Salesforce's customer service tool gets the Amazon treatment

Dive Brief:

With Amazon Web Services as the backbone, Salesforce announced Tuesday the launch of Service Cloud Voice, a product that integrates Amazon Connect to boost efficiency for customer center agents.
The offering bundles phone services, digital channels and customer relationship management (CRM) data in one unified console service agents can access as they respond to customer requests. Customer data and interaction history will be easily available, along with multiple lines of communication, including email, chat, messaging and phone.
Three artificial intelligence (AI) tools supplied by Amazon will help speed up core customer service processes. Through Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate and Amazon Comprehend, the platform will allow for sentiment analysis, automated transcription and translation.

Dive Brief:

In the age of APIs, multicloud and open source, each new piece of technology is purposefully built to connect with anything.

For Salesforce, partnerships with hyperscalers the size of Microsoft and AWS is a central piece of its strategy to carve out a niche in the enterprise market. Its ubiquitous CRM software and the broader Customer 360 platform lie at the center of that playbook.

The partnership with Amazon over Service Cloud Voice is the most recent example of the company's strategy.

For Amazon, the deal represents a chance to expand its service coverage by leveraging Salesforce's customer base. New use cases can unlock fresh markets for services like Amazon Transcribe or Amazon Comprehend, in turn driving up AWS usage.

Salesforce, in turn, leverages its main public cloud provider to add new layers of services to its offering, at an age where industries is looking toward AI to boost customer experience or infuse more efficiency to the workflow.

With the Amazon deal, Salesforce is weighing its ability to meet talent attraction goals. The CRM company's online learning platform Trailhead will now feature AWS' Cloud Practitioner Essentials content.

Cloud computing constitutes three of the top seven skills managers hunt for, at a time when 90% of IT heads say meeting talent attraction goals is challenging.