New Salesforce Service and Marketing Innovations Use Trusted Data and AI to Humanize Customer Interactions

• 83% of customers are more loyal to companies that provide consistent experiences across departments¹
• Bose, MECCA, and Honeywell are building lifelong customer relationships with AI-powered innovations from Salesforce

Salesforce today introduced new Service and Marketing Cloud features that humanize the customer experience with new AI-powered conversational intelligence, mobile offline access to relevant information, and Customer Data Platform innovations. These technologies help service teams and marketers create more personalized experiences that drive lifelong customer relationships for every industry including retail, manufacturing and healthcare.

Rising inflation is shrinking consumers’ buying power and forcing them to scrutinize their spending. With 88% of customers saying the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services,² companies must provide personalized experiences that remove friction and foster trust and loyalty. 

“Seventy-six percent of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs, yet only 34% feel like companies actually treat them as individuals,” said Lidiane Jones, EVP & GM, Salesforce Digital Experiences. “Any company not investing in this area is putting their entire business at risk. With Salesforce’s powerful service and marketing innovations layered with AI, businesses can deliver the personalized, connected experiences that build trust, loyalty, and longevity with customers.”

Service Cloud Innovations: Digitizing voice turns agents to trusted advisors

Seventy-nine percent of service professionals say it’s impossible to provide great service without full customer context. With new Voice innovations agents can become trusted advisors, delivering more personalized interactions, driving more value from purchases, and solving problems fast. The next generation of Service Cloud makes it easier for companies to deliver personalized experiences at scale, leveraging new data and AI capabilities. These innovations will empower agents to create more empathetic, human experiences, which are critical to fostering customer loyalty.

• Contact Lens for Amazon Connect offers advanced conversational transcription for even the longest phone calls, real-time sentiment analysis, real-time supervisor alerts to deliver agent coaching and full-text search on call transcripts. Powered by machine learning, AWS Contact Lens will be natively supported for customers using Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect. For example, an internet provider company can easily follow sentiment and trends of customer conversations in real time to identify key product feedback, and better coach and manage agents based on sentiment and keywords. 

• New Service Cloud partners Google Cloud and Genesys will each offer customers more choice in how they use Service Cloud Voice and enable AI-powered recommendations and automated workflows for their teams. With new telephone connectors from both Google Cloud and Genesys, companies may integrate phone and customer data, automate call transcriptions and notes, and enable agents to receive real-time suggestions while they’re on a customer call. For example, a service agent at a retailer can receive recommended next-best actions to process a return or upsell a warranty, making the conversation more personalized and useful to the customer.

Field Service Innovations: Mobile workers can provide and get support from anywhere

With skills shortages affecting field service teams, it is more important than ever to scale service efficiently. Salesforce Field Service’s modern mobile platform can connect teams on the frontline with their headquarters, with other subject matter experts in the field, and with customers. Field service workers can access the information they need to get their jobs done even if they are offline, and service technicians can use augmented reality to help customers resolve issues.

• Workers providing in-person service with the Salesforce Field Service App now have a Multi-level Offline Briefcase to serve up necessary records whether or not they are online. For jobs like repairing telecommunications equipment after a storm, mobile workers need complete asset, contract, and customer data, for quick decision making regardless of cell signal. Personalized work plans, flows, inventory information, and knowledge articles all in one app allow the technician to focus on the customer at hand.

• Visual Remote Assistant now gives customers the option to schedule in advance and initiate a 1:1 virtual support session with augmented reality from their phone. Companies can reduce truck rolls and give customers options for faster resolution. For example, customers can schedule a virtual session with an appliance technician to show what is going on with their dishwasher, and the technician can point, draw on the screen, and overlay information and direction for the customer on how to solve the problem in real-time on their own. 

Marketing Cloud Innovations: New CDP and Intelligence features to better know your customers

Only 33% of marketers are fully satisfied with their ability to create more relevant experiences with customer data. The next generation of Customer Data Platform, formerly known as Salesforce CDP, helps marketers create a single source of truth so they can get to know their customer and engage with relevancy at scale and in real time. New CDP innovations announced today include:

• With Streaming Insights and Data Actions, marketers can capture near real-time data signals, such as a new customer, a recent product transaction, or payment issue, to trigger workflow events. For example, a new car purchase triggers an email campaign inviting the new customer to set up their driver profile, share on social media, and get a discount on their first car wash.

• Advanced Identity Resolution uses AI to match and merge disparate data for better customer identification. Duplicated fields — such as address, email, or phone, as well as records with names that have multiple spellings or frequently shortened nicknames, as in “Sam” and “Samantha” — can be merged to help ensure the most complete customer profiles. For example, a car manufacturer can now understand a customer’s identity and experiences across their dealership to their service department.

• New Anonymous Profiles enables marketers to track profiles and build a rich history of data on customers when they are in the anonymous state and then connect that data to their profiles once they become known. An online retailer can analyze a web visitor’s interactions, stitching data together when they have signed in to the site with their previous interactions, allowing for better personalization like improved product recommendations.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence, formerly known as Datorama, helps marketers unify analytics and leverage AI insights to continually optimize outcomes that increase customer value and growth. New Intelligence innovations announced today include:

• New enhancements to Intelligence Reports for Engagement* help marketers shift from email open rates due to privacy changes. Now organizations can evaluate email performance by device, client, OS, and browser and optimize new KPIs for conversions, clicks by link, bounce types, unsubscribes, complaints, and click event lag. For example, a healthcare marketer can now better understand which channels and content best engage new patients to complete their onboarding journey before a first visit.
  
• Intelligence now enables marketers to explore and analyze deep data sets with new interactive visualization tools to easily compare currencies, channels, campaigns, time series, business units and more in a single customizable view. For example, a marketer in a media subscription business can now uncover optimal and wasted budget spend by analyzing the cost per acquisition and customer lifetime value of new and returning subscribers, and adjust budget plans and strategies accordingly.

*Formerly known as Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud

Additionally, our next generation Marketing Cloud portfolio is now more aligned with the language marketers already use, so the capabilities and value are easy to understand.

Customers in every industry focus on the customer journey with Salesforce

• Bose, a leader in premium audio products, is deploying Salesforce Customer 360 to expand its robust direct-to-consumer business, providing personalized and tailored marketing and service experiences that delight customers and build loyalty. “Customer experience is at the center of everything we do,” said Jim Mollica, Chief Marketing Officer, Bose. “With Salesforce, we will be taking our digital footprint to a different level – making it easier for customers to immerse themselves in the brand and delivering highly personalized, premium shopping and service experiences. We know this is critical to enhancing customer satisfaction and building loyalty.”

• MECCA, the largest premium beauty retailer in Australia and New Zealand, is using Salesforce to deliver innovative and personalized digital experiences for customers. “Salesforce Service and Marketing Clouds are helping us focus on three areas to bring the magic of our in-store experience to the digital world,” said Sam Bain, Chief Digital Office, MECCA. “We want to bring service to our customers in a really human way, bring education and storytelling to help customers pick the right products for them, and tailor it to make it as personalized as possible.”

• Honeywell, a leading technology innovator, arms their frontline mobile workers with valuable information to operate safely and productively. “We are preparing for the next 100 years of our business, ensuring our customers are getting an intelligent, connected experience through Honeywell Forge and Salesforce,” said Stuart McCormick, Global Service Process & Tools Leader, Honeywell. “With Salesforce Field Service we are improving our occupant experience, making our operations more efficient, and reducing our carbon footprint.”

Availability

• Customer Data Platform features,  Intelligence features, and Visual Remote Assistant self-scheduling are currently available.
• Service Cloud Voice Genesys connector, Service Cloud Voice Integration with AWS Contact Lens, Field Service Multi-Level Offline Briefcase are expected to be generally available this summer.
• Service Cloud Voice Google Contact Center AI Platform connector will be available this fall.

More information

• Join us virtually for World Tour Sydney here today at 11:30 a.m.–1.30 p.m. AES to learn more about these innovations.
• Read how Bose is connecting service and marketing ahead of the holiday season here. 
• Learn about the new #ServiceStars Trailblazer community and Service Career Path here to become a #ServiceStar.

 ¹ based on a 2022 survey of 13,020 consumers and 3,916 business buyers worldwide

²  based on a 2022 survey of 13,020 consumers and 3,916 business buyers worldwide