducing innovations that will deliver the seamless customer experience (CX) your customers want.

Today’s customers demand service on their terms, use an average of 10 different channels to connect with companies — including messaging, chat, social, email and phone — and expect a personalised and consistent experience across all of them, every single time. But disconnected customer service experiences are still far too common.

Almost everyone has had to repeat basic information during routine service interactions with a call centre agent, or found themselves unable to get answers to fairly simple questions on their preferred channel. Only 16% of consumers say companies excel at delivering connected experiences — the fact is, it’s hard.

A complete customer service platform that powers connected customer experiences across any channel, from one central console, enables companies to meet these expectations. Our new innovations in Service Cloud make it even easier for consumers to discover and access the service channels they prefer, and enable companies to deploy bots on more channels so they can scale to meet growing consumer demands. Now every digital customer service interaction can be seamless, regardless of whether it occurs on the web, messaging apps, chat or otherwise.

“With Salesforce, Shopee is able to connect marketing and service channels to solve issues effectively, and elevate our customer experience at every step of the shopper journey. We are excited about the new capabilities Salesforce is bringing to the market. It provides us more options to connect more closely with our customers, ultimately improving their experience with our brand.”

– Lim Teck Yong, Head of Regional Operations and People Team, Shopee

Any channel, anywhere, any time

The static ‘contact us’ page can be a thing of the past with our new channel menu giving customers an easy way to start conversations with companies on whatever channel they prefer – SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, web chat or voice.

The channel menu can be embedded anywhere in a website including high-traffic areas like checkout or home page, making it easily discoverable and accessible. And it 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.  

“AirAsia uses Salesforce to handle 20 million service cases every year, and to gain a complete view of our guests across channels. The addition of new channels like WhatsApp and enhanced AI capabilities will let us deliver even faster, more personalised service to our customers wherever they may be.”

– Adam Geneave, Chief Customer Happiness Officer, AirAsia

With more support for WhatsApp and WeChat as well as existing digital channels like Facebook Messenger, SMS and more, companies can reach more customers through messaging than ever before.

Bringing bots on board

Einstein Bots can now be deployed on multiple new messaging channels including SMS, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and WhatsApp. Einstein Bots empower companies to scale their self-service capabilities by responding to customers immediately, automating routine service requests, gathering basic information and seamlessly handing off the conversation to human agents when necessary. And because the bots are connected to CRM data and processes, and powered by machine learning and natural language processing, they learn your business and get smarter over time.

With innovations like this, service leaders and admins don’t have to be data scientists to take advantage of cutting edge AI capabilities. The setup process is easy, 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.

The new exact match capability lets admins quickly create intent models that train Einstein Bots to quickly recognise what customers are asking for and help them instantly. And 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.

“With Service Cloud we can connect all of our customer information channels to deliver seamless service, which gives our sales teams the real-time data they need to provide the most personalised customer experience. We believe that adding Einstein Bots as well as new channels will help us streamline appointment scheduling and service requests on-the-go, to drastically reduce time to resolution.”

– Sreelakshmi Kolli, Align Technology, Senior Vice President, Global Information Technology

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 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.

Contact centre managers and agents are no less important in the digital age – in fact as customer’s expectations increase, human skills become more even more central to excellent service interactions. Read the new full State of Service report to see what you can do to make customers’ experiences as great as your products.

^{Availability: The channel menu will be in pilot by the end of 2019. Messaging support for WeChat and WhatsApp, and Einstein Bots for SMS, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and WhatsApp are all now in pilot. All other features listed are generally available.}