The News: At the recent Mobile World Congress (MWC), Salesforce introduced the Contact Center for Communications with new innovations built for the communications industry featuring analytics, AI, and prebuilt solutions. The Contact Center for Communications automates common processes, drives improved customer experiences, and reduces operational costs. Salesforce also announced a new integration of WhatsApp with the Contact Center for Communications that will streamline and enrich customer engagement. Read more from Salesforce.
Salesforce Introduces Contact Center for Communications with Analytics, AI, and Automation Solutions for Service Providers
Analyst Take: As more consumers increasingly prefer to conduct their business online, Salesforce’s Contact Center for Communications, built for the communications industry and announced a few weeks ago in Barcelona at MWC 2023, is exciting news.
Across the board, 2023 is the year of doing more with less — for every business in every vertical. Service providers are under increasing pressure to reduce operational costs, while also delivering a great customer experience — not always an easy task. That’s where Salesforce’s Contact Center for Communications provides undeniable value, leveraging analytics, AI, and automation to address these issues.
The Salesforce Contact Center for Communications is designed to improve agent productivity and performance, streamline contact center management, reduce operational costs, and enhance the customer experience. An extension of its Contact Center suite of capabilities, Salesforce’s Contact Center for Communications provides solutions specifically tailored to communications service providers (CSPs).
The Salesforce Contact Center for Communications features include:
- Einstein Conversation Insights: Using AI, service teams are provided with a complete view of what’s happening across their contact center and are proactively notified of issues, like outages or dissatisfied customers.
- Identity Verification: Agents can quickly verify a customer’s identity by using automated workflows easily configured to help service providers meet business requirements and comply with legal requirements in different regions. Salesforce says that it is working on voice verification together with its telephony partners.
- Service Availability Check: Agents can see what services are available to customers that are interested in adding or changing a service with a quick and simple address search.
- Action Launcher: Administrators have the ability to quickly create common workflows, like prepaid top-ups or address changes, which can be easily triggered by agents to serve customers faster.
- Order Fulfillment Date Predictions: Uses AI-based predictions to recommend expected fulfillment dates to help set customer expectations before they place an order.
- Order Delay Predictions: Leverages CRM Analytics to identify orders likely to be delayed due to issues so managers can act quickly to correct it and propose a new fulfillment date using AI-powered insights.
Salesforce Expands WhatsApp Integration
Salesforce is expanding the WhatsApp + Salesforce strategic partnership with new integrations helping companies improve customer engagement and reduce churn. WhatsApp for Service will be available in Salesforce’s Contact Center for Communications enabling providers to deliver consistent, personalized experiences in real time, automate routine requests with AI-powered chatbots, and engage in richer conversations using audio and video files, list messages, buttons, stickers, and emojis within the popular messaging app.
The WhatsApp for Marketing integration allows marketers to connect with customers directly through WhatsApp to send rich promotional messages based on a customer’s unique interests and needs. New enhancements to the integration, including WhatsApp for Marketing Rich Media, will make it easier for customers to get in touch with service representatives in the same conversational thread, and add support for rich media capabilities.
As services providers seek to reduce operational costs while concurrently dealing with soaring consumer expectations, these types of solutions that leverage AI and automation are designed to help provide faster responses, remove inefficiencies, increase productivity, and provide each customer with personalized experiences and interactions.
The launch of the Salesforce Contact Center for Communications is a smart move by Salesforce and good news for communications service providers who are under increased consumer demand while under pressure to reduce operational costs and still want to deliver a good customer experience. The integration of WhatsApp with the Contact Center for Communications is also something I have a feeling users will welcome with open arms as that platform continues to play a role in customer engagement.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum Research:
Salesforce Q4 2023 Revenues, up 14% YoY
How Salesforce is Helping Communications Companies Meet Their Goals and Respond to Market Changes
Salesforce Sustainability Efforts Aiding Emerging Markets
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
