Salesforce has launched a Bring Your Own Channel for CCaaS pilot program to deepen its integrations with cloud contact center providers.
The pilot expands on its successful "Bring Your Own Telephony" (BYOT) initiative, which has enabled 17 CCaaS partners to push their voice solutions into Salesforce Service Cloud.
Now, selected partners may go further and bring their digital engagement channels to Service Cloud.
AWS, Genesys, and Vonage are part of the pilot, with the former leveraging the integration to already market a unified CCaaS-CRM offering: the Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect.
However, expect many other CCaaS providers to soon join the program – once it comes out of pilot - as Salesforce strives to avoid playing favorites.
"We aim to build a broad ecosystem that provides customers with choice," said Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM for Service Cloud, in an exclusive interview with CX Today.
Many customers already have relationships with telephony or contact center vendors, and these may be different across geographies. Our goal is to accommodate these choices while ensuring seamless integration with Salesforce.
In other words, it’s not about favoring any one vendor; it’s about enabling flexibility.
Indeed, with Bring Your Own Channel for CCaaS, end-users have more power to create their ideal service experiences, whether over Service Cloud's digital channels or their CCaaS provider's.
While Salesforce has pledged to keep evolving its channel proposition and adding AI, the pilot showcases the CRM leader’s recognition that some customers have profound relationships with CCaaS vendors or have already gone live on specific channels.
"There’s no reason for those experiences to be isolated," noted Kishan. Instead, vendors can add capabilities to Service Cloud and work with Salesforce to meet the growing demand for CCaaS and CRM convergence.
That offers an exciting vision for Service Cloud as not just a robust customer engagement CRM solution but also as a platform, almost like IOS.
The Next Evolution of Salesforce-CCaaS Integrations
The Service Cloud BYOT initiative is growing at "triple-digits", processing millions of minutes worth of customer conversations over voice.
Salesforce aims to replicate that success with Bring Your Own Channel for CCaaS.
