Audata uses Agentforce to scale service without missing a beat

After building its business from the ground up with Heroku, Audata is now using Agentforce to scale and deliver exceptional service 24/7.

Audata helps media and entertainment brands around the world automate processes and engage their audiences with data-driven experiences.

Audata’s founder and CEO, Keegan Bakker, first turned to Salesforce for a solution to build the company’s first app. The Audata Promo app helps brands manage contests, automate prize fulfilment, and collect audience data. It has been a huge success, which has led to new challenges like scaling sales and service.

The business prides itself on exceptional service, and as it expanded globally, it needed an efficient way to scale this service across multiple time zones. Similarly, it needed to ramp up sales and navigate complexities like quoting in different currencies.

Agentforce augments Audata’s team with digital labour so the business can offer every customer the same high level of service, no matter their timezone. Its first agent converses with customers in natural language, answering their questions around the clock. The agent can ask questions of its own to determine the severity of issues and can also submit feature requests based on customer input.

Analysing conversations, the agent autonomously triages and escalates inquiries. For the most critical cases, this could mean triggering a message to Audata’s team in the middle of the night.

All answers and actions delivered by the agent are grounded in the business’ data. This includes unstructured data from user manuals which has been brought into Salesforce and made accessible to agents using Data Cloud. The majority of Audata’s customer and product data already resides in Salesforce, with the business having built its applications on Heroku.

“It’s hugely important for us to provide fast and convenient support across timezones and channels. Agentforce allows us to do that while leveraging all the amazing things we’ve built on the Salesforce platform already,” said Keegan Bakker, Founder and CEO, Audata.

Audata anticipates its service agent will ultimately handle up to 60% of customer inquiries. It also expects a 25% reduction in time to close cases created by the agent due to the agent handling much of the preliminary questioning and fact-finding.

The agent, built with Salesforce consulting partner Kaizen ICT, is also the first of many Audata anticipates using to increase productivity and growth. The next could analyse historical sales data and recommend actions to help the sales team close more deals faster.

Bakker wrote the Audata Promo app himself and tried to deploy it on a few different platforms before landing on Heroku. In five minutes, he turned the code he'd written into a live app, and everything worked immediately. Running the app on Heroku also helped instil confidence in its security and scalability amongst commercial buyers. "I could confidently say that while the code was whipped up overnight, our infrastructure was solid," said Bakker. 

The Audata Promo app has now been white-labelled by many of the world's largest media brands, and Audata has used Heroku to build new apps for the industry. These include the Audata Platform, which offers media businesses a connected view of their audiences across different products. 

Sales Cloud has streamlined the sales of Audata's apps, helping to centralise tasks and drive follow-up on cross-selling opportunities and license extensions. Quotes and contracts can be produced in multiple currencies for multiple countries in minutes using CPQ. They can then be sent and signed instantly via DocuSign. 

Heroku Connect allows for order details to be synced right from Sales Cloud to an app in Heroku that automates provisioning. This has replaced the tedious process of creating a task list for each order and ticking off items one by one. It has also reduced the time from quote to provisioning by eight days.

“Quoting and provisioning in Salesforce has been a game changer and allows us to provision new licenses for existing customers almost automatically. In the past, it was so difficult that it discouraged us from upselling,” said Bakker.

Audata uses Salesforce to onboard and support customers and ensure high levels of satisfaction. Marketing Cloud supports personalised onboarding journeys which include a series of emails with tips and information tailored to the products used by each customer. Service Cloud and Service Cloud Voice allow for efficient and collaborative case management with features like omni-channel routing and real-time call transcription.

Audata is further leveraging Service Cloud to manage feature requests and to let customers know when their request is actioned. “It has really changed our product planning as we can go in and see what features people are talking about and make data-driven decisions about what to implement next. Keeping people informed of what’s happening also gives them a sense of buy-in which is great,” said Bakker.

With Agentforce deeply integrated with the Salesforce platform, AI agents have built-in access to Audata’s customer data and knowledge articles—enabling them to deliver fast, accurate responses to customer inquiries. 

By extending Audata’s team with digital labour, Agentforce also helps the business provide exceptional service to its growing customer base, irrespective of time zones.