Providing great service is an absolute imperative – 82% of service leaders acknowledge their company’s customer service must transform to stay competitive, making the service agent’s job more crucial than ever. Service agents are on the front lines of all customer interactions and are responsible for solving complex problems, identifying cross-sell opportunities, and ensuring customers have great experiences with the brand.

We recently announced new AI-powered recommendation, routing and productivity solutions that empower agents to tackle these challenges, but I’ll be the first to admit we can’t do it on our own. Modern contact centers are complex and varied, requiring a number of different systems to tightly integrate in order for companies to deliver amazing customer experiences across channels. That’s why I’m excited to announce we are extending our strategic partnership with Google and making it even easier for customers to build intelligent contact centers. By bringing together elements of Salesforce Service Cloud, Einstein AI, and Google Cloud Contact Center AI, we are giving customers more flexibility than ever before to deliver an integrated AI-powered customer experience.

How it all works: Service Cloud, Einstein AI, Google Cloud CCAI

The first component of this is around telephony — still the #1 channel customers prefer for support — and brings Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) solution into Service Cloud to assist agents with insights in every voice conversation. Leveraging the powerful combination of Contact Center AI, Service Cloud, Einstein AI, and Salesforce’s ecosystem of telephony partners, companies can automatically transcribe real-time voice conversations, provide intelligence signals to Salesforce, and recommend knowledge articles and next best actions based on those signals. This will enable companies to help agents quickly resolve complex customer issues, provide personalized and relevant upsells, and gather AI-driven insights to improve overall contact center operations.

The second piece is around scaling automated support for customers across channels and languages. Enhanced natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities in Google’s DialogFlow will extend the power of Einstein Bots by enabling more intelligent customer interactions for over 20 languages (including Japanese, Polish, Portuguese and Russian), identifying entities within conversations (such as addresses, names and locations), analyzing sentiment to keep track of the customer’s level of satisfaction, and knowing precisely when escalation to a human agent is necessary.