Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Presentation] Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar, How Service Cloud and Agentforce Help Service Teams Do More with Less in 2025. Today, we will show you how Service Cloud and Agentforce can help service teams address some of the biggest challenges that they are facing in 2025 like rising customer expectations, managing complex issues that do with limited sources. I'm Srinivas. I am a specialist in the Service Cloud solution engineering team. And I have with me Srinihita, who is also a specialist solution engineer, who -- and she will be demonstrating some of the ways in which Service Cloud can enhance productivity, scalability and customer experience. I would want to start with a thank you. Thank you for being our customers, our partners. We hope to make valuable use of your time today. Your success is priority to us. So just a quick start with the safe harbor. I would like to advise that you, please, base your purchasing decisions on the products and services that are already currently available. So in terms of agenda, we will open things up with understanding why service teams must work smarter in 2025. This will be followed by a demo that shows you exactly how Service Cloud and Agentforce can help your teams increase productivity, scale effortlessly and wow your customers. We will also take a quick look into our road map. And if time permits, this will also be followed by a Q&A, so requesting all to please submit your questions throughout. And make sure that you stick around to learn more about what's coming ahead in terms of Service Cloud and Agentforce. So let's take a closer look at the challenges that service organizations are up against. Teams are stretched thin. They are caught up in low-value tasks, which leads to burnout and frustration. Meanwhile, the customer expectations are soaring, demanding faster responses and more personalized experiences. The growing gap between service quality and cost efficiency is a real challenge, but it's also a huge opportunity and opportunity to think how we deliver exceptional service and meet these rising demands head on. How do we become more productive, scaling efficiently and keeping customers happy, all the while managing tighter budgets, smaller teams and rising expectations? And the way we achieve these goals, that's also changed very dramatically. For example, let's take productivity. It used to be very simple automation, things like macros and workflows. Now AI agents handle repetitive tasks. They draft responses and free up your time to focus on the work that matters the most. Then there is scalability, which used to simply mean hiring more people to meet the growing demand. Today, AI helps your team to do more without adding head count, making it easier to grow without really stretching your resources too thin. And finally, there is customer satisfaction. Teams used to rely on individual knowledge that wasn't always documented. That led to gaps in service. Now AI delivers real-time insights and feedback, helping teams truly understand customer needs and deliver better experiences every time. And here is the kicker: it's not just about service teams feeling -- about the service teams feeling the pressure. Business leaders are betting on AI to drive efficiency, so much so that about 85% of executives plan to increase spending on AI initiatives in 2025, according to Forbes. With growing demands from customers and pressure from executives, service teams need to adapt. Whether you are working with fewer resources or just trying to make the most of what you have got, the shift to smarter productivity, effortless scaling and greater satisfaction and -- is what service teams need to succeed in 2025. Let's take a closer look at the challenges service teams are facing today and why these shifts are important. The reality is that service teams are in a tough spot. Customers expect fast, personalized service, so much so that 77% expect an immediate response when they reach out. That's a lot of pressure. And it's not just about speed. Reps are bouncing between tabs, searching for answers, and the entire same manual task over and over. Instead of helping customers, they are stuck dealing with disconnected tools and outdated processes. And for smaller businesses, it's even tougher with smaller teams, tighter budgets and fewer resources than enterprises. Keeping up with complex customer issues can feel almost impossible. In fact, 69% of service reps are struggling to balance speed and complexity, yet customers still expect fast, personalized support. And with self-service and AI handling the easy cases, reps are left managing the toughest, most complex issues. That's why they need AI assistance to help them solve these complex issues faster and more efficiently. At the same time, leadership is highly invested in AI, pushing service teams to adopt it faster. The challenge, most teams don't have the right tools to keep up. Service teams need a better way to work, one that actually helps them to do more with less. That's where Service Cloud and Agentforce comes in. Instead of juggling the million tabs and switching between tools, everything your team needs is in one AI-powered workspace: case management, knowledge management, instant management, Slack collaboration and built-in AI. It's all right there, ready to go. Now your reps can spend less time clicking around and more time actually helping customers faster. So now what we will do is we want you to actually see this action. And this is where I'll be handing it over to Srinihita, who is going to walk us through how Service Cloud and Agentforce can help your teams work smarter in 2025. She will show you how you can help your team get more done by taking the busy work off their plate so that they can focus on what really matters: how to make scaling easy with tools that grow with your business; and keeping your customers happy with faster, more personalized service that keeps them coming back. So over to you, Srinihita.

Thank you, Srinivas. So now that we've covered the broader context, let's quickly dive into something that is more like tangible that we can look at how exactly this automation with Salesforce can directly boost productivity for us, right? This can be with the help of Agentforce. We can look at increasing the customer satisfaction that we will see later and how case management can be happened -- or can be managed. So if you look at it in today's fast-paced customer service environments, right, speed and consistency are everything, so agents are expected to resolve these cases faster, reduce the manual work and deliver a much more seamless customer experience every time. So this is where automation becomes a big game changer, and let's look at how it can help us. So let's take a look at how a customer service rep can actually leverage tools to be very productive, right? So a phone call can come in. And we can see that, through this omnichannel, it gets routed to the agent that's got the right skill set and is also available, but what they're presented here right off the box is a screen that's very productive for them. It gives them full view of the Customer 360 data. In this case here, it's also transcribing the whole call, which allows us to actually push actions to our agents as well as without having them to actually take notes and searching on their screen. What we are also doing to be productive here is we're coming out with "out of the box" flows, in this case here identity verification flows, which allows our agents to do things like compliance, do things like validation, all within the flow of work all within their console. And as they're going through those motions, going through those steps, they need history in terms of what's been going on with this client, right? So a full view of the time line, all the history that's been going on with this individual or these individuals, right, how many e-mails we've sent them, which channels are they coming off of, all of these things that are very important to understand the history of this interaction. Now there's a lot that goes on when we talk about history. And why would I, as an agent, have to go and do all of that, putting someone on hold, doing all of the searching, trying to understand everything? Why? Why would I do that? So let's take advantage of Agentforce here to actually do some of that busy work for me. It's like a little helper, right? It has a lot more throughput power to accomplish those tasks, things like summarizing all of the open cases with this individual right now, with Lauren Bailey, as an example, and not just memorizing but what other assets do they own? From our client as well. And so all of that is allowing me to ask clarifying questions instead of asking for history. And we can get to the root cause quicker and serve this customer quicker. So Agentforce has the capability to do all of that throughput for us. When it comes to time as well, to get down a bit deeper into the things to solve this scenario or solve this issue, we can leverage knowledge articles, but again, here with unified knowledge, we've got the ability to bring external knowledge documents into the flow of work as well. Not everything has to live inside of Salesforce CRM, so by combining embedded knowledge articles from Salesforce and the external documents from any other systems out there, we've got the ability to serve and resolve this case a lot quicker. But not only that, all of our AI technology can also ground all of that data, leveraging those external documents as well to provide a very personalized and a very specific answer and tailored answer to any issues that our customers might have. So that's all at our fingertips. When you think about being a lot more productive as a customer service rep, we've got access to all of that. When it comes to escalating a case as well, which happens quite a bit, I'm sure you all would agree, we might need additional resources. We might need someone very skilled in a certain aspect of it. Instead of escalation, why not collaborate in the flow of work in a moment in trying to improve that first-contact resolution as well? So here you can see that, natively inside of the console, a service rep can actually start to collaborate with individuals in different departments that might not have access to the Salesforce console at all. They can live in Slack. And we can create the swarm on a case, allowing us to solve the issue, collaborate together, get to the root cause of it. And then once we get that answer, we can then go back and get back to our clients and explain to them what the issue exactly was. We've got experts on the line, allowing us to give that immediate feedback, that accurate description as well. And then we can go off and close that case. So this is where we can involve experts from outside of the Salesforce console, give them access and visibility into what we need to actually solve this case at the end of the day, which makes it a lot more powerful and productive, instead of getting back to a customer at a later point in time. Now, because -- all of that collaboration that we've done here and we've been able to solve complex cases, let's share this knowledge, right? Let's not keep that specific to one case. What if we draft a brand-new knowledge article? But instead of typing everything that just happened, AI can generate a knowledge article for us based on all of those case details, description; based off of that -- or transcript based off how we resolved this case and collaborated together, all of the knowledge articles that we've used to actually find the right answer. AI can actually create that brand-new knowledge article, at least a draft of it. And then we are going to be able to leverage that and push that through our normal approval flow, to expose this on the portal as an example or anywhere else that we need. And at the end of it, that's how we can close cases faster with a lot more accuracy and more perfection, leveraging all of these productive tools that we've seen at our disposal right here in the flow of work, right? So that's like a great advantage for all of us. And it's fabulous that we were able to do all of that from a customer service agent's perspective right here. So that was great, now that we've -- understand productivity. So we all know that, as business grows, so does the volume and the complexity of our customer service requests, so scaling support operations efficiently is one of the biggest challenges of -- that we will be facing with especially the business that we have today. So manual processes simply do not scale, at least not with sacrificing quality or overwhelming your team. That's where scalability and automation would help, and Salesforce can help you. So in this demo, I'll probably show you how automation can help scale service operations by intelligently distributing workload, eliminating repetitive tasks and enabling consistent service delivery even as the volume increases. So when we talk about scalability, right, it's the very meaning of doing more with less. What better way to show this than with a self-service scenario? So you can see here we've got service agent, instead of a customer portal, helping one of our clients, Lauren, and asking a bunch of questions related to her assets. And what does she own? And what is she capable of actually self-serving in this scenario here? And this can be done in the channel of your choice. So you can see that Lauren is asking a combination of general questions here but also very specific questions on some of her assets. And as Agentforce, because it's grounded in not just the knowledge documents, it's grounded in all the CRM data and all the data cloud data. It's got access to the full customer view and profile. It can personalize each and every answer that's coming from one of those data sources and provide a very accurate and personalized answer as well, but we can do that across any number of channels. So how does all of this actually scale at the end of the day? This is the Agent Builder, right, what I'll show you next. And you can see we've got Agentforce agents here for different scenarios, anything, from employees, service team, marketing teams and even other agents as well. And so Agentforce builder allows us to create all of those agents and then scale them across the different channels that are accessible to us. So what you can see here is we've got an agent which is based off of a few concepts, things like topics, things like actions. It has access to data libraries, which you can specify to make it more an expert as well, right, languages, all of these things that are at the disposal of an agent, to make it very precise and to make it sort of a specialist, if you will. And based on different channels, we might want to create different scenarios for our agents. When we look at a topic, we can see here that there's a classification and there's a scope behind it as well. This allows us to put guardrails around what this agent can do. What is the task to accomplish? And then there's actions tied to all of that. And the actions can be things accomplished inside of your CRM system, as an example. And it can be cross-departments as well, things like creating an opportunity, say for example, for the sales team; or taking an action on a case such as escalating it or adding additional resources, as an example again. And then at the bottom of this Agent Builder tool, you also have the ability to test it out, iterate different scenarios. And as you do that and as you're playing around with it, to make sure that it's hitting the right topics, you can see specifically which actions it's going to hit as well based on your case scenarios that you are testing out here. So it's very visual way to actually try out yourselves as you're building your agents and then really putting it through that test [ demeanor ] so that you've got the ability to see where is it being tripped up or maybe your instructions. Because it's an agent that you can build without having to require you any coding in the background, but you can change the instructions based on all of that. Now as I said that I'd show you a new feature called the Service Planner, this is it, okay? So think of a service agent, again, opening up a case. It can determine if there is a service plan that fits the bill for this type of case. And it generates service plan for you. You can see here it outlines the steps that it needs to take in order to solve this case. And that could be based off of compliance that we've got internally. That could be based out of trainings and training new agents, but it outlines the steps. And then with a click of a button, it can take actions such as sending an e-mail based off a prompt template that you already have for those specific scenarios, right? So it's an AI-generated e-mail that a newer rep can then generate, send off because the Service Planner has outlined all of the right steps to follow for this specific type of scenario. And at the end of the day, when we're about to resolve this case and we need to wrap it up, the ability again with a click of a button to summarize this whole case, the history of what happened, again, based off of a prompt, which allows you to continue having the same number of characters, the same length of your case summaries, making sure that we are following again adherence, compliance, different reasons, but it really helps train some of our newer agents to make them a lot more productive. But it helps you to scale your business when it comes to not having to increase the number of agents but making every single agent a lot more productive when it comes to time, to put them into the field ready to actually go out there solving cases as well. All of this, at the end of the day, leads to a greater customer satisfaction because you're solving cases quicker, helping your customers faster, right? I'm sure that was a good demo for you to understand exactly how scalability works. So now, at the end of the day, the ultimate goal of any service organization is to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction. Customers want quicker answers, minimal effort and consistent support every time they reach out, right, so when the agents are bogged down with manual steps and inconsistent processes, it directly impacts the customer experience and their satisfaction. So in this video, I'll show you how we can help increase customer satisfaction, by covering Agentforce; Customer Experience Intelligence, where we tap into the customer sentiments; and feedback management. There's a lot of tools that are out there to help us measure CSAT, NPS score, sentiment, et cetera, but Customer Experience Intelligence allows you to view all of those metrics and all of those data points in that one single dashboard. And you can see here that I can flip different dashboards and different views to see all of those data points tied together. And we can see here there's a lot of negative sentiment around the reasons that people are contacting us. And a lot of these things are tied to entities, phrases and products, but that's a lot of data point for me to actually sift through and try to understand at a more granular level. This is where Agentforce comes into play, as you can see. So why not leverage the power of Agentforce to find the key trends, to find the issues at heart? What's actually happening behind the scenes here? I can see that you can summarize all of the negative sentiment around batteries that we've seen here in the past 30 days. More so, can you open up those cases and tell me how did we resolve all of these situations related to that negative sentiment and those bad scores that we've been receiving? So as -- Agentforce, as you can see, has the computing power to do it not only at scale but do it at a speed that an agent or an individual would require a lot more time. And at the end of the day, let me draft an e-mail to one of my clients as well, right? So -- but how do we get these scores, all these NPS scores? Surveys, of course, are a great way to do it. Almost everybody is doing that. Let's make that easier as well. Let's scale that portion of it. Let's build out an AI-generated survey. And also that's at your disposal inside of Salesforce's platform. So you provide basic details to the survey generation tool, and then voila. You've got access to actually make it very personal. And you can tweak anything that you want because you have the access to the AI prompt which allows you to specify it. "I do not want," or, "I want these exact 3 questions. I don't want to make this general to the manufacturing industry. I actually want to make it very targeted towards one of my products as well," right? And so you've got the ability to tweak a prompt that will actually generate those questions inside of your survey. And that's all done generated content inside of Salesforce based on your data as well. And that's actually generating the survey for you, which is a lot of time saved, as you can see, but also it's leveraging the best practices within the industry and within the CSAT and NPS scoring techniques as well that are used out there. Not only that, you still have access to all of our branding capabilities inside of Salesforce, like changing the logo, adding a background, but surveys is one thing, right? It's great to do it in one language. It generates it, but what about all of our global users then or users that might have a very specific language based on regions or based on demography as well? We can actually use AI once again to translate our survey. So let's go ahead and translate one of our surveys that we just built out here in the French language. And so you've got the ability within the click of a button to translate every single line that you see within your survey, but you can also edit the format, change the font if you want to. And you can come in here and really customize the look and feel and everything else around it, but this can be translated into the languages of your choice. It does not have to be just one. And at the end of that, what you can see is you can completely save and finish your survey if you're happy with everything that you just saw, right? As you can see, it's saved.

Thanks, Srinihita. Thanks for the great demo. Sorry, I was speaking on mute. So let's do a quick recap of what was just covered by Srinihita some time back. So she spoke about how to increase productivity. You saw how you can help your team get more done by resolving cases faster, collaborating in Slack and letting Agentforce handle repetitive tasks like writing case summaries and responses. Then we looked at how to scale effortlessly, showing you tools like autonomous agents, making it easy to grow without adding any head count. And finally, we focused on how to boost customer satisfaction by using AI-powered insights and feedback to better understand what your customers need so you can deliver better experiences that keeps them coming -- better experiences that keep them coming back. Bottom line, with the right tools, your team can work smarter, grow without blowing the budget and keep your customers happy. Also let us look at some of the customers who have significantly transformed their operations across various industries. For example, in manufacturing industry, at Unimark, we were able to streamline and provide -- they were able to -- streamlined and transparent processes, optimized field service to boost customer engagement. Service queries are consolidated, classified and routed for speedy and optimal case assignment. Realtime of -- views of schedules and service histories and reports uploaded on the go has boosted the productivity by 25%. And again, at Air India, Einstein for Service automatically classifies cases. And omnichannel routing assigns them to the right agents with the right AI skills. Agents know exactly what next steps to take on each case, thanks to the AI-powered reply recommendations grounded in knowledge. Similarly, for Angel One, Salesforce has automated omnichannel approach to service, which makes the customer experiences seamless. Guided service workflows and a unified customer view help agents deliver faster, personalized service, resulting in 30% reduction in the average handling time. Through omnichannel engagement, Proactive For Her, which is in the health care space, has delivers -- is able to deliver seamless service. Digital engagement tools help them meet patients on their preferred channels; and also provide seamless omnichannel service, including integration with WhatsApp. And this is just a glimpse of what's possible, faster time to value, greater efficiency and a significantly improved customer experience. So before -- just before we close. So let me also take you through some of the exciting innovations that were released recently. And also some of them -- some of which are expected in the year ahead and beyond. This is a slightly busy slide, so I'll just touch upon some of the key areas over here. So in the demo, you were able to see some of the key functionalities which are coming in spring, for example, Service Planner. This has been recently rebranded as Service Assistant. This gives your service reps ability for step-by-step plan to tackle a case. You also saw case summaries that allow one click of button for summarizing the cases, along with the relevant details and contextual knowledge. One of the things that probably was shown or not shown, I'm not very sure, was related to the service e-mail assistant that is enabled, which allows you to take free-form instructions at the point of generating an e-mail. For example, if you do not have any template readily available for any specific instance, you can have your service reps type in natural language, kind of e-mail they want to generate and Agentforce would generate it right at the point of the workflow of the work. Moving on to summer. We have the next phase of Service Assistant that involves actionable plans. Not only do service plans help guide the service rep, but they also expose actions to automate the various steps, like look up orders, check eligibility and so on and so forth, to improve the efficiency of tackling the case. We will also have a more tighter integration with Agentforce service actions in Slack. You would be able to perform actions within Slack and also use Slack conversations to help solve cases quicker. We will also have self-learning knowledge. Srinihita had talked about how important it is for knowledge base to remain up-to-date with the latest information. With this feature going beta in summer, we literally see taking the next phase to help your service team and knowledge base to update consistently using AI. Finally, looking beyond the summer. We really want the Service Assistant to become more adaptive in nature; support more channels beyond case, including message and voice; and also adapt to changes in case context and new customer engagements. So maybe we have some, a couple of maybe -- time for just 2 or 3 questions, so let me just go through some of the questions which have been asked.

So I think there was a couple of questions which were around the TAT around -- the case TAT. And also there were some questions which were around, say, whether videos and tutorials can fix the issue. So I'll address the TAT-related query first. So with -- in Service Cloud, we have something called entitlements and milestones which essentially allow you to basically handle any SLAs which are there. So you can define entitlement process and you can have definite milestones which can be attached to that particular entitlement, and then that can be tracked. So that is how typically the SLAs are tracked. Then I think there was also some query which is related to whether -- the videos and tutorials which are there. So of course, we do have knowledge, but what we also have in our road map is multimodal support. So what that means is that you can have images. You can have videos and probably Agentforce would be able to interpret those images and messages and videos and extract and show useful information to your agents as well as to your customers. So that is also -- and part of it has already been rolled out, but that is also in the road map which will be -- also be available. I'll just go through some other questions. Can service also [ perform ]? Okay, I think there was one question which is related to LMS, whether service also supports LMS. So I don't know if I am understanding, but learning management system is that what we are referring to. But typically what we have is knowledge which is there. So typically what happens is that as and when, say for example I am supporting messaging: knowledge widget is already available as part of the service console, so an agent can essentially search through the knowledge base using that, in fact, automatically. Replies can also be recommended, so instead of you having to search any context or text from scratch, from the widget will automatically prompt some recommended service replies based on your knowledge base. So that is something which is already supported. So I think we are just past time, so what I'll do is we will try to get back to these other questions also in the course of time. What I want to leave you with is, just before we wrap up, just sharing a few ways. I think these would have already been available to you during the course of this webinar, but what you can do is you can just take a screenshot of this particular screen. You can scan the QR codes that you are able to see on the screen because it has got a lot of valuable resources. For example, the first link is related to the state of art (sic) [ State of Service ] report. A lot of the stats you would have seen in this webinar has -- are coming from this report, so you can basically download it and keep learning. Then you also can join Serviceblazer community. That also provides a lot of opportunities to learn and part of the community, ask questions. So that is also very much possible. So that is it from -- at our end. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Thanks for taking time and joining this webinar. Thank you.