Salesforce previewed new automation features and data integrations planned for its clouds and MuleSoft — collectively called Customer 360 — ahead of next week’s Dreamforce.
Einstein Bots for Sales, coming in 2023 to Sales Cloud, will live on Salesforce users’ websites, and accompany customers to speak with live sales reps. These bots will be a step up from the “How can we help?” bots the average internet consumer typically encounters while browsing the web, said Bill Patterson, Salesforce executive vice president and general manager for CRM applications.
Bots will simplify data usage, recommend content to answer prospective customers’ questions, route conversations to the right sales reps, set up meetings with CRM calendar hooks , and otherwise quickly escalate conversations to live agents. The tasks Einstein Bots for Sales are tailored to perform are limited by design to facilitate key sales-specific tasks and reel in leads, Patterson said.
“We’re not trying to have our bots do everything — as if we’re not there to answer questions about the weather,” Patterson said. “We’re there to give you information about what you’re looking for, information that’s more relevant to you. And then, if we can’t answer them, the best thing we can do is put you in a living person… a more humane way of interaction rather than the machine method.”
Older salespeople — especially successful reps who built their careers before the advent of AI sales technologies — may not trust customer relationships to automated bot communications, but often more younger generations want it, said Jason Wong, distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner.
“A younger worker is used to texting, interacting with a messaging app, natural language messaging style,” Wong said. “Bots are not just for consumers as a way to get quick answers, but increasingly — in terms of how we work — we’re using messaging, we’re becoming more mobile. [Einstein Bots for Sales] is only building on this trend.”
Also coming in 2023 is Service Catalog, a tool where Service Cloud users can quickly automate simple processes such as subscription changes, returns, and refunds so their customers can complete them themselves. task.
Featured this fall
Coming this fall to Sales Cloud is Enablement, an automated data-driven tool that suggests tasks to sales reps to increase productivity.
Another new feature is MuleSoft Direct for Industry Clouds, which gives users shortcuts for specific integrations common to an industry, where applications need to exchange patient data in the settings of health care, for example.
Scheduled for a fall release for Commerce Cloud is the Store Associate app, which puts customer data in the hands of workers. It’s a tool for retail users to bridge the digital e-commerce experience with the physical, in-person experience, Patterson said. It puts information such as product recommendations and purchase history in front of store employees so they can personalize their interactions with customers.
“Salesforce’s strategy is to expand beyond the frontline, customer-facing workers,” Wong said. “The store associate is key to delivering the customer experience.”
Previously previewed and now available are the Account Engagement API and External Actions enhancements, which allow marketers to connect third-party segmentation tools to their Salesforce CDP; Flow for Industries, which takes the general Salesforce Flow low-code automation and offers pre-built automations common to specific verticals, such as loan origination for banking and the collection of health information insurance for healthcare providers; and Composable Storefront, Salesforce’s headless commerce architecture.
One of the three main themes found in this basket of features is a renewed focus on vertical industries, as Salesforce competitors such as Microsoft and ServiceNow catch up to Salesforce’s lead. Others are efforts to simplify automations and new functionality through Salesforce CDP as it pushes customer data into new areas on the platform.
While CDP may have been considered a marketing tool in recent years, users will expand its role and Salesforce will move closer to its Customer 360 platform vision that separates data silos between different clouds .
“CDP is a technology to unify data models and ensure data consistency critical to their products, from marketing to commerce to sales to customer service. [and] to other applications built on Lightning,” Wong said. “Then it’s connected to other systems that share metadata with the customer. All of that is connected.”
Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.