What is Agentforce? A Brief Overview
Salesforce announced a cutting-edge and innovative solution on 12th September 2024, for customers and businesses that will allow them to handle tasks in service, marketing, commerce and sales. This groundbreaking AI solution is called “Agentforce”.
Agentforce facilitates businesses to enhance customer experience and drive accurate results, helping them achieve their goals. This solution will be generally available for businesses to use in sales and service from 25th October 2024.
Both large- and small-scale organizations can use the application – Agentforce Agent as a proactive and autonomous application to provide support to their employees and customers. This AI Agent is equipped with features that can help employees achieve their goals and targets.
What will be the Role of Agentforce in Your Business?
You can build and employ this AI Agent on Salesforce to understand your business objectives and what it needs to do in accordance to achieve your goals for your teams.
Here are some ways you can utilize Agentforce for your business:
Enhance customer experience
Agentforce helps with resolving customer queries by providing them with accurate solutions in a less amount of time. Moreover, the AI Agents will work autonomously across various channels 24/7, which reduces the chances of missing out on any customer query. Divert manual and repetitive tasks to AI agents. This facilitates the customer support professionals to focus on solving more complex queries.
Additionally, AI Agents will create a more dynamic work environment, enhancing efficiency and productivity. With pre-fed and undisputed data, be rest assured that your customers are in good hands!
Optimize Sales
Leveraging Agentforce for Sales will enhance productivity and efficiency for your sales team. By automating most of the manual and repetitive tasks, it helps your sales team to focus on fostering better customer relationships and developing strategic and personalized sales pitch.
As AI Agents leverage data analysis to predict lead conversion, it helps sales reps to never miss out on a potential lead. It also provides recommendations to the sales professionals on how they can enhance engagement and drive sales growth. By staying on top of real-time feedback and insights, it will help your sales reps to hone their skills and optimize sales journey.
Enhance Marketing Strategies
Developing good marketing strategies will help your brand grow exponentially. Deploy AI Agents to create tailored and personalized marketing experiences, that target enhancing customer engagement. As AI Agents use analytics, it will facilitate marketers to create tailored journeys for their customers that will potentially trigger an increase in sales.
By facilitating marketers with tools for creating targeted campaigns and advertisements, AI Agents can help businesses satisfy the needs and demands of their customers. It also encourages your team to be more creative by suggesting ideas that may align with your marketing goals.
What Does This AI Agent Need to Work?
To simply put – data. You need to provide undisputed data to your AI Agent that will help it carry out the tasks. This data can comprise of CRM data, external data, third-party data, Cloud Data, general websites, knowledge articles and more.
Based on the data you provide the agent will identify the next actions to complete the tasks. The best part of Agentforce is – it will ask queries to the user which will help in getting clear answers. These answers will act as bedrock for the AI Agent to understand, reason and then produce new results. This process is repeated until the AI Agent has fulfilled the original task.
Want to know the best part? In Agentforce, the AI Agent is completely customizable according to your business needs! It will intuitively suggest your guardrails (which means the prompts that you had given while setting up your AI Agents) that will help you answer your unique business requirements.
For example: You are a pharmaceutical company. By customizing your AI Agent, you can provide prompts that will trigger suggestions and guardrails that will be built in your new AI Agent. When a customer or client asks the AI Agent for any query, it will intuitively take up that question and provide accurate answers, provided you have set up data that is related to your firm.
Another best part about this AI Agent is, it will always stay on the topic, and never derail from its original motive. For instance, if a client has visited your company website and is asking unrelated questions to your company niche, this AI Agent will gently guide the customer to ask their requirements pertaining to your niche. These are some of the reasons why having an accurate input of data and prompts can help you utilize the potential of Agentforce.
How Does AI Agents Differ from Einstein Bots?
Let’s understand how Agentforce differs from Einstein Bots. Here are the following differences:
Setup Process
Getting started with AI agents is a breeze! With prebuilt topics and actions, you can dive right in and set up your AI Agent in just minutes. Their use of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) allows the user to converse in easy-to-understand natural language.
On the other hand, Einstein Bots require a more hands-on approach. By manually training Natural Language Models (NLMs), the Einstein chatbots can decipher customer queries. Training and building these chatbots are time-consuming and complex.
Context and Exception Handling
One of the standout features of AI agents is their ability to understand and manage context. They can handle follow-up questions seamlessly and maintain the flow of conversation, remembering the entire interaction history. This leads to a more coherent and satisfying user experience. It also prevents customers from derailing from the topic and block questions that may be harmful to company policies.
On the contrary, Einstein Bots struggle with comprehending human language. It typically only responds to the last question asked. This lack of intuitive interaction can create a hindrance while seamlessly conversing with the users.
Maintenance Requirements
Maintaining AI agents is quite easy. You can enhance your AI Agents with new prompts and suggestions. This helps in enhancing performance over time by changing natural language instructions.
On the contrary, Einstein Bots need ongoing maintenance. You’ll need to keep prompts and intents up to date then retrain the models according to the new prompts. This leads to higher operational overheads and is a more resource-intensive process.
Will you Have Control on Your AI Agent? Absolutely!
In Agentforce, you can build your AI Agents according to your business niche. This innovative AI solution also lets you have control over how you want to use it. For instance:
- In Agentforce there are assistive agents or copilots that can collaborate with your human agents and get the work done! This increases the efficiency and productivity of your employees. However, care should be taken to provide accurate details from the human agents to refine suggestions and answers.
- If you want the agents to have complete autonomy without any human intervention, then it is also possible. Agentforce Agents allow users to be completely hands-free. However, to maintain data privacy and adhere to crucial data regulations, businesses should clearly establish that in the guardrails, while they are creating the AI Agents.
How Does Agentforce Ensure Appropriate Guardrails for Your Business?
Here are some ways Agentforce ensures you can maintain appropriate guardrails for your business:
Einstein Trust Layer
This feature facilitates the AI Agents to maintain data privacy and security. It has a set of features and guardrails that play a crucial role in protecting your data and enhancing the accuracy of the AI results. It helps businesses to adhere to privacy guidelines through data masking, detecting unrelated topics, etc., for a more controlled and secure interaction between customers and the business.
Instructions
In Agentforce users can provide prompts and queries in natural language to articulate instructions. This helps the AI Agents to understand which topics to avoid and direct the client to ask queries related to the business niche. This approach helps establish clear boundaries for the Agent’s functioning.
Metadata
AI Agents also follow the same guidelines that are set up by Salesforce. This includes managing permissions, data sharing protocols, validation procedures, and workflow automation to ensure businesses comply with data privacy, rules and regulations.
Agent Analytics
This analytics tool offers a comprehensive view of how the AI Agent is functioning, its performance, and reliability. It also helps businesses identify opportunities for enhancement to ensure optimal usability.
AI Test Center
The AI Testing Center is defined as a framework that provides a consolidated environment for testing AI Agents. It also includes support for batch evaluations, prompt templates, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and various model application scenarios.
Channels Where You Can Deploy Your AI Agents
Want to Avoid the Hassle of Building an Agent? Use These Pre-Built Agents
Salesforce caters to all user needs. So, if you don’t want to go through the entire process of building your own AI Agent, here are some pre-built AI Agents that can address your business objectives and enhance sales development:
Service Agent
If your business objectives are to provide exceptional customer service, use Agentforce Service Agent. This helps streamline the customers’ experience without you having to pre-program AI Agents.
SDR Agent
If the primary objective of your organization is to drive leads and convert them into opportunities, then using Agentforce SDR Agent will be the best decision for you. This AI Agent will autonomously engage with incoming leads, handle queries in natural language, solve customer challenges and schedule meetings with sales representatives of your organization.
Sales Coach Agent
If you are focusing on optimizing sales development for your organization, go for Agentforce Sales Coach Agent. This AI Agent will autonomously engage with prospecting sellers and create simulations that will seamlessly discover the entire buyer journey. Additionally, this AI Agent will also help you to gain an understanding of buyer personas.
