Salesforce has launched a Bring Your Own Channel for CCaaS pilot program to deepen its integrations with cloud contact center providers.
The pilot expands on its successful “Bring Your Own Telephony” (BYOT) initiative, which has enabled 17 CCaaS partners to push their voice solutions into Salesforce Service Cloud.
Now, selected partners may go further and bring their digital engagement channels to Service Cloud.
AWS, Genesys, and Vonage are part of the pilot, with the former leveraging the integration to already market a unified CCaaS-CRM offering: the Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect.
However, expect many other CCaaS providers to soon join the program – once it comes out of pilot – as Salesforce strives to avoid playing favorites.
“We aim to build a broad ecosystem that provides customers with choice,” said Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM for Service Cloud, in an exclusive interview with CX Today.
Many customers already have relationships with telephony or contact center vendors, and these may be different across geographies. Our goal is to accommodate these choices while ensuring seamless integration with Salesforce.
In other words, it’s not about favoring any one vendor; it’s about enabling flexibility.
Indeed, with Bring Your Own Channel for CCaaS, end-users have more power to create their ideal service experiences, whether over Service Cloud’s digital channels or their CCaaS provider’s.
While Salesforce has pledged to keep evolving its channel proposition and adding AI, the pilot showcases the CRM leader’s recognition that some customers have profound relationships with CCaaS vendors or have already gone live on specific channels.
“There’s no reason for those experiences to be isolated,” noted Kishan. Instead, vendors can add capabilities to Service Cloud and work with Salesforce to meet the growing demand for CCaaS and CRM convergence.
That offers an exciting vision for Service Cloud as not just a robust customer engagement CRM solution but also as a platform, almost like IOS.
The Next Evolution of Salesforce-CCaaS Integrations
The Service Cloud BYOT initiative is growing at “triple-digits”, processing millions of minutes worth of customer conversations over voice.
Salesforce aims to replicate that success with Bring Your Own Channel for CCaaS.
Specifically, Kishan shared three core aims for doing so:
- Adding more partners that will bring their channels into Salesforce.
- Working with ISVs (independent software vendors) offering differentiated solutions to add unique value for particular geographies or industries.
- Enhancing WFM (workforce management) and routing integrations to create seamless workflows, whether that routing comes from the CCaaS side or within Salesforce. The goal is to ensure the right task reaches the right person at the right time.
By helping brands unify CRM and CCaaS, Salesforce hopes they will look further into the CX ecosystem. For instance, they may next leverage a platform like Data Cloud to better combine all that service data with data from commerce, marketing, and sales teams.
“Our vision is to bring this all together within Salesforce,” confirmed Kishan.
Of course, that’s essential for developing a unified view of the customer. Yet, it also lays the foundation for Agentforce, Salesforce’s autonomous AI Agent platform.
Indeed, customer experience teams can ground their Agents for more accurate AI, deploy them across the CX ecosystem, and – ultimately – have them work together, automating cross-functional processes.
“This blending of AI, CCaaS, and CRM ensures customers feel they’re interacting with a unified entity, not multiple disconnected functions,” concluded Kishan.
Elsewhere, Salesforce also announced a new partnership with NVIDIA to further bolster its Agentforce and Data Cloud platforms.
Meanwhile, the CRM leader released a “Foundations” upgrade for Service and Sales Cloud customers in September, offering cross-cloud capabilities at no extra cost.
Again, this announcement signals Salesforce’s desire to connect the customer experience ecosystem and set the stall for Agentforce.
