From a series of announcements from Dreamforce and INBOUND 2024 to the release of a “first-ever” CX platform, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Salesforce Dreamforce 2024: 5 Top Takeaways from the Event (So Far!)
After a steady stream of high-profile pre-event announcements, Dreamforce 2024 is officially underway.
Unexpectedly, the new Agentforce platform, which empowers front-office teams with autonomous agents, dominated the keynote – as it did much of the build-up.
Why? Because it marks a significant shift in Salesforce’s thinking. It highlights how the CRM giant has pivoted from “human in the loop” copilots to “human at the helm” autonomous bots. These bots can perform tasks across customer-facing functions without human assistance.
For instance, in customer service, they can deal with customer queries of varying complexities without pre-programmed responses.
Earlier this year, Marc Benioff, Chair & CEO of Salesforce, repeatedly warned against such autonomous use cases. In March, he called many existing solutions “very confident liars, producing misinformation and hallucinations.”
He continued by suggesting: “There’s a danger for companies, for enterprises, for our customers, that these are not trusted solutions.”
Given these public warnings, Benioff had to take to the Dreamforce stage and send out a clear message that Agentforce is different from previous autonomous offerings.
Eventually, this message came, but only after an overview of Salesforce’s transformation from a suite to a platform company – and the overall significance of that change. (Read on…).
HubSpot Promises to Make AI Easy, Announces Breeze
HubSpot has unveiled Breeze, a set of AI solutions embedded across its entire customer platform.
Chiefly, those solutions include Breeze Copilot, Breeze Agents, and Breeze Intelligence.
No matter the HubSpot CRM, Breeze Copilot aims to help users do their work better.
Meanwhile, Breeze Agents strive to do more of the user’s work autonomously.
Finally, Breeze Intelligence aspires to give users actionable customer insights.
Through each solution, HubSpot claims it will “make AI easy” by removing the reliance on customers to utilize disconnected AI tools that are difficult to adopt and use.
Instead, HubSpot promises no steep learning curves or question marks, just “a breath of fresh air” in the often intimidating world of AI.
Of course, that’s alongside “huge results for marketing, sales, and service teams”. (Read on…).
T-Mobile & OpenAI Team Up to Build a “First-Ever” AI Engine for Customer Experience
T-Mobile claims that it – with help from OpenAI – is building the “first-ever” intent-driven AI-decisioning platform for customer experience: IntentCX.
The platform couples a real-time understanding of customer intent and sentiment with a “meaningful understanding and knowledge” of the customer to share personalized next best actions.
In doing so, it will guide both virtual and live contact center agents and – according to T-Mobile – take proactive actions on their behalf.
T-Mobile has reportedly set an internal goal to reduce its customer service calls by 75 percent with IntentCX.
Yet, that’s not only by intercepting issues with AI. To achieve this target, T-Mobile hopes to use the intent data to understand how problems start in the first instance and stop them before escalation.
In doing so, T-Mobile hopes to apply “the most advanced technology” to reimagine customer journeys, enhance back-stage processes, and create a blueprint for success.
These intentions are ambitious, especially around call volume reduction. Indeed, recent Gartner research found that 61 percent of customer support leaders expect generative AI (GenAI) to reduce their agent headcount by less than five percent.
However, Mike Sievert, CEO of T-Mobile, promised that the platform will “revolutionize how customer love is shown across our industry.” (Read on…).
Talkdesk Launches a One-Click “AI Rewriter” Solution for Contact Center Agents
Talkdesk has added two new generative AI (GenAI) solutions to its CCaaS platform: the Talkdesk CX Cloud.
The first is an AI Rewriter that enables contact center agents to instantly rewrite content in a manner that reflects the customer’s sentiment and mood.
With this, agents may simply write out the bulk of their responses and use the tool to ensure a professional, friendly, or empathetic tone.
Alternatively, they may use it to personalize knowledge articles before sending them off to customers.
Either way, Talkdesk believes that the solution will help improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) rates and average handling time (AHT).
Meanwhile, it may also help supervisors ensure that agents are following brand guidelines in their communications with customers.
All-in-all, Talkdesk calls this an “essential capability”, particularly for accelerating new agent proficiency or supporting those who have failed to adhere to company communication guidelines.
The second solution is an AI Translator that – as the name suggests – automatically translates texts to help agents engage with customers in any language. (Read on…).
