How DIRECTV Uses Salesforce Technology to Boost Productivity

This week at Dreamforce 2023, DIRECTV — a provider of best-in-class entertainment and sports content — will showcase how it is transforming customer experiences with Salesforce and Slack as a productivity solution.

What’s the impact: According to a recent Media & Entertainment Industry Insights Report, improved customer satisfaction is the top priority for media and entertainment companies. DIRECTV is on a journey to transform the company and redesign its tech stack to drive innovation and deliver the best experience possible for both internal and external customers. 

• “Our industry is at a pivotal point. And we believe that the way we’ll win is by differentiating our customer experience. Salesforce, supercharged by Slack, is really going to help us meet customers at the moment when they want to be met, with a 360-degree view,” explained Laurie Giammona, Senior Vice President of Customer Service and Loyalty, DIRECTV.

Innovation in action: DIRECTV strives to deliver simple, consistent, secure, and delightful interaction experiences for customers and employees. And, DIRECTV is betting on Salesforce as a foundational software layer that they can build and scale upon, with Slack as a key component. The company uses the technology in a number of ways:

• DIRECTV360 is powered by Salesforce as a primary interaction experience platform to orchestrate sales and service business processes. Slack is a key enabler of the employee technology transformation, enabling collaboration in the context of CRM data from Salesforce Service Cloud with the ability to incorporate data from external applications like Workday. 
• DIRECTV leverages automation within Slack using Salesforce Flow, Slack Workflow, and Slack Bots to reduce the effort it takes for DIRECTV users to find and act on information without context-switching.
• DIRECTV Sales & Service selected Slack to deliver an improved user experience, initially for back office agents and field technicians, for collaboration directly related to the installation or repair processes. Now, the technician experience is designed to bring data and CRM information into one mobile-first Slack interface on Android devices. Moving from synchronous chat in an external application to asynchronous collaboration with Slack Swarming will increase productivity, reduce queuing time, and provide a better 360-degree perspective of customer interactions.

Dive deeper: DIRECTV use cases:

• Slack for Field Service: DIRECTV uses an innovative approach for field technicians to create Service Cloud cases directly from Slack and leverages Salesforce automation to route cases to back office agents. Service Cloud will be the primary interface for back office agents while field technicians will work directly in Slack to collaborate in the context of installation or repair processes. Slack Swarming allows over 5,000 users to drive issue resolution and visibility.
  • DIRECTV will further extend its investment in the Slack platform to better enable users involved in the processes around notifications, announcements, safety, attendance, coaching, scorecards, and inventory.
• Slack for Service Cloud: DIRECTV’s digital care transformation across sales and service is built on Service Cloud. The DIRECTV360 Agent Console provides a single interaction experience to orchestrate business processes. Slack will extend the Service Cloud capabilities to sales and service agents to collaborate, search for knowledge, and automate business processes.
  • This will allow agents to collaborate with experts on complex customer issues without transferring callers. Artificial intelligence (AI) will then help reduce internal customer effort by helping users find relevant information faster when managing customer interactions across the customer lifecycle.

Looking ahead: DIRECTV plans to integrate AI into its current customer care processes to reduce the time and effort involved in managing customer interactions.

• “DIRECTV sees AI as an accelerant to current processes and technologies, making the working lives of their front line more simple, more pleasant, and more productive, so they can focus on delivering a better experience for their customers.” — Sandhya Seetharam, AVP Customer Technology Transformation, DIRECTV 
• “Removing the manual effort it requires for our agents and technicians to find information or accomplish basic tasks, and using AI to supercharge our ability to get resolution faster, is what we strive to achieve by obsessively focusing on the experience and needs of our internal customers across DIRECTV sales and service.” — Craig Reines, VP Customer Technology Transformation, DIRECTV 

Combining data with AI produces something that is more than the sum of its parts. It really is a strategy of AI plus data plus CRM to be more valuable in helping our frontline agents and our field technicians be the most successful that they can be in managing customer interactions.

Drew Fisher, Senior Director Customer Technology Transformation, DIRECTV

• “Combining data with AI produces something that is more than the sum of its parts. It really is a strategy of AI plus data plus CRM to be more valuable in helping our frontline agents and our field technicians be the most successful that they can be in managing customer interactions.” – Drew Fisher, Senior Director Customer Technology Transformation, DIRECTV

More information:

• Tune into Dreamforce 2023 on Salesforce+ to catch the Slack keynote with DIRECTV
• Read more Salesforce customer success stories here
• Read more news and stories from Dreamforce 2023
• Learn more about Salesforce AI here