Cloud CRM giants, Salesforce.com, launched what they refer to as an “Intelligence Engine” to their Service and Marketing Clouds. The company intends to use the engine to combine customer services with data science and provide access across more devices.
Stating their reason for building this application, Salesforce.com stipulated that smart customer service and data science will make up important parts of the market, especially with the growing list of devices through which the internet can be accessed. The Internet of Things continues to snowball, carrying with it the expectations of consumers who will need rapid customer services.
Important Features
A few important aspects of this Intelligence engine include the following:
- Automation of workflows according to processes christened intelligent business processes by Salesforce. These, they hope, will enable the intelligence engine to assign the correct case to the correct agent on the workforce by weighing their history, skills, communication channel and workload.
- Management of workloads coupled with management of agent spikes during support. In this system, cases/queries are distributed according to the caseload and level of expertise of each agent. For instance, the Service Cloud may suspend forwarding of cases for agents that are taking a video call/chat.
- An omni-channel view which customers can use to begin conversations on some channel and switch to a different channel if necessary. With this feature, a customer does not have to repeat their entire query when a situation necessitating change of channel arises.
In a nutshell, Salesforce.com is trying to improve their products and solutions in preparation for the demand of more devices and channels being applied towards customer experiences and support. These devices will be used as points of customer support, according to the Vice president in charge of Service Cloud Product Marketing, Sarah Patterson.
It is anticipated that some of the queries arising might begin as automated cases transmitted from a connected point e.g. a car, which can then be switched to a different channel e.g. live chat, voice or email.
On-going Pilot Runs for the Project
The intelligence engine was built using Salesforce algorithms and includes custom and customizable rules applicable to enterprises. According to the company, a number of consumers have been placed in pilot runs for the application.
If successful, the Service Cloud Intelligence Engine will be made available later this year, during which time pricing for the same will be made public. This Intelligence Engine will be an extension of the Service Cloud, which is available at a minimum cost of $135 monthly per user-these increases as the features required increase.
The same engine can also be used to extend the capability of the Marketing Cloud and is fully integrated with other Salesforce products such as the Salesforce ANT migration products. Marketing teams can harness the potential presented by data science to enable targeted and predictive marketing.
This is in response to the general explosion of big data and the data science revolution, which, according to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, will change the very rudiments of business functionality today.