This article first appeared in UC Advanced magazine issue #24.
As AI is able to understand data more efficiently than we mere mortals, Salesforce is setting out to bring customer data to every part of the CX, not just within a CRM.
Salesforce has launched Agentforce Contact Centre, aiming to unify fragmented customer experiences by combining contact centre capabilities with its CRM platform. Agentforce integrates voice, digital channels, workflows, and AI agents into a single stack built on Salesforce Data Cloud. By breaking down enterprise data silos, AI agents gain rich context, enabling smarter self-service and seamless escalations to human representatives without customers repeating themselves. Ultimately, this unified approach improves customer satisfaction, boosts agent productivity, and lowers costs.
There are some iconic moments in the tech industry; my personal favourite is a toss-up between Elon Musk smashing the “indestructible” CyberTruck live on stage and the dancing at the end of the Windows 95 launch.
Given the size of their business now, it’s no surprise that the iconic moment everyone seems to want to emulate is the launch of the iPhone; “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and an internet communicator.”
The latest business, in the UC industry at least, to have its self-proclaimed iPhone moment is Salesforce, bringing together Voice, including IVR and IVA, Digital channels such as chatbots, SMS, WhatsApp, and social, CRM data and service workflows, and AI agents and AI-assisted human reps.
“While we hope that this is an iPhone moment for launch,” said Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM, Salesforce, “the analogy from a customer experience standpoint is that there’s a whole bunch of disparate systems in the market that are not fully connected, which leads to a broken experience.
“If you look at all the solutions that are needed to deliver customer experience, they’re not all stitched together, or maybe stitched together in a very basic way. Even when customers move from one channel to another, such as speaking to an AI agent and moving to a human agent, they have to repeat themselves. This is what leads to poor customer experience.”
Agentforce
The Salesforce ‘iPhone moment’ is the launch of Agentforce Contact Centre, an agentic contact centre solution that unifies Contact Centre as a Service and Customer Relationship Management within the Salesforce platform in an attempt to unify a fragmented Customer Experience as they see it.
Agentforce integrates voice, digital channels, CRM data, workflows, and AI agents into a singular stack built on Salesforce Data Cloud. The core vision is to enable seamless collaboration between AI and human representatives to deliver personalised, proactive, and 24/7 service with complete contextual awareness across all communication channels.
The solution is differentiated by several core pillars, including a unified, “Agentic-First” platform that leverages comprehensive customer and enterprise data to enhance self-service capabilities.
“What we are finding is that customers need more than a chatbot,” said Gautam Vasudev, Product Management at Salesforce, “and the formula for more than a chatbot really is having all of the channel data, having all of the customer data together, and also having your enterprise data come together to give your AI agents the richest context.
“That means the AI agents start getting smarter because they have the full picture, and they’re not starting from zero. This then extends to your human agents. When your AI agents are smarter, they have better human escalation, and the human reps can get that information and know exactly where the customer had that escalation moment.”
Working Together
The key point of the contact centre offering is being able to use the data about customers within the CRM system in order to make the customer experience better.
According to Salesforce, access to data significantly boosts representative productivity and satisfaction through the assistance AI can provide as it hands over to human agents. Interactive Voice Agents (IVA) and data analytics integrated with Customer Signal Intelligence pick up on customer intent and sentiment wherever they choose to interact. Agentforce is designed to support the complete customer journey, extending beyond post-purchase support to cover pre-purchase inquiries and assistance during the sale process, essentially becoming the evolution of Service Cloud.
“Something else that we’ve noticed is that customers need to have a real-time experience when in voice channels,” said Vasudev. “For businesses to have AI that operates in a real-time manner, they need to break down enterprise data silos.
“Stitching all of the data together means that businesses have to think a lot about latency and how the voice experience is operating.
“All of this needs to serve the core business, KPIs. When all of these components are working in harmony together, the rep experience, the customer experience and the agent experience are all improving to drive better CSAT and loyalty. Our customers are also starting to see a lower total cost of ownership, because all of these components are coming together for faster deployment and faster setup.”
Comment from the UC Advanced Editor: Elliot Mulley-Goodbarne
I might be exposing myself here, but I used a bit of AI to do some research for this article. Don’t worry, the words are all mine. I just had a funny feeling that Salesforce had, in the past, committed to not entering the contact centre. According to Perplexity, they never ruled it out, but Salesforce always sat precariously close to the contact centre, so this announcement should come as no surprise.
The Salesforce share price has fallen 20% over the last six months, so they had to do something to give investors a bit of confidence in the wake of massive disruption caused by AI. On the bright side, it looks like customer experience will improve now that data silos are being broken down. Agents, be it artificial or in person, will have all the information they need to provide a quick and satisfying resolution to our problems.
