Salesforce Introduces Service Cloud Workforce Engagement to Help Contact Centers Thrive in an All-Digital, Work-from-Anywhere World

Service leaders will be able to predict customer demand and organize their workforce to staff the right agents with the right skills at the right time — all on the world’s #1 CRM

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, introduced Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, a new dynamic workforce planning product that will help service leaders organize their entire workforce from anywhere and distribute the right work to the right agents based on skills and service channel.

With COVID-19, contact centers are dealing with a huge surge in the volume of questions across service channels like phone, chat, text and social media. At the same time, service leaders are managing staffing resources amid the transition to the work-from-home environment. Many are relying on legacy workforce management technology to organize their teams — disparate, on-premise solutions and spreadsheets that were never designed to manage globally distributed workforces. In today’s all-digital, work-from-anywhere world, companies need technology that offers a connected view of the employee and customer, all on one cloud-based platform.

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“Delivering service is more complex than ever with agents working from anywhere and volumes of customer support requests spiking,” said Bill Patterson, EVP and General Manager, CRM Applications at Salesforce. “With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, Salesforce will arm the contact center with a connected solution — all on one platform so our customers can remain resilient and agile no matter what tomorrow may bring.”

Introducing Service Cloud Workforce Engagement

Service Cloud Workforce Engagement will help companies deliver exceptional service by using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict customer service demand, enabling companies to staff the right agents, with the right skills, at the right time. With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, agents will have a single workspace that integrates all of the data, systems and coaching they need to deliver personalized service and resolve issues quickly. Salesforce will be the only provider who offers a complete customer service suite —  Core Service, Digital Engagement, Service Cloud Voice, Salesforce Field Service and now Service Cloud Workforce Engagement — all on one CRM platform. Today’s announcement includes:

• Service Forecast for Customer 360 uses AI based on data from the Salesforce platform and integrated third-party tools to help service leaders organize their workforce and predict how many requests will come into the contact center in real-time, across all digital channels and regions. For example, a retail service leader will be able to predict the number of Cyber Monday support requests and adjust their forecast accordingly, to account for expected phone demand versus chat. Service leaders will also be able to easily adjust in real-time to account for unplanned events, like an influx in calls in response to a social media influencer promotion.
• Omnichannel Capacity Planning enables service leaders to balance staffing needs across any digital channel — including phone, email, web chat, text and social channels — by assigning the right agents at the right time based on their skills and availability. For example, a bank may see customer calls dropping because of hour-long wait times on phone channels, but with omnichannel capacity planning, service leaders will be able to address these coverage gaps by cross-training agents to support multiple channels and businesses.
• Personalized Agent Engagement provides real-time coaching and on-demand training from anywhere by integrating myTrailhead, Salesforce’s online learning platform, directly into the Service Console. To increase agent engagement and performance, companies will be able to quickly onboard and continually train agents by delivering bite-size, guided learning paths directly in the agent’s workspace during their shift. For example, if a service leader at a meal subscription company identifies an agent who needs help understanding new pricing details, they will be able to deploy a guided learning path that explains a customer’s options.

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Thriving Companies Use Salesforce Service Cloud to Build Trusted Customer Relationships and Drive Growth

Companies across all industries can use Service Cloud and Workforce Engagement to scale their service efforts as they grow and face unexpected surges in customer demand.

Canyon Bicycles “Due to our continuous global growth, and as people find more value in outdoor activities and exercise amid the pandemic, we have seen a huge global increase in customer demand across our channels over the last few months,” said Thomas Kohl, Head of Customer Service at Canyon Bicycles GmbH. “While this is great for our business, it is really challenging our ability to plan, staff and optimally cover this demand. With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, we can leave spreadsheets behind and automate this process on the Salesforce Platform with great accuracy, which benefits our staff as well as our customers.”

Fisher & Paykel “As we scale globally, we are looking to automate our workforce management capabilities across different service channels, skills and teams,” said Rudi Khoury, EVP of Marketing & Customer Experience at Fisher & Paykel. “In order to do this, we need a tool to help us optimize our workforce. With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, we will be able to perform all of this and more, adding to our productivity and service quality while creating better experiences for both our customers and our service agents, alike.”

Xero “Salesforce’s vision for workforce management will allow us to balance efficiency goals with our people and culture goals, which prioritizes celebrating agent skills and providing an engaging place to interact with their workday,” said Nigel Piper, Executive General Manager, Customer at Xero. “A centralized view of future capacity will enable us to make better decisions around reactive service delivery, together with shifting effort into proactive engagement with customers.”

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