Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Wed, 18 Dec 2024
“Limitless.” That’s how Kishan Chetan, the Executive VP and GM of Salesforce Service Cloud, describes the future of AI in customer service. Kishan Chetan explains why customer experience has evolved from deflecting customer interaction and how state-of-the-art tools like Agentforce are the key to providing proactive customer engagement, meaningful connection for employees and customers alike, and equitable accessibility for every type of customer. Whether you’re searching for that hidden, game-changing data that’s currently free-floating in an untitled spreadsheet, or you need to centralize your customer’s feedback so every department offers impeccable service, or you simply want to know how to choose, pilot, and customize the right AI tool for your business… this episode is for you.Key Moments:00:00 Introduction to Customer Efficiency00:41 Transforming Customer Service with AI02:06 The Limitless Future of AI03:48 Proactive and Reactive AI Service05:47 Introducing Agentforce07:49 AI Agents vs. Chatbots09:43 Human and AI Collaboration17:15 Real-World Examples of AI in Action22:58 Leveraging Unstructured Data for Better Operations23:20 Unified Knowledge: Powering AI with Comprehensive Data24:03 Challenges in Centralizing Data for AI25:55 Importance of Quality Data and Human Curation26:47 Practical Tips for Implementing AI in Customer Service28:16 Choosing the Right Channels for Customer Interaction29:21 Balancing AI and Human Interaction31:37 Piloting AI Solutions for Maximum Impact32:23 Creating Exceptional Customer Experiences with AI36:04 Future Trends in AI and Customer Service38:25 Potential Pitfalls and Considerations41:34 Optimizing Customer Experience: Real-World Examples44:04 Advice for Customer Experience Leaders –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: What does customer efficiency mean in AI?
if we help our customers to be efficient they will love us for it exactly don't think of just our time and our efficiency but think of what it means for the customer i mean that's customer experience nailed it let's not forget this is not ai in isolation it's ai that works seamlessly with humans so making sure it has the right loop to the humans as well as the right ai that sits along with the human to make that more productive
I'm sure your CEOs are asking for it. I'm sure your customers are asking for it. Start with something that you can turn on, show value, and then you can expand.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm thrilled to have Kishan Shaitan, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Salesforce Service Cloud, to discuss how Salesforce is transforming customer service with AI.
I attended Dreamforce this year, and I have to say it is wild what Salesforce is bringing to the table when it comes to customer service and AI. The innovation is absolutely out of this world, and we're going to dive into all of that today.
But before I do, I think it's important to quickly highlight exactly who it is we're speaking to, because Kishan has spent his career innovating at some of the world's largest tech companies. Previous to Salesforce, he was at Microsoft, HP, and SAP, just to name a few. So we are truly speaking to an expert today on Experts of Experience, and let's dive into it. Kishan, how are you?
It's an honor to be here. This is such a fantastic set of discussions, and I'm thrilled to be here.
Awesome. So I'm so excited to dive into this because when it comes to AI, everyone's favorite topic these days, customer service is really one of the best use cases for this new technology. And Salesforce is really at the forefront of creating what I would think of as our AI future when it comes to customer service. So from your viewpoint, what
What does customer service look like as we look forward in time? And how is AI impacting that?
Yeah, that's such a fantastic question. I mean, if you think about it, I think the biggest thing that I think customer service will be with AI is limitless. That's the word I like to use. And let me explain what I mean by that. If you look at it traditionally, customer service was always focused in some sense on minimizing the number of interactions you had. It was about deflection.
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Chapter 2: How is Salesforce transforming customer service with AI?
Yeah, and that is super crucial and something that we think a lot about, Lauren. That's absolutely crucial. Because, listen, there are reasons why an AI agent might not be able to handle it. That's because there are things that just need the human ones in judgment. What if a customer sounds really pissed and angry? You perhaps don't want to have that in that conversation. Or...
Because of your process, if that discussion is about buying a new product or doing more upselling, you might really need to have that human connection in there. So your business need might drive that human connection. But what becomes really important is to pass the full context and have all of that context always available for the human. So which means... Like a very simple thing.
How often have you had an experience where you've entered all this information in a form or with a bot, and then you go into a person, they're asking you the same questions, and you're like, why didn't you know this? Like, I've already entered it like two times in this conversation. Like, are you seriously asking me for my email? Like, are you crazy?
So I think that stuff's like the thing that we should not do, right? So you should make this experience like super seamless. So that way when you go in, You know all of this information. You've taken everything that you've had from the bot or the agent in this case, and that's available to the human agent to do really well. Then we also have agents that sit alongside the human.
For example, how can you get a prescription on what are the three things you need to do If somebody is complaining about a bad router at their house, right? And that agent essentially makes the human as well, far more powerful. But the most important thing is any conversation that's happened before with an agent, pass the full context, provide the right context to the customer.
And most importantly, the customer should just feel it seamless. And you know what? From a human, you might actually go back to an agent for some other reason, or you might go to a different channel because you might have started the whole thing in a chat message, but now you're going into your phone and we really don't want you to chat on your phone when you're driving.
So you might just convert that into voice. So all of that needs to be very seamless. And we've put a lot of effort to make sure that it is.
Mm-hmm. I think you mentioned a really great point that the AI agent is not only for the customer, but also for the employee. And we talk a lot on this show about the importance of the employee experience and if we can make it easier for if the customer does need to speak to a human.
How can we enable that human within our company to provide a great service easily, efficiently, so that they can spend more attention on the customer that they're speaking to rather than going into multiple tools or systems to find the right information and propose the right thing.
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Chapter 3: What is the limitless future of AI in customer service?
So making sure that first, it's the right oversight. It's solving the right problem. It's not hurting the brand. I mean, we've heard examples of this airline company which had a problem in terms of a suggestion. And I don't want... Like brands have to be very careful about that.
And second, like making sure that the brand continues with what its core purpose, what its core value is, what its identity is. I think that's important. And third, we need to make sure as a society that as we are kind of using this to handle a lot of like what would be done by labor, how do we ensure that
the employees are then trained to take on this additional building relationships, driving growth. So there's a whole bunch of like training that we kind of broadly need to do. So there are things that we need to concertedly watch out as a group.
I think that employee training piece is something, I know a lot of people are worried. They're worried about their jobs in the face of AI because AI can do things that they're doing currently. And it kind of goes back to the values piece as well that you mentioned. for companies to think about what is the experience that we want to provide to our customer?
What I find often is that what companies want to be providing is not what they're providing. And I think if we stay focused on creating the experience that we really envision for our customers and we allow our employees to grow into providing that with the help of AI, everyone is going to be happier.
So this is again, my, my optimist view, but I really see there's such, there's a open green pasture for great customer experiences that so many companies have not been able to step into. And we can now do that. And so it's not about having less people working for us per se. It's about having more people doing the right things that create the right experience that really
increases our relationship and the value that we can provide our customers, which just makes everything better, in my opinion.
Couldn't have said it better, Lauren. I think that's the key thing. I mean, think of a small mom and shop store where you have this corner store where you want to go buy some flowers or things like that. I mean, now they can essentially have an engagement and far better communication. kind of service than they ever did before, before they were just constrained based on resources.
So in that case, it's not about like people. In fact, we are actually driving more business with them. So I think that's like, it opens up a whole bunch of opportunities that we just never had before. So, and the experience and us as consumers are just going to be richer for it. But there are things that we of course have to work through.
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Chapter 6: What challenges exist in centralizing data for AI?
Chapter 7: How can unstructured data enhance customer operations?
Chapter 8: What are some real-world examples of AI in action?
But even in addition to proactive, even in reactive mode, imagine I'm in an airport, I'm in a totally different time zone, I'm calling what is late in the night in the US time, and I actually still speak to an agent on the other side, a voice agent, which is really an AI-powered agent, and I can have that conversation anytime, versus being told, you have to call between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.,
on regular working hours in US time. So I think that's the difference. It's proactive and also like just the ability to get it 24 seven.
Yeah. And just easier for the customer. I think this was the thing that stood out to me so much when I was at Dreamforce and seeing the agent force demos was that you can pick up the phone and you can call the a company and you get someone, an AI agent answering the phone immediately, you don't have to say press one, press five, press no, no, no, no, no, to get all the way through.
You're just speaking to someone normally in natural language and getting your problem solved quickly and efficiently. And I was, honestly, I thought that this type of voice AI customer service was something that was like, I don't know, three, five years down the road, but It's here. It's here right now. And it's really amazing. It's really amazing.
So I want to talk about AgentForce today quite a bit, but could you just tell everyone, for those who maybe aren't familiar with what AgentForce is, can you give everyone a bit of a download on what Salesforce has brought to the world?
Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, agent force is really a key part of our overall kind of platform. It's built on our overall platform. What agent force does it, it makes it very easy to build an AI agent across any role. So you could have an agent for service, which is what we're discussing, but it could be for sales to help with better sales across any industry.
It could be for retail, it could be for consumer goods, financial services, and across any product. So that's kind of the core force part of agent force. And what you might ask is like an agent, And the way we look at agent is agent is somebody who like, which has a role like you're selling or you're marketing or you're servicing. It works across a set of channels.
So voice, as you mentioned, could be on a text, could be on a chat. It works on a set of data, which is your data as a customer service. It works on your data so it knows what's there in your knowledge base. The agent knows what's in your website, et cetera. And it essentially drives a set of actions.
And that's crucial because really what the agent is focused on is taking this data and converting that into action. And the key part of agent force is does that in a very intelligent way because at the heart of all of this is what we call our Atlas reasoning engine. It basically takes all this data, processes that data, reasons on it, and creates this output and orchestrated set of actions.
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