Another busy week for the customer experience and service sector has seen fresh capabilities from Salesforce, a HubSpot acquisition, Microsoft retiring its Viva Goals solution, and an "industry-first" Teams integration from Five9.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Salesforce Expands Service Cloud with Employee Service
Salesforce has expanded Service Cloud to support a new type of service: Employee Service.
In doing so, the tech giant has added an HR solution – named “Employee Service” – to the CRM app.
Employee Service provides a service console for HR, which comes with an employee portal.
Essentially, this portal is an employee’s one-stop shop for HR. As such, staff can receive immediate answers to their questions with GenAI, connect to HR specialists from any channel, and initiate tasks like requesting paid time off (PTO).
Meanwhile, HR teams may leverage the service console to unify information sources, offer AI-driven support, and automate particular employee experiences.
Sharing the news in a LinkedIn post, Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM for Service Cloud, said:
This new solution unifies employee data, case details, and a company’s corporate knowledge base all in one workspace that gives HR teams a 360-degree view of each employee and the ability to manage employee support cases with built-in AI and productivity tools.
Ultimately, Salesforce hopes to eliminate the use of various point solutions in HR and prevent employees from searching multiple sources – including email, the internet, their collaboration platform, disparate knowledge bases, etc. – for HR-related tasks (Read on...).
HubSpot to Roll Up Frame AI, Boost Its Conversational Data Capabilities
HubSpot has reached an agreement to acquire Frame AI, the conversational intelligence provider.
Frame AI will bolster HubSpot’s data-handling capabilities across its platform, which includes its various CRM applications.
Yamini Rangan, CEO of Hubspot, described the move as “an important step” in the company’s goal of maximizing the potential of AI.
The CEO also believes that Frame AI’s technology has the ability to “transform” its customers’ unstructured data.
Indeed, the tool analyzes and extracts information from emails, calls, meetings, and conversations to deliver real-time insights and practical recommendations.
In doing so, it empowers businesses to predict customer needs and evolve their experiences.
“AI is only as powerful as the data behind it. While structured data has long been the foundation of CRM, unstructured data – like conversations – holds the key to deeper insights into customer sentiment, behavior, and intent," Rangan explained (Read on...).
