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Amazon and Salesforce Join Forces to Improve Their Contact Center Value Propositions

At Dreamforce 2019, Salesforce announced it would be expanding its strategic partnership with Amazon. The scope of the partnership takes two forms:

• Bolstering integrations between Service Cloud and Amazon Connect to enhance call center capabilities.
• Making AWS content available on Trailhead, Salesforce’s learning management and training system.

Amazon Connect provides real-time speech analytics, such as transcriptions and sentiment analysis. The partnership will allow these analytics to be directly surfaced within Service Cloud Voice in order to give customer service agents better contextual information and to surface relevant knowledgebase articles based on what’s being said by the customer. These automated prompts will enhance the value proposition of Service Cloud for organizations with a large contact center footprint.

The move brings Salesforce into more direct competition with mainstay contact center vendors such as Cisco and Avaya. Amazon also benefits by having a new use case profile with a well-known customer relationship/success management (CRM/CSM) vendor. For our members with both a large Salesforce footprint and a number of in-house contact centers, we expect this will be a welcome announcement that will help improve key metrics such as average time to resolution.

The second element of the partnership is that Salesforce will now host AWS learning materials on its Trailhead platform. This marks an interesting development – Trailhead has received widespread praise for being an intuitive platform to drive user adoption of Salesforce applications. Amazon’s use of Trailhead begs the question of whether Salesforce will continue to expand and monetize Trailhead to host learning materials from other application vendors as well.

Source: Salesforce Service Cloud at SoftwareReviews. Accessed December 10, 2019.

Our Take

• Salesforce and Amazon announced a strategic partnership at Dreamforce 2019 to deepen their integrations between Service Cloud and Amazon Connect. The primary value proposition will be to deliver better real-time speech analytics to contact center agents. This is a savvy move for both vendors.
• Salesforce will also host AWS content on Trailhead. This raises the question of whether Salesforce intends to expand this approach and monetize its Trailhead platform to host a wide range of learning materials from other vendors.

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