Imagine a future where customer service interactions are seamless. No more arguing with chatbots over a return policy. No more being placed on hold for hours as you’re passed from service rep to service rep trying to sort out a seemingly small issue.
At Cloudwerx, we believe that the future has already arrived, via the power of Einstein Copilot and Einstein GPT for Service. And it’s yours for the taking.
At our recent partner event with Salesforce, CEO of Lightfold (A Cloudwerx Company), John (JC) Cosgrove took to the stage to demonstrate how AI-powered service can handle tricky customer interactions with grace, efficiency, empathy, and even a touch of humour — exactly what your organisation should be delivering to turn your customers into loyal enthusiasts.
Here are our four big takeaways from the event:
1. We haven’t reached peak AI ‘hype’ yet
When ChatGPT came onto the scene, the barrier to entry for AI use dropped — dramatically. For the first time, users no longer needed to understand how to design experiments, prepare data sets and build models, like churn prediction or cross-selling scores in order to get useful accurate responses in response to queries.
With the playing field levelled, John believes now is the moment to pay attention. John cites experts like Geoffrey Hinton, an initial sceptic of AI, who also caution that we are at a critical inflection point — the technology is evolving rapidly, and we are now at a point where enterprise-grade AI is already consuming more investment than the entire cloud infrastructure.
2. An AI-first strategy is now mandatory for all organisations
When it comes to customer service, zero handle time is a radical idea. And, John cautions, it’s not going to happen overnight.
But, with generative AI, metrics we rely on to track customer service, like handle time, are improving at lightning speed. It’s not just about AI improving current processes, it’s about rethinking your entire organisation’s potential. You’ll be able to change your assumptions around scaling, as for the first time, you won’t need to grow at the same rate or cost as before.
Salesforce, for example, allows direct connections to your knowledge base. Conversations, audio logs and transcripts can all be fed directly into your system, and, from there, AI can start deducing meaning and context before providing a response — crucial for scaling AI in an enterprise.
As John says,
“This shift rewards those who have taken their knowledge base seriously.”
3. How we use generative AI has fundamentally shifted
At the partner event, John provided a demonstration using Cody and Charli, AI-powered customer service bots, who were able to provide customers with dynamic, context-aware responses. Known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), this technology moves beyond basic prompts and attachments by integrating with custom actions and APIs.
It’s impossible to understate how enormous of a change this is, as we move from consumer AI to enterprise AI, where detailed context, custom actions and parameters control the AI’s output. When designing something like Cody, RAG shines, supplementing the bot’s knowledge with context so that it can deliver accurate and empathetic responses — even in unpredictable customer interactions.
Our job is no longer to tell AI what to do. Our job is to give it exactly what it needs to maximise its success. It’s exactly the same principles that we would follow when training a new (human) service agent: to equip them with what they need to succeed.
4. As Salesforce customers and partners, we’re at the frontier of AI technology
This year, Salesforce released ‘Planner API’ — brand new functionality that takes all the information provided by the customer and interprets it into a sensible series of steps. While this product is still being developed, it is, at its core, a tool that can quickly determine how to solve the customer’s problem by bringing in tools and experts, and then route to the necessary individuals who can collaborate, check if they need to escalate, or feed back an answer — all within milliseconds.
Additionally, Salesforce has introduced analytics features like conversation mining and service intelligence that are all designed to help you improve service quality. These features are available within Salesforce right now, but they haven’t been widely adopted because they have only recently become available.
At Cloudwerx, we want to help our customers to unlock the potential within their Salesforce Cloud. If what you’ve read so far is piquing your curiosity, or if you’d like to learn more about creating your own AI-first strategy, make sure you reach out. We’d love to walk you through the latest developments and explore how Salesforce AI can help you revolutionise your customer service interactions.
Interested in working with Cloudwerx?
Please reach out to hello@cloudwerx.com. We offer free consultations, and would love to hear about your business.