Service Cloud Voice & non-voice channels in Salesforce

With the launch of Service Cloud Voice, Salesforce streamlines the user experience when providing support via multiple channels.

Service Cloud Voice benefits

Answer calls via the Omnichannel widget

I believe that being able to answer all channels via one and the same widget is a big advantage.

With AppExchange solutions, Phone interactions were handle via the proprietary ‘Phone’ widget for the specific (OpenCTI) Telephone solution provider.  With Service Cloud Voice, all channels are now nicely combined in one widget.  Currently, only AWS Amazon Connect is used with Service Cloud Voice, but also other telephony providers will be added in the future.  Not only because of the better user experience, but also because Salesforce won’t update the OpenCTI API any further.

Live transcription of incoming calls

It’s exciting to see how a live voice conversation gets instantly transcribed. This definitely provides a big benefit for agents in an ongoing call.  But also supervisors and managers benefit as the content of the transcripts may get used for better reporting and analytics.

Omnichannel Supervisor

Having a view on ALL channels in the Omnichannel Supervisor dashboard is also a big benefit. Handling incoming and outgoing calls via the Omnichannel widget, now allows supervisors to manage also this channel via the Omnichannel Supervisor dashboard.

Einstein

If you have Salesforce Einstein licenses, then AI may bring you additional value.  Having the opportunity to analyze the call transcriptions and use these data with Einstein, allows for more personalized and pro-active support.

Under the hood of Service Cloud Voice

As mentioned above, currently only Amazon Connect is used as telephone provider with Service Cloud Voice.  But what does that mean?

Amazon Connect

While (skills-based) routing for non-voice channels – Chat, E-mail… – happens in Salesforce, the routing of incoming calls (or making outbound calls) happens via Amazon Connect.  Nothing different than with your existing telephony provider and OpenCTI you might say, but…

Also read

• Offload Your Salesforce Service Cloud Voice Enabled Support Team
• Amazon Connect Service Level Agreement & Support
• Voicebot apps in your contact center

With the implementation of Service Cloud Voice, AWS and Salesforce provide a number of standard functions to make the integration seamless.  For instance:

• Upon incoming call, a Voice Call record gets automatically created.  Also, the Contact record is automatically displayed, transcription of live conversation happens, and the recording of the call is automatically available in the Voice Call record
• Additional (REST) API functions are available to make the dynamic integration from with Amazon Connect Contact Flows.  Retrieving and/or updating Salesforce records is standardized and becomes very easy.  You don’t have to create custom components in Amazon Connect to retrieve, for instance, the name of the caller, and to announce that person’s name in the IVR application.

AWS Transcribe

The transcription of live phone conversations happens using AWS Transcribe.  And, while Transcribe supports many languages when used in offline mode, online transcription still has a limited number of supported language.  AWS makes enhancements continuously, so you may check this page to get the latest on the supported languages for live transcriptions.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda functions are used to make the seamless integration with Salesforce, but also to integrate with other AWS Services. It is important to understand that Lambda and other AWS services are used in the Service Cloud Voice solution, as these services may have specific service limits.

We already mentioned the supported language for online transcription services, but there are also limits with Lambda.  For instance, a Lambda function runs for maximum 15 minutes.  This could impact the transcription of your calls run over that 15 minute boundary – only the first 15 minutes get transcribed.

 

 

Service Cloud Voice brings a lot of new opportunities. And as Salesforce and Amazon Web Services actively work on further enhancing the functionalities, there is surely more good news to come in the (near) future.  It’s definitely a combination that will help a lot of companies integrating different channels in their support teams.

If you need further information or want assistance with implementing Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, then fill in our contact form. We are happy to assist you!