Google and Salesforce.com aren't exactly strangers. The two have been working together since 2017 on various projects, including an integration between Salesforce CRM data, Google Analytics 360, and Google BigQuery, as well as an integration between Google Analytics 360 and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. But while most of their partnerships have been centered on sales and marketing activities, the companies are now doubling down on customer service specifically.
Earlier this week, Google and Salesforce announced their shared goal of transforming customer service by combining Salesforce's customer knowledge with Google's customer service-related artificial intelligence technology and unifying the best of both solutions to arm companies with a better customer service experience for human- and bot-based interactions.
On the human side, the joint solution will help provide more context for agent interactions with customers based not only on specific interactions with companies (which is Salesforce's forte) but also what's going on in the world, such as the weather or current events (which is Google's forte). This deeper context can help agents see when, for example, a snowstorm is slowing down a customer's delivery and combine that insight with how many purchases that customer has made in the past to determine whether to offer a coupon to delight a high-value repeat customer.
"The combination of Google Contact Center AI, which highlights the language and the stream of intelligence that comes through that interaction, combined with the customer data and the business process information that that Salesforce has, really makes that an incredibly enriching experience for agents," Bill Patterson, executive vice president for Salesforce Service Cloud, told TechCrunch.
Meanwhile, on the bot side, Google and Salesforce plan to leverage Einstein, Salesforce's artificial intelligence layer and Google Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in its Google Dialogflow to improve companies' understanding of how consumers speak and what their emotions are during customer service interactions. The solution will help sense growing frustration to, for instance, prioritize a certain customer's request.
"So many organizations just struggle with [a lack] of great customer service and experience. We have a lot of passion for making everyday interaction better with agents," Patterson also said.
The companies didn't specify when a concrete solution would be rolled out, but they did emphasize that their work in this area is already in progress.