SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Salesforce.com has introduced Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, a new dynamic workforce planning product that will help service leaders organize their entire workforce from anywhere and distribute the right work to the right contact centre agents based on skills and service channel.
With COVID-19, contact centres are dealing with a huge surge in the volume of questions across service channels like phone, chat, text and social media. At the same time, service leaders are managing staffing resources amid the transition to the work-from-home environment. Many are relying on legacy workforce management technology to organize their teams: disparate, on-premises solutions and spreadsheets that were never designed to manage globally distributed workforces. In today’s all-digital, work-from-anywhere world, companies need technology that offers a connected view of the employee and customer, all on one cloud-based platform.
Service Cloud Workforce Engagement will help companies deliver exceptional service by using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict customer service demand, enabling companies to staff the right agents, with the right skills, at the right time. With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, agents will have a single workspace that integrates all of the data, systems and coaching they need to deliver personalized service and resolve issues quickly. Salesforce will reportedly be the only provider who offers a complete customer service suite–Core Service, Digital Engagement, Service Cloud Voice, Salesforce Field Service and now Service Cloud Workforce Engagement–all on one CRM platform.
The announcement includes:
–Service Forecast for Customer 360. It uses AI based on data from the Salesforce platform and integrated third-party tools to help service leaders organize their workforce and predict how many requests will come into the contact centre in real-time, across all digital channels and regions. For example, a retail service leader will be able to predict the number of Cyber Monday support requests and adjust their forecast accordingly, to account for expected phone demand versus chat. Service leaders will also be able to easily adjust in real-time to account for unplanned events, like an influx in calls in response to a social media influencer promotion.
–Omnichannel Capacity Planning. It enables service leaders to balance staffing needs across any digital channel — including phone, email, web chat, text and social channels — by assigning the right agents at the right time based on their skills and availability. For example, a bank may see customer calls dropping because of hour-long wait times on phone channels. But with omnichannel capacity planning, service leaders will be able to address these coverage gaps by cross-training agents to support multiple channels and businesses.
–Personalized Agent Engagement. This provides real-time coaching and on-demand training from anywhere by integrating myTrailhead, Salesforce’s online learning platform, directly into the Service Console. To increase agent engagement and performance, companies will be able to quickly onboard and continually train agents by delivering bite-size, guided learning paths directly in the agent’s workspace during their shift. For example, if a service leader at a meal subscription company identifies an agent who needs help understanding new pricing details, they will be able to deploy a guided learning path that explains a customer’s options.
Service Cloud Workforce Engagement is expected to become generally available in the first half of 2021. Pricing information will be made available at general availability.
“Delivering service is more complex than ever with agents working from anywhere and volumes of customer support requests spiking,” said Bill Patterson, executive vice president and general manager, CRM applications at Salesforce. “With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, Salesforce will arm the contact centre with a connected solution: all on one platform so our customers can remain resilient and agile no matter what tomorrow may bring.”
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