Salesforce Launches First Autonomous AI Agent to Transform Customer Service
Salesforce announced Einstein Service Agent, Salesforce’s first fully autonomous AI agent. Einstein Service Agent makes conventional chatbots obsolete with its ability to understand and take action on a broad range of service issues without preprogrammed scenarios, helping make customer service far more efficient.
Unlike traditional chatbots — which can only handle specific queries that have been explicitly programmed into their system and don’t understand context or nuance — Einstein Service Agent is intelligent and dynamic. Built on the Einstein 1 Platform, Einstein Service Agent interacts with large language models (LLMs) by analyzing the full context of the customer’s message and then autonomously determining the next actions to take. It uses generative AI to create conversational responses — grounding its responses in a company’s trusted business data, including Salesforce CRM data — tailored to a company’s brand voice, tone, and guidelines with a few clicks. For service organizations, this means they can offload a large number of tedious inquiries that bog down their productivity so they can focus on tasks that require a human touch. For customers, this means they get the answers they need much faster because they no longer need to wait for human agents.
Einstein Service Agent is standing ready 24/7 to communicate with customers in natural language, respond across self-service portals and messaging channels, and perform tasks proactively while operating within clear guardrails that companies can define using the Einstein 1 Platform. And when more complicated, high-touch issues arise, requiring escalation to a human worker based on the parameters set by the company, Einstein Service Agent performs the handoff quickly and easily.
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Currently in pilot and generally available later this year, Einstein Service Agent can be set up in minutes with user-friendly interfaces, pre-built templates, and low-code actions and workflows.
“Salesforce is delivering a future where human and digital agents join forces to improve the customer experience,” said Service Cloud General Manager Kishan Chetan. “Einstein Service Agent, our first fully autonomous AI agent, will not just complete service jobs on its own; it will augment how human agents work and completely transform how service teams operate, making them far more efficient and productive. We are reimagining customer service for the AI era.”
Why it matters
Studies show most companies use chatbots today, but 81% of customers would rather wait to speak to a live agent because the current generation of chatbots aren’t meeting their expectations and the experience can be frustrating. Yet, 61% of customers say they’d rather use self-service to resolve simple issues, underscoring an opportunity and need to deliver more intelligent, autonomous agents powered by generative AI.
Improve agent productivity and elevate customer experiences by integrating AI directly into the flow of work.
Dive deeper:
- Sophisticated reasoning and natural responses: Einstein Service Agent has fluid, intelligent conversations with customers. It uses its reasoning engine to interpret and process information to provide answers and solve problems for customers. The advanced reasoning engine interacts with LLMs by analyzing the full context of the customer’s input to understand their intent, drawing logical inferences from the data, and connecting various pieces of information to determine the right set of actions to take. Einstein Service Agent executes those actions and uses generative AI to create responses that align with a company’s brand voice, tone, and guidelines.
- For example, if a customer reaches out to an online shoe store to return a recent purchase, Einstein Service Agent, powered by Salesforce Data Cloud, has all the customer and business data required to autonomously process a return, such as product details, purchase history, customer preferences, warranty, and inventory information. With that information, Einstein Service Agent can automatically process the return and communicate with the customer from start to finish, even sending a follow-up survey to gauge their satisfaction level.
- 24/7 swift resolutions driven by trusted data: Einstein Service Agent grounds its responses in a company’s trusted business data, including Salesforce CRM data. Using Data Cloud and Unified Knowledge, companies can even integrate data and knowledge from third-party systems, like SharePoint, Confluence, Google Drive, and company websites and files, to help Einstein Service Agent generate accurate responses that are personalized to every customer’s specific needs and preferences.
- For example, if a telecommunications customer is looking for a new cell phone, Einstein Service Agent can instantly provide personalized recommendations the way a store associate would using generative AI responses grounded in a wide range of data — the customer’s purchase history, data usage, web browsing activity, past service interactions, marketing engagement, and the company’s product catalog and inventory.
- Built-in guardrails: Einstein Service Agent is built on the Einstein 1 Platform and leverages the Einstein Trust Layer to perform functions like masking personally identifiable information (PII) and defining clear parameters and guardrails for Einstein Service Agent to follow.
- Quick setup: Einstein Service Agent doesn’t require thousands of lengthy structured dialogues for setup. It can be turned on in minutes with its out-of-the-box templates, Salesforce components, and an LLM. Companies can even reuse existing Salesforce objects, like flows, Apex code, and prompts, to equip Einstein Service Agent with skills faster and create custom actions that are specific to their business needs using a low-code builder and natural language instructions to save time and money.
- Cross-channel and multimodal innovation: Einstein Service Agent can assist customers anytime across self-service portals and messaging channels, like WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, Facebook Messenger, and SMS. Because Einstein Service Agent understands text, images, video, and audio, customers can send photos when their issue is too difficult to explain in words.
- For example, if a manufacturing company runs into a problem with a recent equipment purchase, Einstein Service Agent can look up the product information and automatically send out troubleshooting steps personalized to that user. If that fails, the customer can upload a picture of the error code they are seeing, which Einstein Service Agent can analyze to see if sending a replacement unit would be justified. Similarly, Einstein Service Agent could take the opportunity to upsell the customer, providing relevant recommendations for more fully featured units.
- Seamless handoffs to human agents: If an inquiry is off topic or falls outside of Einstein Service Agent’s scope, it will easily transfer the conversation to a human agent using Service Cloud. The human agent will have full context of the conversation and can pick up where Einstein Service Agent left off without asking the customer to repeat themselves.
- For example, a life insurance company that wants to provide human care to members experiencing a loss can have Einstein Service Agent escalate to a human agent if it detects language or sentiment related to “loss” or “death.” Or if a loyal customer asks to return a jacket they bought 32 days after purchase, and store policy only allows taking back items in the first 30 days, Einstein Service Agent could suggest a human co-worker make an exception.
Customer perspective
“Einstein Service Agent’s speed and accuracy in handling customer inquiries is promising. It understands and responds like a human, adhering to our diverse, country-specific guidelines. I can see it becoming an integral part of our service team, freeing our human agents to tackle higher value issues.” – George Pokorny, SVP of Global Customer Success, OpenTable
SOURCE: salesforce
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