Salesforce pushes into customer service staff management with Service Cloud Workforce Engagement

Salesforce pushes into customer service staff management with Service Cloud Workforce Engagement


With Workforce Engagement, Salesforce is expanding its Service Cloud offering to include AI-based service call prediction, personnel capacity planning and staff training.

Salesforce launched Service Cloud Workforce Engagement Wednesday as part of the company’s Dreamforce 2020 event, which is being held completely virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Workforce Engagement is a new product within the software company’s Service Cloud suite that is designed to help businesses manage their customer service personnel resources and improve support experiences for customers.

“Companies have quickly realized that great customer service is a competitive advantage,” said Bill Patterson, EVP and General Manager, CRM Applications at Salesforce, in a press release. “Service Cloud Workforce Engagement will provide service leaders and agents with the tools needed to deliver trusted service experiences, no matter what demand shifts or workforce disruptions might arise.”

Workforce Engagement is just the latest addition to Salesforce’s Service Cloud platform. At Dreamforce 2018, the company announced
Service Cloud Einstein

, which integrated Salesforce’s AI platform into its customer service offering. At Dreamforce 2019, it announced
Service Cloud Voice

, which added telephony support to the platform. With Workforce Engagement, Salesforce is adding tools to help companies forecast service requests, perform capacity planning, and provide staff training.

TechRepublic spoke with Melissa Matross, SVP of Product Management at Salesforce, about the announcement in a video interview. “Workforce Engagement is a new workforce planning technology that helps service leaders in the contact center ensure the right agent, at the right time, with the right skills is ready to deliver the best customer service,” said Matross. A full transcript of that interview, edited for readability, is provided below.

Salesforce Service Cloud Workforce Engagement - Forecasting

Salesforce Service Cloud Workforce Engagement – Intelligent Dyanmic Forecasting

Image: Salesforce

Workforce Engagement has three main features:

  • Intelligent Dynamic Forecasting: Workforce Engagement will ingest data from a company’s other Salesforce solutions and third-party systems (thanks to
    Mulesoft

    APIs) and then use AI to predict future levels of service requests. Within a single dashboard, service organization leaders can see projected trends for customer requests either in total or segmented by characters such as, channel (phone, chat, email, etc.), skill level, priority and geographic region.

  • Omnichannel Capacity Planning: Workforce Engagement lets managers turn the system’s service level forecasts into capacity plans directly from within the tool. Matross said the system is designed to answer three questions, “how many agents are needed, when they are needed, and what skills they should have.”
  • Personalized Agent Engagement: Workforce Engagement will also leverage
    myTrailhead

    , Salesforce’s training platform, to deliver “guided learning paths” for customer service staff. Manager can assign training materials to specific staff members, and agents can access those training modules directly from within the system. This can be used both for onboarding new employees or up-skilling existing staff.

During the Workforce Engagement launch, Salesforce highlighted three companies already use the platform, German-based Canyon Bicycles GmbH, Fisher & Paykel (a New Zealand-based appliance manufacturer owned by Haier) and Xero (a maker of cloud-based accounting software also based in New Zealand).

“Due to our continuous global growth, and as people find more value in outdoor activities and exercise amid the pandemic, we have seen a huge global increase in customer demand across our channels over the last few months,” said Thomas Kohl, Head of Customer Service at Canyon Bicycles GmbH, in a release. “While this is great for our business, it is really challenging our ability to plan, staff and optimally cover this demand. With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, we can leave spreadsheets behind and automate this process on the Salesforce Platform with great accuracy, which means a great benefit for our staff as well as our customers.”

Salesforce’s customer service ‘workforce planning technology’

Bill Detwiler: So at Dreamforce, 2020 this year, Salesforce is announcing a new product. Salesforce Service Cloud Workforce Engagement. Tell me what it is.

Melissa Matross: So Workforce Engagement is a new workforce planning technology that helps service leaders in the contact center ensure the right agent, at the right time, with the right skills is ready to deliver the best customer service.

Bill Detwiler: And how does this fit into the existing Service Cloud offering?

Melissa Matross: Well, it completes our Service Cloud suite. So…



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Author: crmexpert444

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