Grow Customer Success: Self-Service Support with Salesforce AI

Hello and welcome everyone. Can everybody hear me? All right, perfect. We're incredibly excited to have you all here with us today and we're going to take 20 minutes to discuss how Salesforce delivers self service support. So let's just go ahead and get it kicked off with a brief introduction. My name is Amanda Rogers. I'm part of our digital success organization. I lead our incredible digital operations team and it's an honor and privilege to be here with you today. Steve would like to hand it over to you.

Thank you, Amanda. I'm Steve Roberts and I have the honor of leading our amazing knowledge management team which is responsible for governing the content that feeds our help agent on help salesforce.com thank you, Steve.

Steve and I are here to talk to you about how we at Salesforce deliver self service support and more importantly, what our successes have been, but also the challenges that have come along the way. As we begin our journey today, I want to introduce you to the beginning of a new era. This is the era of agentic AI. On the left side of the screen you see the legacy enterprise. It's really the way in which we've always worked. It's the world of slow manual processes and it ultimately caps growth and productivity. On the right, well, on the right you see the future. It is our future. The agentic enterprise. Today at Salesforce, we are living this world where agentic AI augments human intelligence, ultimately leading to higher productivity and limitless growth. So as we move into this world at Salesforce, this is transformation. This is how we bring together higher productivity for our employees. We create a more personalized customer journey and decisions while we can make decisions more intelligently. So here at Salesforce, we're living this transformation today as the world's first agentic enterprise. And we're here today to help you become one too. But before we go any further, I want to explain what it means to be customer zero here at Salesforce. It means that we are at the forefront of all the incredible products and innovation that you see today. We are the first to test, we are the first to utilize these products and features internally to learn and understand how we can bring this product and these products to you. When you get them in there in your hands, you can trust that these products are ready. We are your partners and we want to share with you today how our customer zero story of testing and utilizing these tools daily are bringing these products to market for you and how you can also be successful as adopting customer zero in reality. Customer zero, it's not just that Catchy phrase. It's something that you can take these learnings from today and create your own journey. So as we move further in our customer success journey, I want to introduce you to our customer success organization. Customer success is at the forefront of everything that we do. My leadership team, myself included, we all came up in customer facing roles. We know this world, we know that customer success is what fuels our innovation. And every day we're 9,000 strong. We span across 32 countries, nine global hubs and we have a vast array of roles as you can see on the screen. But here's the key takeaway. These teams, they weren't always unified. They were disconnected and separate and siloed. Teams don't bring together the ability to deliver the best experience for our customers. Well, why? Because if you're not connected, you're not speaking to one another. When you're connected, it leads to exponentially better outcomes and you understand your entire customer base together. This powerhouse right here serves 200,000 customers and over 176 million touchpoints in annually. That is the scale that we are talking about today. The rich context that all of these individuals on the customer success team brings, it's the foundation for what we're about to show you today. But as you can imagine, bringing together such a large organization, it requires a unified formula that's incredibly important and that is a starting point. In reality, our formula is simple, it's easy and it's expert. First, easy, it's to be intuitive, to be accessible and to be always on with zero wait time when we can help it. Second, that's where we demonstrate our expertise. But it's not just the expertise in our products and our features. It's the rich expertise that we have in the customer that is what fuels everything that we do on a daily basis. We've been working with these customers for over 26 years. And that rich customer context is exactly what is the result of being the world's leading CRM. We want our customers to feel known. We want them to know that we care about them. And we are creating these experiences to serve everybody across the globe. And this kind of success, really being easy and expert, has to start somewhere. And it starts with enabling the right channels. And this is where AgentForce comes in. Through AgentForce, we've been able to bring this organization together from pre to post sales to connect all of our previously disconnected experiences together. But for this to truly work, it depends on you, our customers, to be at the forefront of everything that we're doing to adopt this product. And give us feedback to really put this into play. So now that you've seen our goal here, I'd like to hand it over to Steve to bring us on the journey a little longer.

Thank you Amanda. So here's what we started with. We had a highly customized website where every little change required a hard code change. And this meant that we could not iterate or make improvements, leaving us to quickly have an outdated user interface for our customers. Our customer experienced slower load times and also hard to navigate and find information. And in our case submission form it was so complicated it had too many required fields as well as many pages to click through. In short, we knew we needed to reimagine self service and to meet our customers expectations. So enters agentforce. We rebuilt help.salesforce.com you know, with the Agent Force experience and we introduced this time last year our help agent. Agentforce represents a completely new way to connect our customers. It's always available for both technical and you know, easy questions 24, seven, you know, a day with accurate, reliable responses. It's grounded on our trusted data, the data that our teams manage and curate. And it can take autonomous action, not just answering questions, but taking action. More on that in a bit and the results have been great. This year We've seen a 77% resolution rate with Agent Force as well as 1.8 million conversations to date. And now we're able to iterate more quickly and fine tune with impact. At the beginning of the year we introduced the full screen experience. So no more chatbot in the corner. We brought that into the full screen where customers can engage with viewing AgentForce as an AI powered channel. And then we went in and we unified that support experience in March, enabling customers to create and manage their cases from within the conversation. So no more complicated web forms. Together we saw a 22% increase in adoption and a 17% reduction in abandonment rate with this new engagement model. One window, one experience engaging. We then went in and we iterated even further. By May we were introducing inline citations so that customers could would know where the answers were coming from. This enhanced our trust with the customer and drove a 27% lift in adoption. And then finally in June we rolled out multi language support and today we support over six languages and growing which is allowing us on English only content to meet customers where they're at in a global environment. And each enhancement has dependent deepened our trust, engagement and accessibility fueling continued global adoption of Agent Force. And at Its core of AgentForce is Agent Builder. Agent Builder is the brains behind the AI automation and personalization. And we kept it simple. We had seven topics and eight actions. And what this allowed us to do is we can set global instructions like tell the agent you are a support engineer and you are looking for the best interests of our customers and Salesforce. And we can also control guardrails, for example, don't answer any questions that are not Salesforce product support related. And finally, we can enable autonomous actions. This is where the magic really begins. Take for example, file a case. It can help guide the customer through the login experience so that they're authenticated properly. It can take all that information that they've been conversing with the agent on and build that into a case submission, ask additional questions if it doesn't have enough to fill out the information our support engineers need, and then hand it over to our incredible support engineering team in a seamless, automated way without the customer even having to go through that complicated web form. Now, Agent Builder provides control, safety and autonomy, letting AgentForce handle complex support tasks efficiently and accurately. And even sometimes automation requires a little bit of a human touch. So AgentForce captures all the details and summarizes the context and hands that over to a case owner. And by the time the case owner and the swarm team arrive into the service console, they've got a full picture of the customer experience and what their concerns are. And AI and Omnichannel Omni routing. The Omnichannel routing feature ensures that we find the right expert at the right time. And it also spins up a slack channel for multi team collaboration, for real time collaboration across all of our teams. AI further accelerates the resolution with suggested work summaries, suggested replies, and my favorite, the knowledge creation. Capturing that information of the engagement with the customer that can be shared with the agent for future responses to our customers. Keeping our content up to date and fresh in real time. And after a year, we've seen over 82% fewer escalations, 61% faster case resolution time and 4.7 combined out of five customer satisfaction scores. And now that you've seen all the pieces, let's put it together and show you how AgentForce works when we bring this all together. Take these two experiences here. The first, a customer wants to talk to a customer, has A question and agent 4 summarizes searches, summarizes and responds to using thousands of pieces of content that we have available that our data360 will harmonize and return back a knowledge answer. Now that's probably what you're used to hearing about. The second though is on the other side, a customer wants to just talk to a human. We get a lot of those, I would like to talk to a human. And so we quickly turn that over and we have a design principle that if a customer wants or needs to talk to a human, we would make it easy. This isn't about case deflection, it's about answer efficiency and being really efficient with our answers. And if that means getting it to a human, let's get them to a human with the least amount of friction. Because we believe that whatever's going to go to make the customer most successful and get them the answer the quickest is best for the customer. And that's what we try to orchestrate with the Data360 model. So to summarize our approach, we followed these five key principles. The first, as you heard with Amanda's organizational discussion, we created our North Star. For us that was the easy and the easy and optimist. You know the formula for world class service, the easy and expert. And then we unified our success organizations around a faster way to deploy and iterate changes as we respond to customer feedback. Third is design your operations team and incorporate feedback. When you design your operational team, design it in a way to ensure that you're able to iterate quickly and scale that team quickly. We started small and we took the feedback from our customers to really guide our direction of how we grew and finally set up testing implement scalable testing both pre launch and post launch to continuously improve these steps turned our innovations into repeatable scalable impact and ensuring that our enhancements benefited both our customers and our salesforce teams.

And now we want to extend our thank you. I hope you have an incredible week and have a wonderful day.