Agentforce Contact Center brings native CCaaS to Salesforce
Salesforce launches Agentforce Contact Center, a native CCaaS platform that unifies voice, AI, CRM and digital channels to deliver personalized, proactive customer service.
LAS VEGAS -- Salesforce announced at Enterprise Connect the launch of its native contact center as a service platform, Agentforce Contact Center.
The CCaaS offering is built on the Salesforce platform and designed to bring together voice, automation, CRM data, AI agents and digital channels into a single, unified system. Agentforce Contact Center is now in general availability.
With the growth of AI, customer experience (CX) leaders face siloed data and disconnected experiences. The goal Salesforce set for Agentforce Contact Center was to build a fully integrated platform that could provide personalized, proactive customer service, said Gautam Vasudev, senior vice president of product management at Salesforce.
With a fully integrated platform, AI agents autonomously resolve simple cases and escalate higher-priority and complex cases to human agents. Agents have access to a customer's complete history and insights from voice conversations, texts, chats, previous purchases and marketing activity.
Salesforce has danced around CCaaS before, but a native CCaaS offering felt like an inevitability with Salesforce's Data 360 and Agentforce agents, said Liz Miller, an analyst with Constellation Research.
The platform "promises a virtual tidal wave" of real-time customer data that can be used to improve customer outcomes, value and satisfaction, she said.
Enhancing CCaaS
There are still many organizations that feel they haven't settled on the right CCaaS platform for their on-premises to cloud migration. Large enterprises, too, may have deployed seats across the major contact center vendors, Miller said.
But organizations don't necessarily need to rip and replace their current contact center in favor of Agentforce Contact Center. It can be deployed alongside their current contact center platform to explore the possibilities available in an end-to-end integrated offering, said Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM of Agentforce Service at Salesforce.
"They will be able to see which parts of those can be lit up and what their CCaaS vendor can bring on top of that end-to-end vision as well," Chetan said. "They have a harmonious way to find the strengths they are looking for from the vendor ecosystem."
Boosting agent performance with AI
CX leaders are looking for platforms that empower employees to better engage with customers and bridge the gap between what customers and brands want to achieve, Miller said. AI can help organizations achieve those goals by providing customers with a fully self-service autonomous AI experience or by providing human agents with relevant, contextual information to resolve customer needs.
"When you have an AI agent sitting next to you, helping you with every call, every chat -- you now get that confidence," Vasudev said. "You feel more empowered, and you can deliver a better quality of service."
Katherine Finnell is senior site editor for Informa TechTarget's unified communications site. She writes and edits articles on a variety of business communications technology topics, including unified communications as a service, video conferencing and collaboration.
