Sales Patt’s Bill Patterson explains the three areas of focus of the company around speech technology for conversations with customers or employees.
How technology improves the human side of customer service
Sales Patt’s Bill Patterson explains the three areas of focus of the company around speech technology for conversations with customers or employees.
At Dreamforce 2019 in San Francisco, Bill Detwiler from TechRepublic spoke to Bill Patterson, EVP and GM or service cloud at Salesforce about speech technology. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.
Bill Detwiler: Because companies use technology to create really good customer experiences – great customer experiences – that technology can often also create barriers to creating those good experiences. What is Salesforce doing, particularly in the field of speech and other technology, to remove those barriers and create a more people-centered customer service experience?
Bill Patterson: I think the best technology is those that you don’t even know you use. The more we can use things like our voice, just to become a great way to interact, I think that’s how technology doesn’t come to the fore; it really goes into the background of how an everyday conversation comes about.
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I think in the case of customer service, you know that we are so used to all these choices of channels and technologies and different ways in which companies communicate, that we have not really focused on what was actually communicated, what was actually said , what was discovered in those conversations, to really make it more personal. With the power of now intelligence and modern technology, we can do business today and users today and agents today better in dealing with their customers’ daily needs by dropping them seamlessly and environment-oriented for a user.
Bill Detwiler: I know that one of the things that are always a concern when it comes to technology is that it is also a substitute for human interaction. Talk a bit about how technology is used to increase the human side of customer service.
Bill Patterson: For example, let’s take a vote. We don’t just say words while we speak, but there is a tone, there is an intonation, there are different frequencies of how we communicate. If I am angry, I will scream. If I am sad, you will hear the crackling in my voice. Our ability to bind ourselves to what is actually being communicated, both with a physical text and the wave of how someone is actually communicating, enables us to derive incredible intelligence. By simply using those data signals now, we can convert that data signal into a more humane series of experiences or guidance for a customer service team, to say, “Slow down, you interrupt your customer” or “Be careful how you communicate this message because it maybe a sensitive message is that you are giving someone. “
Here too, technology must naturally strengthen our everyday conversation that we employ, do what is right and ultimately take care of the customer at the moments that matter.
Bill Detwiler: And also to enable people to focus on some functions at a higher level when it comes to those who manage those customer relationships. Use technology to handle some of the more dutiful, routine interactions and to get people to communicate with customers at a higher level. Right?
Bill Patterson: Absolutely. I think technology can handle a lot of the low work nowadays. Things like validating who I am, or things like looking up orders on my behalf so that a user doesn’t have to do that, or an agent doesn’t have to do that anymore. What an agent should do is really explain the variations between perhaps two products – what fits me better if you know who I am. Perhaps I also lead myself to a series of products or services that I didn’t even know were possible.
This is where I think people – as we become more emotional in the service experience – allow us to do what is natural to us, namely, worry, share and lead us to a better whole of results.
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Bill Detwiler: We saw that this morning during the keynote. I loved the demonstration where you asked about the rental vehicles. You said: ‘Hey look, I’m going here. Limit the search to perhaps the vehicles I rented previously. “Talk about that experience or how the technology behind it makes it possible – the technology to make those decisions.
Bill Patterson: Customers have needs; they have wishes; they have desires; they have preferences. I think that that is what we, as Salesforce, distinguish quite considerably from others in the customer service solutions category, because we focus on the power of customer information. If you know who you are dealing with, and you know what to deal with and what their preferences are, it is true that: service can be tailored so much more to the needs of the person you are dealing with up to your line.
Secondly, I think it’s different, if you really look at technology and what’s possible, we can just make it conversational; we can make it surrounding; we can make it natural; we can make it more human. The fact that today you and I only have a dialogue, and maybe I just have a dialogue with a company I do business with, but my words and what I say to you matter. Unfortunately, most customer service interactions barely use that powerful conversation to make that part of their intelligent system that they can reveal to their customers.
Bill Detwiler: When you thought about that interaction – that point of contact – you spoke about it a little earlier when you were talking about delivering sensitive information. It is not only always a new pair of shoes; it’s just not always buying the latest gadgets. Sometimes they are people in crisis. It can be – if you are dealing with insurance – it can be a health problem; it can be financial – a matter that is crucial at that time. Talk a bit about how technology – tell a little more about it – how technology helps companies navigate through those difficult conversations with their customers?
Bill Patterson: I think again, technology is our guide – and Einstein – our AI technology is not AI because of AI. It is AI to really present those important moments with a valuable set of choices to enhance that experience, especially in the case of surveys. What that means in the case of someone like a home health care professional, there may be a set procedure that I must follow, but Einstein can guide me through it with more gentleness; it can lead me through that with better craftsmanship or touch as part of my conversation. It can also lead me to perhaps a series of choices that you didn’t ask me about, but I can sense the data signals that have already been stored about your profile and see that it is really going to surprise you in a way that you have me there not even asked about it.
I really think that technology is not only becoming an enabler, but it is also becoming a way for us to really turn routine interaction into something magical and special.
Bill Detwiler: What is the next step in the field of speech, whether it is customer service or only people and companies during their interaction with their employees or their customers, their customers. What is the next voice on the horizon?
Bill Patterson: Three things we really focus on. One, making every conversation a source of intelligence for a company. As mentioned, many companies hardly record what is said in their conversations and are part of a customer profile. That is kind of number one. That is fundamental for us, but really an important step.
Number two, it’s about making our application easy to talk to, easy to talk to. Wherever I am, as a user I can say: “Hey Salesforce, what does my queue look like today?” That now gives me a better idea of my workload, if you want, or “Hello Salesforce, I’ll take the afternoon off; refocus my queue to the unloading queue ‘so that I now know that my colleagues and my teammates can pick up something that I cannot continue because my working day takes me on the road.
Then number three, I think, is that today, customers want to have more conversations with companies, even in their free hours. The more we can actually let companies use a conversation language – and I don’t mean IVR here. We have all spoken with IVRs; no one likes to talk to that – but really a conversation entity made by phone or another app that allows you to communicate with a company and speak the business language you understand and understand, of course, native, in the language of your choice.
Bill Detwiler: The last thing I want to get your opinion about is privacy. Privacy is always a problem when it comes to new technology, when it comes to the amount of data that companies collect. While we think of speech as a new data point, everyone is used to recording their data and recording their customer service calls. Nobody really thinks about it anymore, but when it comes to analyzing those calls with artificial intelligence, machine learning that can open up, this can raise a number of concerns. Talk a bit about privacy and what Salesforce does to address privacy within Salesforce, and then to help your customers, and customers to address their own privacy within their own activities.
Bill Patterson: It’s no secret that organizations today – and databases have existed for a long time – that people can store as much information about you as they can. At Salesforce, we actually believe we should create that profile. We want to put that in both hands as a company, but even more so, as a customer, to be able to choose only what I want to share with you. Whether it’s about GDPR and compliance and all the other rules out there today, it’s up to us to perhaps lead in this generation to give more control to customers and say, “Hey, it’s fine to use this information but the information that was in this dialogue is not good for you to become a tool in your arsenal to use against me, if you want, in our relationship. “
Our position is really to create that universal profile, give customers the option to choose what information they want to share and not want to share, and then allow that opt-out, if you want, to ensure that it doesn’t is turned against me.
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