One of the first press releases out of a very busy Dreamforce – the annual assembly of Salesforce customers, partners and analysts that claiming 170,000 registered attendees this year – emphatically made the the point “Voice Rules!” Topping the list of announcements were three initiatives:

• Einstein Voice Skills: ready-made dialogue snippets and tools tailored toward specific roles or industries, designed to help “admins and developers to build custom, voice powered Salesforce apps”, which could be rendered as Alexa Skills, Google Assistant Actions or other tasks that can be carried out by voice assistants.
• Service Cloud Voice: resources that closely integrate contact center functions with Service Cloud-based applications and services, enabling agents to avail themselves of Einstein in all its capabilities through a “unified agent console”.
• Einstein Call Coaching: console for managers that use conversational data to spot trends  and provide sales reps with best practices and insights to support designed to improve customer experience (CX).

The announcement coincides with major initiatives by both Google and Amazon. Regarding the former, Venturebeat’s Khari Johnson reports that Google AI for Contact Centers has achieved general availability (although, as of November 20  it is portrayed as “beta” on Google’s product Web site). Google has what Johnson calls an “overarching and rather comprehensive voice strategy” and has designed it to augment traditional contact center functions (meaning call routing or customer interaction management) through APIs that support Natural Language Understanding (powered by DialogFlow) and other popular functions.

As for the latter case, Service Cloud Voice is the principal offshoot of an expanded partnership between Amazon and Salesforce focused specifically on CCaaS, in that it “seamlessly integrates Amazon Connect, to provide contact center agents with a complete set of tools in their agent workspace to deliver enhanced customer service support.” This amounts to making Amazon Connect the preferred CCaaS platform for Salesforce’s existing customers based on Salesforce’s formal announcement that it “has chosen Amazon Connect as its preferred contact center technology,” characterizing it as “, a simple to use cloud contact center service from AWS that makes it easy for organizations to deliver better customer service at a lower cost.” The questions of “better than what? and lower cost than what?” is left open, and that is up to each prospect to determine.

Companies contemplating the addition of automated virtual agents – which Opus Research refers to as Intelligent Assistants – will also benefit from streamlined integration of Amazon Connect’s advanced speech analytics resources, including Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Comprehend, which provide speech-to-text transcription, translation and sentiment analysis, respectively.

Einstein Voice is represents another shout out to Amazon, of course, because it will serve as a major building block for developers looking to add Alexa Skills. To be fair, though, many of the initial implementations are designed to be invoked though Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri and neutral mobile virtual assistants residing on smartphones.

Taking on the Paradox of Choice, Perhaps to a Fault

Service Cloud Voice promises to serve as a “Conversation Accelerator” by showing favoritism to two cloud giants, AWS and Google. Yet enterprises have other considerations to take into account

In the case of Amazon: Service Cloud, like all of Salesforce, runs on AWS and it is clear that familiarity leads to advantageous ways to integrate capabilities that streamline processes for both parties, as well as their customers. Einstein is a powerful concept for applying conversational analytics, natural language processing and machine learning to provide next-best actions to live agents or inform the responses of virtual agents. Amazon’s own cloud harbors Lex for NLU and Lambda to orchestrate conversational flows. Together they will position Salesforce Service Cloud as a comprehensive CCaaS service.

As for Google: Over decades, the Sultan of Search has access to the total universe   of machine-readable knowledge. And it has massive amounts of information on individuals based on tracking our location, our search history and even our emails. Google’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) grew organically from demand by Intelligent Assistants developers for access to DialogFlow, which was believed to be the most robust NLP and dialog management. Endorsement by Salesforce, in the form of a partnership, should help burnish its reputation.

From another perspective, enterprises are concerned about “lock in”. They have asked CCaaS solution providers whether they have to use solutions from a specific cloud provider, like AWS. They would like freedom to look into the options from Microsoft Azure, Google or IBM. And then there’s the overlay of voice-in-the-cloud services specialists, where companies like Vonage, Twilio and legacy carriers like Verizon Business have a set of features and offers that can appeal to enterprises as they define their digital customer support strategies.

A Call to Action  for Customer Care Specialists

Salesforce’s charm offensive for Voice is really a call to action for customer care specialists. It signals general recognition that, in this age of messaging and digital transformation, voice is demonstrating staying power. It also formalizes the schism between voice conversations that originate from smart endpoints and supported by Einstein Voice Skills and contact center-based resources supported by Service Cloud Voice. For Salesforce, Einstein is the great equalizer. Virtual agents on smart speakers and live agents in contact centers will both benefit from Einsteins ability to recognize intent and respond correctly at scale. The conceptual framework is right – making an intelligent agent like Einstein the great equalizer. However there are a lot of moving parts and success will depend on execution.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants