One thing you can always count on is Salesforce announcing a major new product or initiative at its annual Dreamforce conference. That was true this year as well, and no doubt one of the biggest talking points we heard constantly was around Agentforce.
Agentforce is Salesforce’s latest addition to the Customer 360 platform, featuring autonomous AI agents that can work across your platforms. These are not just chatbots, which Salesforce has offered with Einstein for several years now. This is the next step in the evolution of the AI-human relationship.
As you learn more and try to determine how to best leverage Agentforce for your organization, here are a few things to keep in mind.
Because for years we have associated customer service with a help line and something that happens when a problem occurs, we’ve created a narrow view of the concept. We think of the chatbot popping up to help the human agents taking call after call and message after message.
This is still part of the appeal for Agentforce, of course. But it’s not the full scope. And this is important because service needs to be thought of as more than fixing. With the amount of data being collected and leveraged for personalization, companies need to start thinking more about service use cases that enhance customers’ experiences before a problem arises.
AI is intended to allow employees and companies to work more efficiently and effectively. And customer service is about making the customer experience as strong as possible. Both of those don’t just happen when something goes wrong.
Salesforce has a great use case in the commerce space of a personal shopper agent. This is an AI that provides personalized product and shopping recommendations for visitors to your ecommerce site. It’s a service that makes life easier on the customer and builds loyalty. And this is important because brands need to establish these wins and be perceived in a positive light before an issue comes up, so that customers are less likely to leave.
B2B use cases are also big within Agentforce. An AI sales development rep who can reach out to prospects and expand the breadth of your funnel adds pipeline without additional human overhead.
I know, I just got done talking about the cool features and benefits of a tool like Agentforce, but too many businesses dive into an AI solution because it’s the shiny new thing, but without the right foundation in place. Then that solution doesn’t work how they thought and that budget they spent to implement it feels like a waste.
First off, these AI agents are only successful when they are pulling relevant, actionable data. So if you don’t have your customer data centralized and actionable, these won’t do a ton of good. The same goes for your platforms. All of your systems – whether it be your CRM, ecommerce site, OMS, ERP, or others – need to be integrated and work together to create a clear path of action.
Similarly, you better have a strategy in place. What good does an AI sales rep do if you don’t have a plan for who you’re targeting or what happens if and when they get a lead?
AI agents are built to act as an extension of your human team, and when it’s done best, consumers can’t tell the difference. Which means you can’t neglect the actual agents working for you. Make sure you’re arming your teams with the data and processes to be able to do the same thing your bots are doing.
