Salesforce and Zoomin on Data’s Critical Role in the AI Revolution for Customer Service

Editor’s Note: Salesforce acquired Zoomin on November 1, 2024.

Many service agents and mobile workers find it increasingly hard to meet rising customer expectations. Nearly four in five service organizations (79%) have invested in AI to scale service and meet these ever-increasing demands. And these investments are paying off — 87% of service decision makers with generative AI say the technology has helped them better serve customers.

But these AI investments are only as good as the data supporting them. More than 75% of executives say they’re struggling to scale AI, largely due to disconnected systems and siloed data. 

That’s one reason Salesforce partnered with Zoomin to launch Unified Knowledge, a powerful tool that integrates an organization’s knowledge data from disparate third-party systems — like SharePoint, Confluence, Google Drive, and company websites — into Salesforce. 

This aggregated information helps autonomous AI agents and assistants deliver accurate, relevant, and trusted responses that are personalized to every customer’s specific needs and preferences because they are grounded in an enterprise’s proprietary data. Additionally, it gives service teams who handle more complex cases easy access to the resources they need to provide fast, personalized customer experiences. With Unified Knowledge, customers can also quickly resolve issues themselves using self-service bots that deliver relevant and comprehensive answers to their questions.

Go deeper: Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM of Salesforce Service Cloud, recently sat down with Zoomin CEO and Co-founder Gal Oron to discuss AI’s role in the future of service and how their new partnership is helping service organizations keep pace with evolving customer expectations. Here’s what they discussed:

• The AI revolution is a data revolution: Great AI needs quality data. If businesses want to get the most of their AI investments, they need to ensure their vast — often disparate — proprietary enterprise knowledge is easily accessible.
  • “Great AI needs great knowledge. For example, for AI agents to be useful, they need to have knowledge of the products, services, an organization’s policies […] and the reality of the matter is that knowledge is just not in one place. Bringing it all together and providing the right [AI-powered insights] is crucial,” said Chetan. 
• Autonomous AI agents are transforming customer service and can drive business growth: Trained on an organization’s unique policies and procedures, autonomous AI service agents can now join forces with human workers to improve customer service, handling tasks like processing returns or looking for upselling opportunities.
  • “A world with digital agents powered by AI, powered by knowledge, that are working alongside human agents to provide truly differentiated service […] really helps move service from being a cost center to more of a profit center,” Chetan continued.
• Scaling self-service with AI will be key to customer retention and success: AI, grounded in trusted data and knowledge, will be critical to helping customers find accurate answers, troubleshoot issues, and resolve customer cases quickly.  
  • “If you don’t offer compelling self-service, then you’re getting left behind,” Chetan said. “AI is going to be a key part of self-service — giving trusted answers will be crucial to the success of AI.”
  • “With Zoomin, now every Salesforce customer has an Einstein that’s grounded in their trusted, proprietary knowledge to provide detailed, comprehensive, and personalized responses to customers’ inquiries.” — Gal Oron, CEO and Co-founder, Zoomin

More on Unified Knowledge

• Unified Knowledge amplifies capabilities such as:
  • Knowledge Answers in Bots: Automatically generates answers to customer inquiries within a bot, based on a company’s complete internal and external knowledge base. 
  • Einstein Copilot for Mobile Workers: With Einstein Copilot and Unified Knowledge, mobile workers can get instant responses to questions, sourced from the full slate of a company’s organizational knowledge. 
  • Search Answers: Generates answers to both agent and customer questions grounded in a company’s trusted knowledge base and surfaced within a customer portal or agent console. 
• In addition to Service Cloud, Unified Knowledge can also collect and integrate information into Salesforce Field Service, Sales Cloud, Health Cloud, and Financial Services Cloud. 

Customer perspective: 

• “In our indicative tests, service replies that would take approximately 15 minutes to compile are now taking under a minute, and instead of having to search in multiple repositories, personalized answers are right there in front of the user,” said Amir Weingrod, Senior Manager of Business Systems at Unity.
  • “The big challenge was how to inject our own knowledge, which resides in multiple external repositories to fuel all of that goodness. Luckily, with our partners at Salesforce and Zoomin, Unified Knowledge allowed us to do just that. Our corporate knowledge sources are being used to ground Einstein, turning our knowledge into an essential productivity booster and revenue driver,” Weingrod continued.

In our indicative tests, service replies that would take approximately 15 minutes to compile are now taking under a minute, and instead of having to search in multiple repositories, personalized answers are right there in front of the user.

Amir Weingrod, Senior Manager of Business Systems at Unity

Learn more: 

• Check out the Smarter Service Starts With Knowledge event on Salesforce+
• Explore how to increase productivity with Service Cloud
• See what best practices and insights service leaders are sharing in the Serviceblazer Commmunity