Hey Einstein”— Salesforce Brings Voice to Every Customer Experience

Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, is bringing the power of voice to every customer experience spanning the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform and enabling millions of CRM users to talk to Salesforce. With Einstein Voice Assistant guiding every action, insight and prediction, Salesforce users will be more productive—from anywhere. And new Einstein Voice Skills will enable developers and admins to build custom voice-powered apps for employees across every role and industry, in just a matter of clicks. In addition, new solutions for service and sales teams will apply natural language processing to voice conversations, and deliver insights that drive smarter, more personalized customer engagement.

“Voice is a huge shift for the industry and will be as impactful in businesses as it’s been in our homes,” said Bret Taylor, President and Chief Product Officer, Salesforce. “With Einstein, Salesforce is bringing the power of voice to every business, giving everyone an intelligent, trusted guide at work.”

Voice Enters the Workplace

Voice is rapidly emerging as the user interface for our lives. Nearly half of U.S. households are already using a voice-activated device for everyday activities like getting driving directions, dictating text messages, playing their favorite songs and even turning on home appliances – all without lifting a finger or tapping a keyboard. And, just like every other computing revolution that came before it—cloud, social, mobile and AI—Salesforce is helping companies bring voice's immense potential to CRM to transform the way we work.

Talk to Salesforce Anytime, Anywhere with Einstein Voice

Last year at Dreamforce 2018, Salesforce introduced Einstein Voice Assistant, allowing sales reps to talk to Salesforce. With Einstein Voice Assistant, routine CRM transactions – creating or updating customer records, getting personalized daily briefings and exploring dashboards – can be done conversationally, so sales reps can keep their business moving forward and focus on what matters most, customer success.

But every employee can use a guide to help them be more productive and provide a smarter, more frictionless way to ask questions, get insights and predictions or initiate a task. Today, Salesforce announced it will expand the capabilities of Einstein Voice Assistant for any role or industry, giving every app built on Salesforce a voice. This is powered by new Einstein Voice Skills, which will empower admins and developers to create custom voice apps across the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform in just a few clicks.

Build Custom Voice Apps for Any Business Process

Using Einstein Voice Skills, companies will be able to create custom voice-powered apps to reimagine workflows and processes—replacing any manual data entry or manual Salesforce navigation that may impede productivity. From a simple set-up page, developers and admins will be able to build custom skills for any CRM action—such as updating a field, creating a task or reading out a prediction—and select the Salesforce fields or objects that inform each action.

For example, an admin or developer can build a custom voice-powered assistant for a field technician that enables her to verbally and instantly check on a service history while en route to her next customer, Acme, just by saying “Hey Einstein, what is Acme’s recent service history?” Meanwhile, admins can also build and deploy a separate, custom voice app for service managers that has a seat at the table for weekly leadership meetings, offering insight on open service cases in top regions, guidance on the team’s overall CSAT performance and more. Each app is purpose-built for the specific needs and processes of each role. Plus, admins can also control how information will be read back to the user, including the ability to offer next steps or follow-up tasks within the response, and which channels and devices that the skill is accessible on, such smart speakers or phones.

Voice Intelligence: Smarter and More Productive Service and Sales Experiences

Powered by Einstein, new voice intelligence applies natural language processing to call transcriptions – providing sales and service teams with insights and trends that will drive smarter, more personalized customer engagement:

• New Service Cloud Voice: Service Cloud Voice integrates telephony inside Service Cloud, unifying phone, digital channels and CRM data in real-time in one centralized console. Service Cloud Voice can also integrate with transcription services that convert voice to text in real-time, enabling Einstein to serve up relevant AI-powered recommended responses, knowledge articles and next best actions as service agents are on voice calls.
• New Einstein Call Coaching: Now with Einstein Call Coaching, our newest Sales Cloud capability, managers are able to see insights and trends within conversational data. Natural language processing identifies keywords in sales call transcripts, alerting managers to trends like a spike in competitor mentions, or best practices on topics like objection handling or pricing discussions. Those insights can then be used to provide sales reps with personalized coaching on how to improve the customer buying experience.

Voice Interoperability: Einstein Voice for Any Device 

In September, Salesforce joined Amazon and leading technology companies to announce the Voice Interoperability Initiative, a new program to ensure voice-enabled products provide customers with choice and flexibility through multiple, interoperable voice services. As part of this, Einstein Voice Assistant and Einstein Voice Skills will be compatible with a variety of devices, from smart speakers to smartphones–whether it’s the Einstein Smart Speaker that will be unveiled at Dreamforce 2019 (not for sale), the new Salesforce Mobile App, or customers’ preferred devices.