Salesforce Extends AWS Partnership, Announces Einstein-Based Voice Service at Dreamforce

DREAMFORCE ’19 — Salesforce delivered a raft of announcements on Tuesday, beginning with Service Cloud Voice, based on its previously announced Einstein Voice. Other announcements included the expansion of its partnership with AWS, offering Amazon Connect as part of Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, and Customer 360 Truth, which brings together data records from disparate systems or data silos.

Service Cloud Voice links live conversation to other CRM data in a customer record, such as text or email messages, and provides it in a centralized console within Service Cloud, Salesforce’s platform for customer service and help desk support.

Service Cloud Voice can also help customer service agents by using artificial intelligence to surface relevant recommended responses, knowledge articles and next best actions while service agents are on calls with customers. As customer service gets more complex, the offering gives the agents more information and context to handle customer calls and take action.

Salesforce’s Bret Taylor

“Voice is a huge shift for the industry and will be as impactful in businesses as it’s been in our homes,” said Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer, Salesforce.

Service Cloud Voice will be in pilot by February and is expected to be generally available next June.

Amazon Connect and Salesforce-AWS partnership. Salesforce said it will use Amazon Connect, an AWS offering for call centers, as part of its new Service Cloud Voice offering.

Again, phone, email, text and other interactions can be combined into a unified console. When a phone call is routed to a service agent, it appears directly within the agent’s workspace. This eliminates time-consuming data entry and frees up a agent to focus on solving customer problems.

The partnership builds on an existing relationship: In 2016, Salesforce and AWS struck a $400 million partnership deal.

Salesforce will partner with other vendors, such as Cisco and Avaya, as well, so customers can choose their provider or use the out-of-the box solution with Amazon Connect.

Customer 360 Truth. Customer 360 Truth connects data from sales, service, marketing and other, often siloed departments, to create a single, universal Salesforce ID for each customer. It involves four components:

Customer 360 Truth addresses a critical pain point concerning customer data and customer experience. While nearly 70% of customers say they expect connected experiences in which their preferences and profile are known across touch points, data silos often prevent them from being treated as a single customer by different departments. Indeed, according to a recent Adobe survey, two-thirds of respondents said that they are doing a poor job of cleaning and reconciling customer data to provide a single view of the customer.

With Customer 360 Truth, a customer’s previous interactions and shared preferences are brought together to create a complete view so companies can better serve and even anticipate needs, whether addressing a customer service problem or creating a personalized marketing journey.