Salesforce CCaaS to be released globally, adds workforce management
Salesforce's contact center as a service offering replaces a patchwork customers cobbled together to make Service Cloud work, but it puts longtime partners in a peculiar place.
Released earlier this year to U.S. and Canadian customers, Salesforce plans to release Agentforce Contact Center "globally" next month -- which means specifically the U.K. and EU in October, Australia and New Zealand in November, and Latin America early next year.
No plans have yet been announced for the Asia rollout. Presumably, when that happens, Salesforce will become more of a global contact center as a service (CCaaS) market player for many organizations that offshore their contact center work to the Philippines and India, the world's most popular outsourcing destinations.
After years of its customers patching together telephony and other integrations for Agentforce Service -- formerly Service Cloud -- there's now a full, Salesforce-native CCaaS. Previewed at Dreamforce were the coming workforce management (WFM) features.
The promising part of Agentforce Contact Center may be its hooks into AIforce, the updated Salesforce AI intelligence layer also previewed at Dreamforce, which sits on top of its applications. Ian Jacobs, analyst at Opus Research, said that when AIforce can facilitate analytics, it will provide critical functions for running contact centers.
"In theory, when Salesforce matures the CCaaS offer, a supervisor might ask why the service level dropped, have the AI correlate volume, staffing, absenteeism, and handle time, propose a schedule change, and then execute the approved adjustment through the WFM system," Jacobs said.
Product marketing director Katie O'Neil discussed Salesforce's CCaaS in the main Dreamforce keynote.
CCaaS partners dig in
Of course, Salesforce has had longtime CCaaS partners such as Genesys and Nice. But Kevin Lee, Nice CTO and key pursuits leader, isn't worried about what he considers a downmarket Agentforce Contact Center cannibalizing joint customers. He said that the Salesforce CCaaS would not be able to support the large, sometimes global contact center operations that Nice serves.
"There's always going to be co-opetition out there, and Agentforce Contact Center is great for a certain portion of the market -- especially for organizations already native on Lightning and want the adjacent accouterments," Lee said.
"But when it comes to the much more robust enterprise-grade organizations -- AT&T, Disney, Sony -- that need breadth and depth, Salesforce is just not going to be there … that's the feedback I've gotten from product managers as well as clients."
Jacobs seconded that, adding that brands in the lower tiers of the market, as well as diehard Salesforce customers, may appreciate the Salesforce integrated stack, complete with CCaaS.
Salesforce doesn't need to out-Nice Nice on day one. It needs to make CCaaS easy enough for Salesforce customers to stop shopping.
Ian JacobsAnalyst, Opus Research
The one caveat: As WFM and other complex contact center features previewed at Dreamforce go live, Salesforce may pose a market challenge to its established CCaaS partners down the road.
"WFM is coming, but details about much of the other key parts of CCaaS at scale are still hazy," Jacobs said. "Unless Salesforce is working one-on-one with some large brand on deploying CCaaS -- and exposing its roadmap along the way -- the appeal of all-in-one is nowhere near as strong. Salesforce doesn't need to out-Nice Nice on day one. It needs to make CCaaS easy enough for Salesforce customers to stop shopping."
For its part, Salesforce said it will continue to work with its longtime CCaaS partners to build agentic hooks into Agentforce for Service.
"[With them], we have made the power of voice agents available and easy to integrate," said Harish Batlapenumarthy, product vice president for Autonomous Service and Knowledge, in a Dreamforce session going over the CCaaS and agentic service roadmap.
Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip?Email him.