How Will Salesforce Lead the Future of CX With AI?

“Customer service is the experience we deliver to our customer. It’s the promise we keep to the customer. It’s how we follow through for the customer. It’s how we make them feel when they do business with us.”

— Shep Hyken

In this hyper-competitive world, what sets you apart from your competitors is the quality of customer service that you deliver.

According to Salesforce research^[i], 71% of customers make purchase decisions based on the quality of customer service that a company provides.

Customers are your greatest brand advocates. And enhancing CX makes them feel valued and happier with your brand. Not only does this lead to a stronger customer base but also helps you generate higher revenue.

But how do you get there? Enter – AI-driven CRM systems.

They are the driving force to deliver exceptional customer experiences. When combined with innovative technologies like ML (Machine Learning) and NLP (Natural Language Processing), they hold the power to future-proof your customer service operations.

And when we talk about a modern AI-driven CRM system, Salesforce tops the list.

In this blog post, we’ll decode everything you need to know about how AI is revolutionizing the world of CRM and what new things that we expect Salesforce to do in this area.

The Role of AI to Boost CRM Functionality

54% of executives believe AI solutions have enhanced productivity in their organization^[ii].

AI has made its way to help sales and marketing teams make informed decisions. And it is making CRM systems smarter. AI-algorithms within CRM systems reduce the work of salespeople by automating tasks that were previously done manually like segmentation, fetching purchase history of customers, examining online interactions, and more.

AI can also impact how salespeople reach out to customers. For instance, an AI-driven CRM system ensures that your customer data is captured in the desired format using document, image, and speech recognition technologies. Also, customer service agents can only handle one customer service issue at a time. However, AI expands this ability. For example, chatbots. There is no limit to how many questions and queries it can address at a time. And if a query is too complex, it can direct the customer to the right support agent. AI has made round-the-clock support a reality. It reduces the workload for customer service, marketing, and sales teams, and helps them do their work faster and with accuracy.

Salesforce’s AI Game Plan Rounded Up With its Innovative Solutions

Salesforce CRM has been topping the CRM industry charts for years now. Its extensive features and the added ability to customize & integrate makes it stronger and more reliable. Here are a few of its solutions that currently make it a favorite among businesses:

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud: It is a fully automated and highly customizable marketing automation solution that uses AI to identify new marketing opportunities.

• Salesforce Service Cloud: This automates support teams’ activities and helps them resolve customer queries more efficiently by combining Salesforce Service Cloud and AI to help in upselling and cross-selling, increase agent productivity, and more.

• Salesforce Einstein: Developed for the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, Einstein is the AI technology that’s available across various products of the Salesforce ecosystem. It gives sales and marketing teams comprehensive and up-to-date views of customers and sales prospects.

• Salesforce Genie: Salesforce Genie is the latest development in the Salesforce Customer 360 platform that was unveiled at Dreamforce 2022. It harmonizes data in real-time to help you meet your customers at specific stages of their CX journey. It integrates data from every step of the customer journey into a single, unified customer profile. With Salesforce Genie embedded into Salesforce’s different products, companies can use a unified customer profile and real-time data to deliver personalized experiences.

Salesforce: Driving the Future of AI-Powered CRM

Salesforce has always been at the forefront of innovation and introducing new features to its CRM platform. Here are a few features that help it lead the way with AI in the present and the future:

• Einstein Voice: Salesforce has added a vocal layer on top of CRM with Einstein Voice. It makes it easy to enter data into Salesforce. For instance, sales reps can just use their voice to enter data into Salesforce on-the-go. They can keep data up to date without having to use a tool. This has enabled businesses to put more data in and get more intelligence out of the CRM system. Sales reps can speak conversationally to provide granular details about their meetings, service reps can provide detailed feedback on their customer interactions. All this not only contributes to more sales but also better customer service.

What’s Next?

Einstein Voice will offer developers and admins with building blocks to create custom voice-powered apps. Even if you are not well-versed with voice technology, you can use Einstein Voice Skills to build custom/personalized voice apps for every profile and role within your organization.

• Data Patterns with NLP: Salesforce is likely to add a new functionality in its CRM using NLP which will be a multi-task question answering network. In this, there will be a question section that will include the customer queries, information source from which a link to the answers will be added, and then service agents will easily provide answers to the multiple questions asked by the customers.

• Data Analytics with Stories: With this amazing feature, you will be able to create stories to analyze your data. It helps you explore insights that Einstein Discovery reveals in your data by using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistical analysis. This feature will help you generate intelligent insights from your data.

• Slack-First Customer 360: It is an integrated collaboration system that empowers users to communicate, collaborate, and finish operations by utilizing Salesforce and other slack-compatible tools. With AI-powered Salesforce CRM and Slack interface, users can automate the mundane business processes that help them perform their other tasks quickly and easily.

• Salesforce Service Cloud and Troops: Salesforce’s acquisition of Troops.ai has been another breakthrough advancement in its CRM offerings. Troops.ai is a growth engagement technology that simplifies the sales process. It helps salespeople manage CRM input issues that they put in Slack. Since CRM keeps customer service at the forefront, it’s interesting to see how Troops works with Salesforce Service Cloud. Here are a few ways it benefits customer service teams:

• Keeps Track of Stalled Cases: Troops helps your support teams proactively work on unresolved cases on Service Cloud. It uses scheduled signals to notify your team of it.

• Real-time Updates on Progression of Cases: Troops use real-time signals to update your team about how Service Cloud cases are progressing.

• Makes Customer Support Collaborative: It provides your team with real-time visibility of cases to make them collaborate better and offer better customer service.

Conclusion

AI provides a deeper dive into customer decision journeys, identifies potential anomalies or negative sentiments in customer behavior, and is a promising addition to strengthen customer experience. As this multi-dimensional technology keeps evolving, it is important for businesses to stay abreast of the latest AI trends and its impact on the CX initiatives. And as Salesforce is continuously magnifying AI capabilities in CRM, we can expect to see many exciting new features being introduced to simplify customer service at granular levels.

Wish to Deliver the Best Customer Experience? Talk to Us!

Statistical References:

^[i]Salesforce Research

^[ii]PwC