Announcements include AWS integrations for Slack, new voice capabilities for virtual selling, a new virtual care solution, and elevated commitments to reaching Net Zero and overall sustainability.
At Dreamforce this week, Salesforce introduced a massive suite of new technology to help organizations build their digital HQs. Announcements included Salesforce + Slack integrations and innovations, virtual selling enhancements, new solutions to ensure health and safety, and elevated commitments to reaching Net Zero and overall sustainability.
As organizations redefine what it means to succeed from anywhere, Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the world’s leading cloud provider and a strategic Salesforce partner – are supercharging the digital HQ by helping companies develop industry-specific applications however they want, from wherever they want globally, at any scale.
Together, Salesforce and AWS are taking their expanded partnership to the next level with:
- Slack as the digital HQ: Offering flexible and connected ways of working for development teams building applications across Salesforce and AWS
- Health and Safety Solutions: Virtual Care offering for Salesforce Health Cloud to help physicians provide remote care at scale.
- High-Velocity Sales with New Voice Capabilities: Announcing the availability of Amazon Connect + Salesforce High Velocity Sales to help sales teams succeed from anywhere by making it easier to engage prospects and customers, and use AI to glean insights from key conversations.
- Investing in a Sustainable Future: Deepening their company commitments to joint sustainability initiatives with Salesforce joining Amazon’s The Climate Pledge this week. We’re also optimizing Hyperforce, our next-generation cloud infrastructure, to reduce our carbon footprint and accelerate climate action.
Questions about the partnership news are answered below.
Q: How does AWS supercharge the digital HQ from Salesforce and AWS?
In a world where everyone is working from anywhere, digital environments can be even more important than physical offices. This year at Dreamforce, Salesforce announced new Slack integrations to help organizations around the world build their digital HQs – enabling them to work better, and grow faster. With Slack, joint Salesforce and AWS customers can better collaborate with colleagues, customers, and partners – no matter where, when, or how they work.
Salesforce, the #1 CRM provider, together with AWS, the world’s leading cloud provider, are supercharging the digital HQ for joint customers by providing the infrastructure they need to succeed from anywhere. By integrating Slack across products and industry solutions, the partnership helps joint Salesforce and AWS customers connect, collaborate and succeed – anywhere, anytime. In doing so, the partnership is changing the way businesses build and deploy technology, responsibly, at global scale.
Customer success through technology is at the center of Salesforce’s partnership with AWS, and Slack provides new transformational benefits to an already expansive collaboration. Slack has also enjoyed a successful strategic partnership with AWS for years. With Slack as the collaboration layer, customers succeed from anywhere with unified AWS and Salesforce products. This helps developers move faster and be more productive.
The partnership also gives customers new intelligent applications for sales, service, and industry – embedding transformational AWS services like voice, video, AI, and machine learning directly into Salesforce products. And, through our partnership with AWS, our global customers will be able to grow in new markets, fast and at scale, through Hyperforce – our next-generation infrastructure architecture.
“Salesforce and AWS are helping us transform the way we use technology to create better customer experiences. With this partnership, we’ll be able to innovate and deliver faster.
For example, a customer can book an in-store appointment using My T-Mobile. In the future, we could use AWS machine learning services to recognize their previous online or in-person engagements with our company. Data connectors between Salesforce and AWS would enable us to apply these insights into Salesforce products, enabling T-Mobile sales reps to anticipate customers’ needs and suggest the most relevant products or services for them. These insights could also lead to more delightful and relevant conversations with each customer.
We’re excited to see how together, Salesforce and AWS can provide technology that empowers us to improve the customer experience.“
– Warren McNeel, SVP of IT, T-Mobile
Q: What’s an example of how customers will benefit from using Slack, Salesforce and AWS together?
Together, Slack, Salesforce, and AWS make it easier for large, distributed teams to manage the process of building and operating apps across the Salesforce and AWS platforms, allowing teams to innovate more efficiently. Announced in June 2020, the AWS Chatbot for Slack lets teams monitor and use AWS resources directly in Slack channels. Coupled with the new AWS and Salesforce integrations, DevOps teams can now monitor, manage, and deploy apps and integrations that span AWS and Salesforce from one unified engagement layer: their Slack Digital HQ.
For example, let’s say an organization has built a business-critical app that relies on the unified experiences between Salesforce Platform Events and Amazon EventBridge, as well as other custom services on AWS. If an operation incident occurs, AWS Chatbot can post real-time notifications in-channel and Slack Workflows can automate the creation of a trouble ticket in Salesforce, enabling teams to respond near-instantaneously. Team members can swarm the ticket and pull diagnostic info or run AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) commands directly in-channel. This significantly reduces context switching and speeds up the resolution process.
Q: Why is AWS important to Salesforce’s plans to deliver a virtual care application for Salesforce Health Cloud?
At an enterprise level, technology is essential to help deliver health and safety from anywhere, and Salesforce is determined to empower organizations to deliver better health and safety outcomes for their employees, customers and communities. At a consumer level, there has never been a more important need to rethink how clinicians help patients from anywhere. Patient expectations have changed and virtual care is now fundamental to the patient experience.
At a time where medical resources are scarce, a virtual care (telehealth) solution from Salesforce – powered by AWS services like Amazon Chime SDK and Amazon Transcribe Medical – will focus on connecting patients and clinicians with minimal friction, while at the same time connecting the different steps in the patient’s journey to improve the overall patient experience and satisfaction.
Both Salesforce and AWS have deep industry knowledge, but with Slack, healthcare teams can also more easily come together with real-time collaboration through Slack-first healthcare and life sciences solutions. This will enable employee engagement from onboarding and beyond, so they can deliver better customer experiences from anywhere.
Q: The first “Intelligent Application” that Salesforce and AWS built together was Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect – what has made this so successful for customers?
Customers of all sizes and industries have seen tremendous success with Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect because it’s a turnkey solution to get an AI powered contact center up and running fast. There is no need to manage a custom integration or CTI adapter between the Service Cloud agent desktop and a telephony provider — it just works right out of the box.
As a single, simple solution, Service Cloud Voice brings together phone, digital channels, and CRM data into one unified contact center experience. Amazon Connect then works in tandem to include pre-integrated cloud telephony and automatic speech recognition for both agents and supervisors in Service Cloud, the leading customer service platform. This provides supervisors and agents with access to real-time transcription via Amazon Transcribe, call recording playback via Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and CRM integration with call analytics.
Learn more about Service Cloud Voice + Amazon Connect.
Q: How might the value of Service Cloud Voice + Amazon Connect extend to other use cases, like inside sales?
While there has never been more pressure on brands to deliver amazing customer support from their virtual contact center, voice experiences are also critical for sales teams that need to drive revenue growth in today’s success-from-anywhere world.
Using the technical foundation of Service Cloud Voice, Salesforce and AWS have now expanded the native support for Amazon Connect into Salesforce High Velocity Sales as well. This means that inside sales teams can use Amazon Connect as their native telephony solution to manage core sales workflows such as outbound click-to-call from a predefined leads list, inbound call management, and automated call transcription for simplified on-call note taking.
Q: Tell us about Salesforce joining Amazon’s The Climate Pledge and commitment to build a more sustainable future together?
Salesforce believes business is the greatest platform for change, and works to serve the interests of all stakeholders — employees, customers, partners, communities, and the environment. Salesforce’s sustainability vision is to accelerate the world’s largest businesses to Net Zero; sequester 100 GT of carbon through conserving, restoring, and growing 1 trillion trees; focus on oceans health, and energize the ecopreneur revolution.
Salesforce this week announced that it signed The Climate Pledge, an initiative co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism as a commitment to reach the Paris Agreement 10 years early and be net-zero carbon by 2040. At this time, 200 global organizations have joined The Climate Pledge and committed to pursuing ambitious carbon-reduction activities, including operational changes in the race to fight climate change. Together, Pledge signatories generate over $1.8 trillion in global annual revenues and are expected to collectively mitigate 1.98 billion metric tons of carbon emissions annually by 2040 from a 2020 baseline.
For more information on how Salesforce, AWS, and Slack are transforming customer experiences, check out these sessions at Dreamforce ‘21.
