Communications-as-a-Feature: How Salesforce Will Replace Your ACDCommunications-as-a-Feature: How Salesforce Will Replace Your ACD

With WebRTC-based communications tools like Live Agent for real-time chat, Salesforce is knocking on contact center doors.

Whether your organization uses WebRTC or not, software developers are clearly beginning to seize the opportunity afforded by including communications tools in their interfaces -- a la "communications as a feature." Look no further than CRM giant Salesforce.com to see the potential of this business model.

Salesforce has introduced three solutions that follow the communications-as-a-feature theme -- Live Agent for real-time chat, Omni-Channel for skills-based routing, and SOS video chat and screen sharing. This is the first in a series of articles that will outline the path that Salesforce is blazing.

In short, if you thought you would always have automatic call distribution (ACD) from Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, or Unify in your contact center, then think again -- and start following Salesforce, because it is going to unplug a lot of these systems. At a minimum, the availability of these solutions from Salesforce will cause traditional contact center vendors to lose market share.

For contact center operators, this may be a rapid transition because Salesforce has been very aggressive. It is including Live Agent and Omni-Channel in most contracts. It positions these offerings as "free," with the cost amounting to little more than rounding error in the overall deals.

For now, I will focus on Live Agent and leave the Omni-Channel and SOS (comparable to Amazon MayDay in name and function, and with extensive use of WebRTC) for future posts. Do note, however, that if an organization has provisioned these capabilities, entitled users get access to Omni-Channel and SOS content and sessions by logging in to Live Agent (in other words, it works like a complete solution for chat, audio, video, and screen sharing). Further, SOS is only available in mobile interfaces at this time. Salesforce has said browser support will be available in late 2017.

A Look at Live Agent
Live Agent is a well-integrated text chat-based solution for websites. Here is a summary of what contact centers can do with Live Agent:

These features and functions are just the high-level elements. Contact centers can invoke myriad other utilities and features.

A word of caution: Neither Avaya nor Genesys make it easy to automate the management of state (available, unavailable, aux-work, etc.) at the agent desktop, particularly at scale. This means that blended queues that support interleaved engagement/call assignment are problematic. In other words, in the absence of CTI-based state management, agents will need to be scheduled for either Live Agent interactions or ACD (voice) interactions.

Land and Expand
You can find many stand-alone contact center chat solutions today, but Live Agent is one of the better ones. A skilled Salesforce developer should be able to assemble a prototype within hours, and many Salesforce customers have put this "free" communications feature into production.

Once Live Agent is in use, Omni-Channel and SOS are much simpler to implement. This is a classic "land and expand" play that allows contact center operators to begin the process of migrating the control of real-time media away from the PSTN and toward a WebRTC-based text, audio, and video automatic engagement distribution, or AED, system.