Salesforce releases new conversational and identity resolution features for service and marketing clouds

Today, Salesforce introduced new features for their Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. Marketers will be able to use more conversational intelligence and identity resolution capabilities to boost customer engagement.

Why we care. You can’t have seamless customer experience without improved employee experience and workflow. Some of these improvements to the Service Cloud address both issues. An agent needs to have real-time data and insights in one place, whether at a call center, working remotely, or on-site with a customer.

Efficient workflows for service calls and other service and marketing insights benefits from conversational intelligence. Even though the cloud is doing it, it means organizations have the opportunity to listen to customers better.

Service Cloud call features. Salesforce partners will roll out telephony connectors to integrate phone and customer data. This will make automated call transcriptions possible and enable agents to receive intelligent real-time suggestions to help customers.

A new integration with AWS Contact Lens brings advanced transcription to Amazon Connect customers. Sentiment analysis and keywords from phone calls enables better coaching for service agents.

Read next: How Salesforce put its Slack acquisition to work

Out in the field. For in-person service calls, the Salesforce Field Service App now has a multi-level offline briefcase. This allows agents to access the right records offline. These records include secure contracts and customer data. The Field Service App places work plans, workflows and relevant safety checks all in one place for agents on a work site.

Salesforce also introduced a new visual remote assistant for customer support. This powers a virtual support session using augmented reality that customers can see on their phone screen. The agent can point and draw on their phone, directing the customer in a one-on-one session.

CDP features for Marketing Cloud. For the Marketing Cloud, marketers benefit from new streaming insights and data actions. Following real-time data signals, automated actions can be triggered by a new customer, a recent product transaction or a payment issue.

AI-powered advanced identity resolution brings customer data together from different sources. It automatically matches multiple spellings for customer names to assemble a single robust customer profile. Salesforce also introduced new capabilities for building anonymous profiles with rich data histories ready to merge with an existing customer profile when the match is made.

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.