Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Expand Global Strategic Partnership

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) and Salesforce announced an expansion of their global strategic partnership. Salesforce is introducing Service Cloud Voice, a new offering that 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.

Salesforce already relies on AWS as its primary public cloud provider, and through this partnership, Salesforce has chosen Amazon Connect as its preferred contact center technology. As part of its Service Cloud Voice offering, Salesforce will now offer Amazon Connect, 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.

In addition, Salesforce and AWS are making AWS content available on Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, to train anyone to become proficient in the cloud. Finally, Salesforce is exploring ways to make Einstein Voice Skills — a declarative platform tool — compatible with Amazon Alexa, among other voice assistants and devices.

Integrating Amazon Connect with Service Cloud Voice

Traditionally service agents have had to rely upon information from multiple sources to address customer needs, making it hard to track customer assets, orders, support history, and more, in one place for a complete view of their activity.

Call resolution times and a customer’s experience can suffer when agents take customer service calls, while manually keeping a record of the conversation and simultaneously looking for ways to address the customer's inquiry. As a result of these distractions, calls can go unresolved because agents can’t answer the customer’s question, resulting in dissatisfaction, follow up calls, and escalations.

To solve for this, Salesforce and AWS have closely collaborated to integrate Amazon Connect into Service Cloud Voice, a new product that brings together phone, digital channels, and CRM data into one unified console. Now, when a phone call is routed to a service agent, it appears directly within the agent’s workspace — the command center for managing customer data and interaction histories, as well as delivering service across channels including email, chat, messaging and phone.

Amazon Connect is also providing powerful AI-powered speech analytics, using Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Comprehend, to surface sentiment analysis, speech to text transcription, and translation into preferred languages, directly to agents through Service Cloud Voice.

Salesforce Einstein uses information from these real-time transcripts to give the agent recommended answers, contextual knowledge articles, and next best actions for the customer, all within the Service Cloud console. This eliminates time-consuming data entry and frees up the agent to focus on solving the customer’s problem.

In addition, organizations can use these transcriptions to identify common themes in their contact center, extract learnings to better train and equip their agents, and archive for compliance purposes. The combination of Service Cloud Voice and the Amazon Connect solution reduces call resolution times and enables service organizations to streamline operations while providing superior customer service.

“At John Hancock we are focused on making decisions easier and lives better for our customers, and part of how we achieve this mission is through our interactions with them in the contact center,” said Tracy Kelly, AVP Shared Services Contact Center, John Hancock. “With the integrated Salesforce Service Cloud and Amazon Connect solution we can handle millions of calls annually, delivering the personalized and frictionless service our customers expect.”

Skilling up the Workforce of Tomorrow

As part of this next phase of their partnership, AWS and Salesforce are addressing the growing technology skills gap by empowering anyone to skill up for the future. With AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials content available on Trailhead, learners have pathways into the professions that both AWS and Salesforce have created – two of the most in-demand professional roles in the IT market today.

Participation in the Voice Interoperability Initiative

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 commitment, Salesforce is exploring ways to integrate Einstein Voice Skills — a new feature that empowers admins and developers to build custom, voice-powered Salesforce apps — with Amazon Alexa, among other voice assistants and devices in the future.

Executive Quotes

“Salesforce's growing partnership with AWS is fueled by a shared commitment to customer success,” said Bret Taylor, President and Chief Product Officer, Salesforce. “Together, we’re making it easier for companies to deploy powerful AI and voice technologies to deliver smarter and faster customer service experiences. And with AWS content now on Trailhead, we are creating a path for everyone to skill up for the jobs of today and tomorrow.“

“For years AWS and Salesforce have had a deep relationship, and we share a commitment to integrate our services to provide customers with industry-leading, enhanced solutions,” said Ariel Kelman, Vice President, AWS. “We are delighted that Salesforce has chosen Amazon Connect as its preferred contact center technology and by bringing AWS content onto Trailhead, we are continuing to enable businesses to leverage the full power of both platforms to provide world-class customer service.”