Salesforce and Google want to build smarter customer service experience

Google and Salesforce have announced they are expanding their collaboration in an effort to build a smarter customer service experience. The goal is to combine Salesforce’s knowledge of customers with Google’s customer service related AI products.

The result should therefore be a smarter customer service experience, whether it is with human employees or with chatbots, for example. The two companies therefore investigate the customer service experience with human employees.

“The combination of Google Contact Center AI, which highlights the language and flow of intelligence generated through that interaction, and the customer data and business process information Salesforce has, makes that an incredibly enriching experience for agents,” explains Bill Patterson, executive vice president for Salesforce Service Cloud, to TechCrunch.

Google’s software understands the voice and the intention, and gets access to a set of external information such as weather or news events that can have an impact on customers. Salesforce then looks at the hard data it stores about the customer, such as who they are, their purchase history and previous interactions.

The companies think that by bringing these two types of information together, they can retrieve relevant information in real time, to help the employee to give the best answer. This could be the best product, for example, or suggesting that an item arrives later due to bad weather in the area.

Chatbot

In addition, the companies want to improve the chatbot experience. Google and Salesforce want chatbots to better understand customer requests. They do this by bringing together Einstein, Salesforce’s artificial intelligence layer, and Google Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in the Google Dialogflow product, so it can better understand demand, monitor sentiment and send a customer to a human operator before the customer gets frustrated.