For years, Salesforce wanted to reach deeper into the contact centre market, and it has done well through its Service Cloud offering.
The competition over the past 12 months has intensified, with more CRM and ITSM vendors becoming more aggressive with their CX strategies. Today marks a historic milestone in the Contact Centre industry as Salesforce, a major tech player, enters a market traditionally led by a few specialised contact center vendors.
Salesforce has now launched its own native contact centre solution. Here are some observations about the announcement:
- The move today is a smart one because voice is now the most important channel in CX. Salesforce understood that to compete, owning and building this channel from the ground up was essential. Although voice could be integrated as part of the Service Cloud offering, significant integration efforts were still needed. Currently, phone numbers are available only for the US and Canada. International expansion, including the Asia-Pacific region for Voice, WFM, and Quality Management, BYOC, will be announced in the coming months.
- For Salesforce-heavy enterprises, Agentforce Contact Centre is effectively their answer to “AI-first CCaaS.” This means one platform using existing CRM, case, and data investments instead of bolting voice and stitching together other applications. For enterprises running Service Cloud with multiple vendor partnerships, this could be a trigger to work with ONE vendor and simplify integration across multiple partnerships.
- Data has always been a challenge, as unifying data marts across multiple channels requires significant integration effort. Salesforce is building a solid data foundation for every customer interaction across service, sales, and marketing, all in a single layer. This could resonate well with some customers during their evaluation process.
- While there may be slight friction or co-opetition among its contact center partners, Salesforce has stated that investments in partnerships will keep growing and that they will continue collaborating with their 17 existing contact center partners.
- Convincing an enterprise to switch away from Genesys, NiCE, Cisco, Amazon Connect or others immediately will be difficult; these are significant decisions involving multiple teams, extensive planning, and substantial investments. There will be many opportunities with companies using Service Cloud and for new greenfield customers.
Salesforce benefits from its implementation partners, including Deloitte, Accenture, and PwC, all of which have large Salesforce practices. This will be a strong driver for future AI, CRM, and Contact Center deployments.
Today is an interesting day in the world of AI, and the Contact Center market just got a lot more interesting!
Thank you for the briefing and catch up over the last few weeks – Ashish Seth, Tim Shepheard David Stone
