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How Agentforce Can Transform Your Business and Drive ROI.
Digital transformation is accelerating, and businesses are under pressure to improve operational efficiency and customer experience. Our clients have asked how Salesforce’s autonomous assistant, Agentforce, can support their organisations and have requested advice on creating a business case to justify the investment. Our aim is to explain how Agentforce AI can provide tangible value, addressing the primary expectations and concerns surrounding its adoption.
Expectations for Measurable ROI (Return on Investment) and Business Value
Client Concern
“Before committing, we need a clear understanding of how Agentforce will provide measurable ROI. We are sceptical about AI-driven solutions, especially as prior attempts with automation tools failed to meet our expectations.”
How Agentforce AI Delivers
Agentforce enhances efficiency in delivering support by reducing response times, predicting customer needs, and suggesting tailored solutions based on real-time data. This kind of AI-driven, proactive service translates to faster case resolution, lower operational costs, and increased customer satisfaction. For example, Agentforce’s case categorisation feature automatically classifies cases, reducing the amount of time the user spends on routine tasks, an efficiency that can lead to significant time savings.
How We Can Help
We partner with clients to develop a business case based on industry-specific metrics. By helping to identify measurable KPIs, such as case resolution time reduction, agent productivity, and increased customer satisfaction, we can set clear targets that align with business goals. Additionally, we support by setting up reporting to regularly track these metrics post-implementation.
Seamless Integration with Existing CRM Processes
Client Concern
“One major concern is whether Agentforce will integrate smoothly into our existing Salesforce environment without disrupting operations.”
How Agentforce Delivers
Agentforce is designed to seamlessly integrate with Salesforce’s suite of products, making it a natural fit for clients already invested in the technology. It enhances existing CRM workflows by adding predictive and generative capabilities that optimise user interactions without requiring extensive configuration changes.
How We Can Help
Our team works to ensure that the AI features align with existing workflows, reducing the need for extensive re-training. We focus on a phased approach, enabling the gradual adoption of AI features so that teams can adapt to the transformation comfortably. Additionally, we provide custom configurations to align Agentforce AI with specific client requirements, ensuring a smooth transition and maximising value from day one.
Expectations for Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
Client Concern
“We expect that adopting Agentforce will improve customer satisfaction scores by delivering faster, more personalised support. However, we are unsure how AI can help achieve this without compromising on the quality of interactions.“
How Agentforce AI Delivers
Agentforce uses machine learning algorithms to predict customer needs based on historical data, empowering agents to proactively complete actions within the set parameters and provide highly relevant responses. If, however, a customer has a complex issue, Agentforce can escalate it to the support agent, allowing them to offer a permanent solution. This level of personalisation leads to a higher customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS), always keeping humans at the centre of the technology.
How We Can Help
Our implementation team at Performa IT works closely with clients to set up customer feedback loops. We support training for users to leverage Agentforce to its fullest potential, helping to ensure that any AI recommendations align with real-world customer expectations. Through post-implementation reviews, we track improvements in CSAT and NPS, tying these metrics back to Agentforce usage.
Concerns About Data Privacy and Security
Client Concern
“We need to understand how handling sensitive customer data is managed around data privacy and security, especially with AI-driven solutions that analyse large amounts of personal information.”
How Agentforce AI Delivers
Salesforce has a strong track record of compliance with data security standards such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, and Agentforce adheres to these stringent security protocols, ensuring that customer data remains protected. With Agentforce’s highly secure data model and trust layer, no information is shared beyond your organisation. The AI’s data usage is limited to operational insights rather than intrusive data extraction.
How We Can Help
We work with clients to clarify data privacy features and provide necessary compliance for their internal audits. Our team also customises data retention and access settings within Agentforce AI, ensuring that the solution aligns with the client’s internal data governance policies and external auditing requirements.
Expectations for User-Friendly AI with Minimal Learning Curve
Client Concern
“We worry about the complexity of AI tools and how they might burden our customer service agents with an additional layer of technology to learn.”
How Agentforce AI Delivers
Agentforce is designed with a user-friendly interface that integrates directly into the existing Salesforce dashboard. It offers real-time suggestions, predictive prompts, and case recommendations that are easy for users to understand and act upon while enhancing workflows rather than complicating them. Additionally, Agentforce operates off of natural language, meaning that employees can communicate with their AI assistants as if they were instructing another colleague.
How We Can Help
We provide hands-on training and a knowledge transfer program to ensure users feel confident using Agentforce AI. Our team offers a phased deployment approach, allowing users to become comfortable with simpler features before adding more advanced functionalities. This ensures a smooth adoption process with minimal disruption to day-to-day operations.
Concerns Over Customisation and Scalability
Client Concern
“We operate in an industry with unique demands, so we need assurance that Agentforce can be customised and scaled to meet our specific needs.”
How Agentforce AI Delivers
Agentforce AI is highly configurable and can be tailored to various industry requirements, whether in retail, healthcare, or financial services. Its machine learning models can be adapted to prioritise the needs and trends of different business sectors, allowing it to grow alongside the business.
How We Can Help
At Performa IT, we offer consulting and implementation support to customise Agentforce AI for specific business use cases. Additionally, we provide guidance on best practices for scaling the solution as the client’s needs evolve, ensuring that Agentforce remains a strategic asset as their business grows.
As one of the first partners to roll out an Agentforce AI pilot in the United Kingdom and Ireland, we are already seeing a significant opportunity for companies looking to transform their operations and improve ROI. As a Salesforce consultancy with over 13 years of experience, Performa IT are here to support our clients at every stage of the Agentforce journey from defining the business case and customising the solution, to training teams and measuring results. By addressing key concerns and aligning the technology with business objectives, we help ensure that Agentforce delivers real, measurable, and sustainable value.
Check out performa-staging.co.uk/agentforce/ for more information, or to get started with an Agentforce Readiness Consultation.
Article by: Paul O’Dowd
Title: Chief Commercial Officer
Company: Performa IT Limited (UK)
Web: performa-staging.co.uk
21/11/2024
The Dawn of Agentforce
Transforming the future of work
This year’s Dreamforce is ready to get underway, undoubtedly with a huge focus on Salesforce’s latest Einstein innovation: Agentforce. Agentforce allows you to create an autonomous conversational assistant for any channel, created to respond and act upon natural language requests. Gone are the days of sifting through data and completing lengthy admin tasks – Agentforce helps you serve your customers in seconds. Your agent can help with tasks such as scheduling appointments, diagnosing issues, navigating returns, qualifying leads, amending bookings and suggesting the right products with dynamic discounts for your customers.
This is a virtual assistant like no other – you don’t need to create laborious dialogue trees and if/then/else logic, the agent already understands descriptions, scope and instructions delivered in natural language. In the past, we have seen virtual assistants that can provide a standard level of service and troubleshooting. Agentforce goes beyond that, possessing the ability to complete actions within the parameters you set for it with clicks, not code. These intelligent helpers have the capacity to understand the nuances of human interaction, navigating context and complicated queries from customers. They can even interpret shorthand responses, as Agentforce gives AI agency to reason (within the boundaries you set) giving the assistants more flexibility to perform their job to a human standard. Notably, the agent is also multimodal, which means it has the ability to interpret images as well as text.
Historically, designing and maintaining virtual assistants and chatbots is an extremely time consuming task. Even with an abundance of effort and refinement, you would often end up with a bot that produced static, ‘one-size-fits-all’ responses. Now, you can easily and swiftly create tasks for your assistant to perform using actions, putting in place clear boundaries to ensure that the agent performs exactly what you (and your customer) would like it to do. These actions can be based on flows, apex classes or prompts. The more prescriptive and precise you are with your prompts, the better. With clear instruction, the Einstein agent can deftly handle personalised customer interactions whilst embodying your brand voice.
Essentially, the technology is designed to have a level of autonomy that we have never experienced before. Whilst Agentforce has the ability to be flexible, it also comes with the innate ability to detect harmful inputs and redirect to approved topics. This means that the AI won’t absorb or recycle any information that could damage your business. Salesforce has armed the virtual assistant with the automatic ability to detect and reject attempts to damage the tool with malicious prompts. This negates any fears that external inputs can manipulate your agent’s responses.
Want to dramatically reduce your customer service or business development costs, without sacrificing customer experience? Agentforce might be the solution for you! Give us a call on 01453 703230 or email hello@performa-it.co.uk to claim your free AI use case workshop.
#PerformaIT #Salesforce
24/09/2024
Dreamforce Keynote: The Highlights
It’s no surprise that this year’s Dreamforce will be focused on one key theme: AI. Specifically, Agentforce. Agentforce is Einstein Copilot reinvented, with the key addition of collaborative autonomy. But with 1,500 sessions to watch, Dreamforce can seem a bit daunting! So, what are the key takeaways? These can be gleaned from the Dreamforce keynote, and we have provided a summary of the 90-minute presentation to provide you with the Dreamforce highlights.
1. Introduction
2. A Vision for Agentforce: Mark Benioff, CEO
3. Explaining Agentforce: Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI
4. Live Demo of an Agentforce User Story: Patrick Stokes, EVP of Product and Industries Marketing
5. Where Data Cloud Comes In: Sanjna Parulekar, VP of Marketing
6. Use Cases for Agents: Leah McGowen-Hare, SVP of the Trailblazer Community
7. Key Announcements
1. Introduction
Whether Sales, Marketing, Service, or Commerce, Salesforce now boasts an ‘Agentforce layer’ to its 360 suite, meaning that you can deploy autonomous agents to complete actions by harnessing your business data. Salesforce’s aim for Dreamforce 2025 is to show its customers the power of leveraging every cloud and every agent, on one trusted platform.
The leading CRM giant emphasises that you shouldn’t have to ‘DIY your AI’, meaning that all the hidden costs, effort and resources associated with typical machine learning models (MLMs) are eliminated with this new innovation. All of the functionality is available in the Salesforce platform; no training, no disconnected data, no investment in new resources, no code.
That all sounds great, but where do you start? Well, Salesforce recommends working backwards from the value. Once you have identified the benefit, whether this is reducing toil, reducing cost, or enhancing experience, you can then roadmap how to extract that value from the system.
2. A Vision for Agentforce with Mark Benioff, CEO
In his opening speech, Marc Benioff welcomes an era of AI, envisioning “humans with agents driving customer success together with Salesforce.”
He acknowledges that their ‘second wave AI’ offering of copilots did not perform exactly as customers wanted them to, with no real augmentation or autonomy and no substantial indent in workload. Today, the team is pushing Salesforce to the next step – Agentforce. Marc urges that this is the most exciting and important aspect of Dreamforce ‘25, showcasing technology never seen before.
“Why are we struggling with chatbots, copilots and MLMs, when we can create technology to just take care of business? With all compliance and governance included across the industries so you can deploy the technology as you need it… A single, professionally managed, secure, reliable platform that nurtures all those stakeholders that are so important for your company.”
Following on from predictive functionality to the evolution of copilots, we are now in the third wave of AI. Marc emphasises that “innovation and AI is in the DNA of Salesforce” and that these brand new out-of-the-box and customisable agents are the “biggest breakthrough [Salesforce] has ever made.”
By introducing new, trusted, and secure functionality to the CRM that you know and use day to day, Salesforce has provided its customers with instant scalability with a very high level of accuracy and the lowest hallucinations (incorrect or misleading results) we have seen. This is because we can now harness the data, metadata, workflows, security, and sharing models that we have trusted for the past 25 years to create a more accurate AI.
This innovation, which will be generally available in October, is easy to build, requires no code, is instructed by natural language and is notably the most accurate AI in the world. Even better – it is built right into the Salesforce 360. The more customer touchpoints you have with Salesforce, the more AI can help you improve your business with the unified metadata platform.
3. Explaining Agentforce with Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI
CEO of Salesforce AI, Clara Shih, begins her presentation with a striking statement; “the future is AI as commonplace as Apps and Webpages”.
She goes on to outline the five components of building a next gen Salesforce AI agent:
- A role: for example, a Sales Development Rep, Account Executive, or Service Agent.
- Data: which is already existing in Salesforce; custom objects, slack conversations, knowledge articles, metadata (structured or unstructured), and even external data can be activated by Agentforce.
- Actions: in essence; what are the workflows, the automations to get the job done? Prompts, flows, apex code and Mulesoft APIs can be ‘point-and-clicked’ and used to empower agentforce.
- Channels: where customers and employees are interacting with agents (for example, whatsapp, voice, email, messenger etc).
- Trust and security: this exists within the Einstein Trust Layer – every Agentforce implementation comes pre-built with prompt injection defence, data privacy and guardrails e.g. toxicity filters and monitoring.
“Everything you have ever done becomes the guide and the guardrails for your autonomous Agentforce.”
This statement means that, providing that your data is clean and harmonised, everything you need to leverage the power of Agentforce already exists, ready to go, in your Salesforce system.
Clara introduces the Atlas Reasoning Agent, which is the brain of Agentforce; continuously looping to be sure it can achieve your goal. It harnesses both structured data (such as databases, objects and tables) and unstructured data (such as email bodies, videos and images) to take action across the customer 360, which might manifest in activities such as engaging with a prospect, confirming a reservation, or serving a customer. Atlas knows when and how to seamlessly escalate to one of your service reps if it doesn’t yet have the capability to solve a request. The beauty is, the more you use it, the smarter it gets – and all outcome data is proprietary to your business, creating strategic advantage over time.
To conclude this deeper dive into how Agentforce was designed, we are left with some enticing statistics. Based on customer benchmark data, Agentforce boasts 33% greater accuracy and 2x more relevancy than the other leading models. This data can give users the confidence to delve into this new technology, and Salesforce has provided over 100 industry-specific use cases and out-of-the-box actions as a great place to start.
4. Live Demo of an Agentforce User Story with Patrick Stokes, EVP of Product and Industries Marketing
If the standard Agentforce actions don’t fit your use cases, it is also simple to customise and build your own with Agent Builder in Agentforce Studio. Patrick Stokes, EVP of Product and Industries Marketing joins the Dreamforce keynote team to provide a live demo of how a Salesforce customer is using Agentforce to revolutionise the way they do business.
Luxury fashion brand Saks Fifth Avenue debuted its Agentforce solution just prior to the Dreamforce kickoff. After initial conception, the pilot was up and running in only a week! To align with the shift in customer behaviour from in-store to online shopping, Saks pivoted to e-commerce and is now using Agentforce to provide a level of personalised service that would previously only have been attainable in person.
Agentforce makes customer recommendations based on preference, unlocking the ability to provide millions of customers with a personal stylist. Now, a luxury experience can be delivered at scale and amplified to online channels, delighting customers with service that is personal and authentic.
Patrick gives the Dreamforce audience a live demo of ‘Sophie’, Saks’ agentforce agent, by giving her the ability to amend, refund, advise on and exchange an order – all in one phone call. Using multimodal AI, ‘Sophie’ can recognise the customer, apologise for any inconveniences, recall the order and date, recommend based on purchase history and even answer detailed queries about the product.
5. Where Data Cloud Comes In with Sanjna Parulekar, VP of Marketing
We are all familiar with the notion that the quality of AI output can only be as good as the input. In this segment, Sanjna underlines the importance of data quality. Salesforce’s Data Harmonisation tool, Data Cloud, is a great option for those needing to collate their information. With no resulting costs for manipulating your data within Salesforce, this product allows you to visualise your information, build workflows and apps, and power your agents.
Sanja elaborates on the advantages of Data Cloud, explaining that every single system you have to describe a customer does so in a different way. The great thing about Data Cloud is that it ‘harmonises’ all of your tools and platforms, enabling them to speak the same language. This is essential as AI needs data to understand your business. Data Cloud’s Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) enables you to search through every single piece of data, allowing users to augment prompts effectively (and take action).
To illustrate the power of unified data, Sanjna takes the live Saks demo a step further. Sanjna prompts ‘Sophie’ to retrieve policy data and fix a customer query in the matter of seconds, providing the customer with a refund after a discount was added to a product after purchase. This demonstrates that, with a few clear instructions, agents can retrieve the right data, and ground it in your prompt, easily creating a resolution and a response. Sophie is now empowered with all the data necessary to resolve the issue within a matter of seconds, where it would take a service agent hours of admin to sift through the policies. The best part? This is all done without training a single model.
6. Use Cases for Agents: with Leah McGowen-Hare, SVP of the Trailblazer Community
Senior VP of the Trailblazer Community, Leah McGowen-Hare closes out the speakers with snappy examples of use cases for Agentforce:
- Slack: Humans and agents collaborating in a Slack channel to make swift, informed, data-driven decisions.
- Marketing Cloud: Summarise what customers are saying from unstructured data. From this, agents can suggest actions from analytics, creating a campaign based on customer sentiment.
- Service Cloud: All customer interactions and data can be summarised for the advisor in seconds, allowing agents and humans to work together to resolve cases.
- Retail Cloud: In-store interactions enhanced and guided by Agentforce, giving customers a seamless multi-channel experience.
These are just a number of the use cases that can be found in Salesforce’s new AI library, available to explore here!
7. Key Announcements
The Keynote concludes with two major announcements from Salesforce.
Firstly, Marc Benioff announces the launch of Salesforce foundations: available for enterprise and above. This offering grants users automatic access to the key Salesforce products such as Sales, Service and Marketing. With this, customers can build out their 360 even further, ready to unlock the power of Agentforce across their organisations.
The second key announcement is that an Agentforce World Tour is excitingly scheduled to take place this Autumn! Visit www.salesforce.com/agentforce/ for more information!
Summary
In summary Salesforce has declared a ‘hard pivot’ to autonomous AI. We are excited to see how these groundbreaking new technologies shape the future of work!
As Patrick Stokes enthused, “if you can describe it, you can get Agentforce to do it”. It’s apparent that we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what Salesforce AI can do for our businesses.
For a more in depth overview of Salesforce’s Agentforce offering, take a look at our article ‘The Dawn of Agentforce’. If you’re interested in learning how we can leverage Salesforce AI to save time and resources, give us a call on 01453 703230 or claim your free AI workshop below!
Book Your Free AI Workshop Now
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