Salesforce's Einstein AI technology has surfaced in its Service Cloud product suite as the company moves to embed AI in all of its applications. Here are the key details from Salesforce's announcement:
Einstein Supervisor: Now, contact center supervisors are empowered with real-time, omni-channel insights and AI-powered analytics to increase agent productivity and customer satisfaction. By combining real-time operational insights with smart data discovery, Einstein Supervisor empowers managers with real-time data like agent availability, queues and wait times, enabling them to take smarter actions.
Einstein Case Management: Using machine learning, cases will automatically be escalated and classified as they come in. In addition, relevant information required to resolve cases, such as knowledge articles or videos, are automatically surfaced, saving agents valuable time and creating improved customer experiences. With Einstein Case Management, high priority cases get quickly routed to the next available agent who knows what the case is about before they even pick up the phone.
Salesforce has also created an AI-infused mobile application for field services workers. The app, which features offline capabilities, uses algorithms to schedule and route jobs and pushes relevant CRM data about the customer to the worker's device.
It's only been about five months since Dreamforce, when Salesforce laid out its broad ambitions for Einstein, so it comes as no surprise that not everything announced this week is actually available.
Einstein Supervisor is something of a product bundle, combining Salesforce's Omni-channel Supervisor with Service Wave analytics and Smart Data Discovery. All three components are GA. Omni-channel Supervisor is included as part of Service Cloud Enterprise edition and higher, whereas Service Wave starts at $75 per user per month. Smart Data Discovery is priced on data volume and user count.
Intelligent Mobile Service has actually been kicking around since before Einstein was announced, under the name of Field Service Lightning. It's not clear what newer AI capabilities Salesforce has baked into the product over the past year, but one change affects pricing. Initially offered at a far-from-frugal $135 per user per month for customers with at least one Enterprise or Unlimited Service Cloud license, it's now priced at $150 per user per month for customers meeting that qualification.
Meanwhile, Einstein Case Management is not even in pilot. That will occur "later this year," Salesforce says, vague wording that could mean a GA release is quite some time away.
Analysis: The ROI of AI
Over its history, Salesforce has followed a standard strategic playbook: Every couple of years, target a hot new technology area and make it the laser focus of marketing efforts and product development, with charismatic CEO Marc Benioff leading the charge. Judging from Salesforce's massive growth, the strategy has worked quite well.
Einstein and AI is Salesforce's latest big bet, and one it has used many millions of dollars in acquisitions to place. Salesforce intends to weave Einstein into every one of its application clouds over time, but in doing so clearly plans to create as many new SKUs as possible. (It's got some big growth targets to hit, after all.)
That's where the challenge lies for Salesforce customers who already have significant investments in its technology. The base Service Cloud product costs $150 per user per month for Enterprise and $300 per user per month for Unlimited.
The new Einstein-flavored applications stand to add hundreds of dollars per user/month to that base price. It's not a trivial matter, especially when Salesforce is trying to make the case that customer service is becoming a driver of growth rather than a cost center.
Then there's the question of redundancy. For example, Service Cloud already offers advanced case management features. Can Einstein Case Management offer enough of an improvement to make Service Cloud customers fish out their wallets?
Overall, Service Cloud Einstein—and every other Einstein-flavored application Salesforce delivers—will require careful ROI analysis on the part of customers, and maybe some pushback too. Salesforce has shown willingness in the past to include new features in existing subscriptions, such as in 2012, when customers complained about the introduction of a separately priced analytics product for Salesforce CRM. It can't hurt to try with AI as well.
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