Dreamforce: Salesforce Takes on Contact Center and Automation

Moves fueled by COVID-19 and the demand for better CX

3
Dreamforce-Salesforce-Takes-on-Contact-Center-and-Automation
Contact CentreEvent News

Published: December 2, 2020

Moshe Beauford

Moshe Beauford

Salesforce is already a global leader in CRM technology and the new proud owner of Slack, with the two recently wrapping up a deal worth almost $28 billion. It now appears as if the company has its sights set on taking on the contact center space. At this year’s digital Dreamforce event, the CRM titan introduced Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, its latest workforce planning product. The offering is set for general availability in 2021.

Service Cloud Workforce Engagement is set to help its contact center agents deliver better customer service via artificial intelligence (AI) to predict customer service demand. “This will permit companies to staff the right agents, with the appropriate skills, at the right time,” a spokesperson told me in an email statement. Salesforce also rolled out Service Forecast for Customer 360, which leverages the power of AI-based data from the Salesforce platform along with third-party tools to help agents predict how many requests will come into a contact center in real-time. This means, predicting behaviors like expected rises in call demand is now a reality.

Salesforce said it would add a functionality called Omnichannel Capacity Planning, which will let managers balance staffing needs on any digital channel. Personalized Agent Engagement is on the way to the popular CRM platform too – and will extend real-time coaching and on-demand training from anywhere by integrating myTrailhead, a Salesforce-based online learning platform, into the service console.

If you did not get the chance to attend this year’s event, you also missed the fact that Salesforce launched what it calls Einstein Automate. The new offering could help employees increase the speed in which they work using end-to-end intelligent workflow automation and AI-infused bots to automate mundane tasks. The all-new MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce is set to let users integrate data from various systems into Salesforce without the use of code. Salesforce Customer 360 Truth, a solution that promises to merge data across various devices.

Dreamforce 2020 hosts its keynote address today, Wednesday, December 2, at 9:40 am PST, 6:40 pm CET. Slack CEO and Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield, together with Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, are set to take the stage to lend more insight into the recent buyout of the popular team collaboration app. The event is free of charge. Also joining the keynote – late-night television host and Tony award-winning actor, James Corden. Four-time Grammy award-winner Lenny Kravitz will grace the virtual stage, as well.

Salesforce released its third-quarter earnings report, and the company did well, raking in $5.42 billion, a figure that rose 20 percent year-over-year. The company’s third-quarter GAAP operating margin was 4.1 percent, with a non-GAAP Operating Margin sitting at almost 20 percent. In total, Salesforce had cash equivalents and marketable securities that amount to $9.49 billion.

The Coronavirus pandemic has created what seems like the perfect conditions for the Salesforce-Slack merger, and one that is set to shake up the market if the duo decides to take on UCaaS. As of now, there is a lot of speculation as to what will happen, but 2021 will bring to fruition a new era of enterprise comms with a focus on tighter integration with Salesforce CRM software, creating more competition for the likes of Microsoft Teams.

 

Artificial IntelligenceAutomationChatbotsCRMEventMicrosoft TeamsOmni-channel
Featured

Share This Post