Salesforce Taps Amazon For Call Center AI

Customer relationship management (CRM) firm Salesforce is expanding its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer customer service technology powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Salesforce said in a press release on Tuesday (Nov. 19).

Salesforce is launching Service Cloud Voice to provide customer service tools to contact center agents. Integrating with Amazon Connect, which is part of AWS, Service Cloud Voice brings phone, digital channels and CRM data into one unified console.

Amazon Connect also provides AI-powered speech analytics using Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate and Amazon Comprehend. Calls will be routed and automatically transcribed, offering transcriptions in real time and attaching them to customer records. Salesforce Einstein will use these real-time transcripts to give the agent recommended answers.

Salesforce is also exploring ways to make Einstein Voice Skills compatible with Amazon Alexa and other voice assistants and devices.

Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, said the company’s growing partnership with AWS makes it “easier for companies to deploy powerful AI and voice technologies to deliver smarter and faster customer service experiences.”

Service agents traditionally have had to gather data from many sources to tackle the needs of customers. This new service keeps all information in one place to enable tracking of customers’ assets, orders and support history.

Ariel Kelman, vice president of worldwide marketing at AWS, said the two companies have a longstanding relationship with a common goal of helping businesses “… leverage the full power of both platforms to provide world-class customer service.”

The combination of Service Cloud Voice and the Amazon Connect solution aim to speed up call resolution while streamlining operations, allowing businesses to provide a powerful customer experience.

The new services were announced at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference Nov. 19-22 in San Francisco and New York City. Billed as “the world’s largest software conference,” it has over 171,000 registered attendees and 13 million online viewers.

In August, Salesforce joined Mastercard’s small business program, along with Intuit, to supply solutions in the small business space. The aim is to help businesses succeed by increasing revenue, boosting customers and improving customer engagement.