Customers are fed up with traditional self-service – and it’s not hard to see why.
For many companies, customer self-service looks like basic FAQs, hundreds of knowledge articles, and chatbots that can only handle simple requests. Customers spend more time than they’d like hunting around online, leading to a frustrating experience. A recent Gartner survey found that only 14% of customer service issues get fully resolved in self-service.
Say hello to Service Cloud’s agentic Self-Service
Meet Service Cloud’s agentic Self-Service. By integrating Agentforce – our autonomous AI agents – with customer portals, we’re transforming self-service from a reactive, time-consuming experience into one that’s not just low-effort, but drastically increases resolution rates. Service Cloud is launching a fully integrated agentic self-service experience so businesses can combine the power of Agentforce with real-time insights across your Customer 360 applications through Data Cloud to deliver smarter, faster, more personalized self-service at any time, on any channel.
By assisting customers with their service needs 24/7 through Agentforce and delivering fast, personalized answers using generative AI and Data Cloud, you can improve satisfaction while also saving your service reps time – and your business money.
Agentic self-service is a win-win for both customers and businesses, with mutual benefits including:
- Faster resolutions: Connect customers to answers instantly with AI agents that provide specialized assistance across diverse topics, generative AI to summarize search results, and integrated customer data to reduce customer effort and improve first-touch resolution.
- Cost savings: Increase self-service resolutions by over 80% to significantly reduce support case volume and operational costs–including up to 5 times faster ROI and 20% lower total cost of ownership.
- Increased service productivity: Minimize self-service escalations with Agentforce, freeing up your service teams to focus on complex, high-impact cases that demand human empathy, strategic thinking, and relationship-building.
- Improved customer satisfaction: Deliver self-service experiences that are finely tuned to customers’ profiles thanks to real-time customer data and behavior powered by Data Cloud.
- Fast time-to-value: Deploy unified portal and AI agent experiences in minutes with easy-to-use builders and prebuilt templates, including our intuitive Agent Builder and Testing Center that is 16x more efficient than traditional AI agent approaches.
“Delivering proactive, top-tier customer service requires a level of capacity most companies struggle to fund. Agentforce is changing that. At Salesforce, we’ve reduced our case volume by 8% — freeing up capacity of our skilled Support Engineers to focus on proactive customer outreach. This isn’t just about a better customer experience – it’s cost-effective scalability and it’s only the beginning of what Agentforce can do.”
- Jim Roth, President, Customer Success at Salesforce
What’s available today with Service Cloud’s agentic Self-Service
Today, we’re announcing the release of a unified customer portal and AI agent experience. Unlike traditional customer portals, Agentforce is fully integrated. This means that AI agents aren’t an additional feature – they’re the core of the solution. And, by connecting all of your Customer 360 data with Data Cloud, Agentforce can help customers with their real-time needs like completing tasks and finding relevant answers, faster, all in one seamless view.
Our agentic portal makes self-service an effortless customer experience that significantly boosts resolution rates with the following key features: Dynamic Search and Dynamic Conversations.
Proactively assist customers with Dynamic Search
Dynamic Search offers real-time assistance on search queries in the self-service portal so customers can find answers and complete tasks, fast.
While traditional portals have customers conducting multiple searches and scrolling through static FAQs to hunt for answers, Dynamic Search transfers a customer’s search context to Agentforce to offer immediate assistance. Gone are the days of tedious portal searches that get you nowhere—Agentforce helps you find the right answers in far less time.
Save customers (and reps) time with Dynamic Conversations
Enable customers to self-serve faster in one actionable view — no extra clicks needed.
When customers seek support, the customer portal takes the conversation context and surfaces relevant articles in real-time. For example, if a customer needs to attach files to a claim submission, the relevant knowledge article will be immediately displayed full-screen, along with a file upload link to take fast, seamless action. This saves customers time and effort (and increases their satisfaction) while reducing escalations to your support team, so they can focus on higher-value cases.
What’s next for self-service
What if your needs could already be anticipated with a solution at the ready – before you even realize you have a problem?
That’s the future of self-service: shifting customers from reactive problem-solving to proactive value creation on their own. Instead of waiting for customers to reach out, agentic self-service will take the initiative to communicate. This can look like a reminder to renew a subscription, a heads-up about a potential issue, or a personalized service plan based on your usage.
And though our research finds that 61% of service professionals say their organization already addresses service issues proactively, only 33% of customers agree that the typical company actually does this. The opportunity to innovate to help companies reduce the friction in customer support, enhance user satisfaction, and free up support teams is ripe.
This is only the beginning of agentic self-service at Salesforce. By deepening our unified portal experience between Agentforce and Data Cloud, companies will be able to provide even more engaging, personalized experiences — on any device or channel, 24/7. We’re excited to roll out even more dynamic content updates, actions, and workflows across the entire self-service experience that adapt to each customer’s evolving needs. Stay tuned for more at this year’s Dreamforce.
Resolve over 80% of customer requests with Self-Service powered by Agentforce
Agentic customer self-service and customer portal software can help reduce support cases and costs by enabling customers to find answers faster.
