Salesforce vs Zoho Desk

2020. Salesforce announces new Service Cloud workforce planning tool



With a pandemic raging across many parts of the world, many companies have customer service agents spread out as well, creating a workforce management nightmare. To help answer that problem Salesforce is developing a new product called Service Cloud Workforce Engagement. Like many Salesforce products, this one is made up of several key components to deliver a complete solution. For starters, there is Service Forecast for Customer 360, a tool that helps predict workforce requirements and uses AI to distribute customer service requests in a way that makes sense. Next up is Omnichannel Capacity Planning, which helps managers distribute CSAs across channels such as phone, messaging or email wherever they are needed most based on the demand across a given channel. Finally, there is a teaching component that helps coach customer service agents to give the correct answer in the correct way for a given situation.


2020. Salesforce applies AI to workflow with Einstein Automate



Salesforce announced Einstein Automate, a new AI-fueled set of workflow solutions. Einstein is the commercial name given to Salesforce’s artificial intelligence platform that touches every aspect of the company’s product line, bringing automation to many tasks and making it easier to find the most valuable information on customers, which is often buried in an avalanche of data. Salesforce is also bringing into the mix MuleSoft, the integration company it bought for $6.5 billion in 2018. Instead of processes like a mortgage approval workflow, the MuleSoft piece lets IT build complex integrations between applications across the enterprise and the Salesforce family of products more easily.


2020. Salesforce beefing up field service offering with AI



Salesforce is adding some AI enhancements to its field service offerings that take advantage of this capability. For starters, the company announced Dynamic Priority. Certainly humans are capable of prioritizing a list of repairs, but by letting the machine set priority based on factors like service agreement type or how critical the repair is, it can organize calls much faster, leaving dispatchers to handle other tasks. Also Salesforce also wants to give the customer the same capability they are used to getting in a rideshare app, where you can track the progress of the driver to your destination. Appointment Assistant, a new app, gives customers this ability, so they know when to expect the repair person to arrive.


2020. Salesforce announces a new mobile collaboration tool for sales called Anywhere



Salesforce introduced a new tool called Salesforce Anywhere that’s designed to let teams collaborate and share data wherever they happen to be. As the pandemic took hold and the company saw how important collaboration was becoming in a digital context, the idea of an app like this took on a new sense of urgency. The idea is to move beyond the database and help surface the information that matters most to individual sales people based on their pipelines. Employees can share information across a team, and have chats related to that information. While there are other chat tools out there, this tool is focused on sharing Salesforce data, rather than being general purpose like Slack or other business chat tool.


2018. Zoho Desk adds AI assistant for customer service



Service management software Zoho Desk is getting new capabilities that allow businesses to elevate agent productivity, manage cross-functional service processes, and contextually integrate customer service with other business functions. Voice and Chat Assistant: Zia helps reduce the load on customer service teams. Through Zia Voice, customers can speak or chat with Zia to receive answers from a knowledge base. Agents can also speak or chat with Zia to receive response suggestions while helping customers. Zia suggests specific sections of a knowledge-base article rather than the entire article. Agents can also speak or chat with Zia to receive response suggestions while helping customers. Zia suggests specific sections of a knowledge-base article rather than the entire article. Agents can add these suggestions to a response with a single click and send the same to the customer.


2018. Salesforce allows to enter data to CRM via voice



Sales managers love to talk. In fact, talking is their job. But when it comes to entering customer data to CRM system, they have to type. Salesforce wants to save salespeople from such a cognitive dissonance. New feature - Einstein Voice - allows to enter data into the system using natural speech. Imagine, when getting behind the wheel, you simply launch the mobile app and talk to virtual assistant: "I just met John Smith. He is interested in buying, but asked to call him in a week ...". And the virtual assistant gently adds a note to this customer history in CRM. But Salesforce should do something with personality of their virtual assistant. It looks wrong to force Einstein to perform such simple tasks.


2018. Salesforce released new product - Customer 360



Customer 360 is a new software pulls the various customer data pieces together into a more unified view from the Salesforce product family. It is based on the technology from Salesforce's $6.5 billion Mulesoft acquisition.This should in theory allow the customer service representative talking to you on the phone to get the total picture of your interactions with the company, thereby reducing that need to repeat yourself because the information wasn’t passed on. The idea here is to bring all of the different products — sales, service, community, commerce and marketing — into a single unified view of the customer. And they allow you to do this with actually writing any code, according to the company.


2018. Salesforce simplifies phone sales



Salesforce unveiled some updates to its core Sales Cloud with an emphasis toward automation and integration. For starters, the company wants to simplify inside phone sales, giving the team not only a list of calls organized by those most likely to convert, but walking them through a sales process that’s been defined by management according to what they believe to be best practices. High Velocity Sales is designed to take underlying intelligence from Salesforce Einstein and apply it to the sales process to give sales people the best chance to convert that prospect. That includes defining contact cadence and content. For calls, the content could be as detailed as call scripts with what to say to the prospect. For emails, it could provide key details designed to move the prospect closer to sale and how often to send that next email. Once the sales teams begins to move that sale towards a close, Salesforce CPQ (configure, price, quote) capabilities come into play. That product has its roots in the company’s SteelBrick acquisition several years ago, and it too gets a shiny new update for Dreamforce this year.


2018. Salesforce introduces Integration Cloud on heels of MuleSoft acquisition



One week after MuleSoft acquisition, Salesforce unveils Integration Cloud, based on the acquired technology. The Integration Cloud itself consists of three broad pieces: The Integration Platform, which will eventually be based on MuleSoft; Integration Builder, a tool that lets you bring together a complete picture of a customer from Salesforce tools, as well as across other enterprise data repositories and finally Integration Experiences, which is designed to help brands build customized experiences based on all the information you’ve learned from the other tools. For now, it involves a few pieces that are independent of MuleSoft including a workflow tool called Lightning Flow, a new service that is designed to let Salesforce customers build workflows using the customer data in Salesforce CRM.


2018. Salesforce is buying cloud integration provider MuleSoft



Salesforce will buy MuleSoft in a deal valued at $6.5 billion. The CRM giant was interested in MuleSoft for a long time. With 1,200 customers, it gives Salesforce a mature company to add to its arsenal. It also gives them an API integration engine that should help the company access data across organizations, regardless of where it lives. This is particularly important for Salesforce, which tends to come in and work with a company across enterprise systems. As it builds out its artificial intelligence and machine learning layer, which it has branded as Einstein, it needs access to data across the company. A company like MuleSoft gives them that. But of course Salesforce gets more than tech with this purchase, which it can integrate into its growing family of products. It also gets major customers like Coca-Cola, VMware, GE, Accenture, Airbus, AT&T and Cisco.