{"id":334,"date":"2022-06-29T00:51:47","date_gmt":"2022-06-29T00:51:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rafterone.wpengine.com\/?p=334"},"modified":"2026-04-01T18:21:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T18:21:14","slug":"service-cloud-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.acxiom.com\/salesforce\/service-cloud-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"Salesforce Service Cloud Voice: The Ultimate Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is Service Cloud Voice?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Super high level, Service Cloud Voice is an advanced telephony system natively integrated within Salesforce \u2013 initially just with Service Cloud, but with Winter 21 as we\u2019ll cover below, now it\u2019s integrated with Sales Cloud as well (I\u2019m assuming the name will change at some point to be a more generic Voice, but who knows). This was one of the big announcements from Dreamforce \u201919 and one of the first questions we get when we talk about it is, \u201cSalesforce is already integrated into my phone system, how is this new?\u201d This is a great question, and the keywords here are \u201cnatively integrated\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previously, Salesforce provided an Open CTI SDK that allowed any telephony vendor to build a connector with their system and Salesforce. Most vendors took the basic connector and literally just set up the connection points without adding any new features, so you got your basic screen popping, click-to-dial, agent status changes, and maybe automatic task creation. Other vendors like Vonage (originally it was NewVoiceMedia before they were acquired) and Tenfold built some really sophisticated connectors that provided agents with a much more advanced experience, but in the end, it was really in the hands of your telephony provider how the connector behaved and what features were leveraged. With Service Cloud Voice, Salesforce has moved past the Open CTI connector and created a native experience that Salesforce controls, which fully embeds the telephony experience within Salesforce. We\u2019ll get into the features in a bit, but essentially this means the agent (and soon-to-be sales rep) experience doesn\u2019t end right at the connector, but their experience within Salesforce is improved as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, to do this you need the telephony side as well. For this, Salesforce hasn\u2019t built its own telephony platform but instead partnered with Amazon to leverage its Amazon Connect and AWS services. As announced at Dreamforce, the roadmap indicates that this will be opened up to other telephony vendors to take advantage of (details on how that will look still aren\u2019t out yet), but for now, to use Service Cloud Voice you need to use Amazon Connect as your telephony provider. Service Cloud Voice comes with a bunch of pre-built features leveraging Amazon Connect that we\u2019ll describe below, but the nice thing is you can leverage all of the various services Amazon has \u2013 like storage, voice bots, etc. to even further expand the experience. It\u2019s almost like getting a Lego set \u2013 you have a pre-built design you can leverage, but you can use other Lego blocks to enhance it as you see fit. You just don\u2019t get the cool Lego people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For us, this was a natural fit to jump into. We have been a leading Service Cloud partner since it originally came out, with our first truly large call center implementation all the way back in 2012 with Constant Contact. We\u2019ve always stayed on top of the latest features and customer service approaches, but what made this one a little different is it also allowed us to leverage our contact center experience and AI experience. We have been partners with Vonage from back in the NewVoiceMedia days and we have been working closely with various AI technologies, including to enhance customer service, as well. Finally, to augment our own AWS and AI experience, we wanted to deepen our Amazon Connect skills, so we have partnered with Symbee \u2013 a leading Advance Consulting Amazon Connect partner. Service Cloud Voice really felt like it was a culmination of all this experience, and we were excited to jump in \u2013 and we had our first go-live within 3 weeks of the product being announced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Service Cloud Voice Features<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s dive into the core features that are currently available with Service Cloud Voice and what already makes this a very compelling product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Embedded Call & Agent Status Control<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The most important feature for an integrated telephony experience is the ability to make and receive calls \u2013 and Service Cloud Voice (SCV from here on) has that covered. As you can see below, the call and agent status controls are managed from a tray item \u2013 similar to the Lightning versions of the Open CTI connectors. We\u2019ll talk about how this fully supports Omni-Channel below, but for the status controls, agents can select from any Omni-Channel statuses you set up for this channel \u2013 like Available, Break, Offline, etc. \u2013 and that will change their status automatically within Amazon Connect. Agents can outbound dial from here using a dialer or the click-to-dial from within a Salesforce record, but they also can accept inbound calls \u2013 which you\u2019ll see in the second image below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once accepted, agents can add other callers, transfer to other agents, and mute the call \u2013 all from within Salesforce. In addition to the tray item, the agents get similar controls right from the Voice Calls Record which is the core object for SCV. We\u2019ll dive into details on that next, but overall, the big takeaway here is that the call controls are seamlessly embedded into Service Cloud, wherewith the Open CTI connector agents needed to do some of these from the telephony controls instead of within Salesforce.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Three<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Voice Call Record<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The Voice Call record is a new object introduced as part of SCV where all of the information, relationships, and controls for the call are centralized. This is the record that pops when a call comes in and provides that 360-degree view of the caller\u2019s information as well as their related information \u2013 like Case History, etc. The open CTI connector \u2013 if built correctly (never a given with some vendors) \u2013 is used to create an activity record that would store some of the call information. This was pretty limiting and really came in after the fact. This replaces that activity record, but is actually part of the call process itself, which makes it a lot more powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The image below might be a little tough to read, so I\u2019d click in and zoom, but from there you can see what a completed Voice Call record could look like. Not only does this have all of the information for the Caller and the Case that resulted from the call, but this also has all of the call metrics like when the call started, how long it was in the queue before it was received when it was accepted by an agent, and the call duration. Coupled with the metrics, this is where you can get to the transcription and recording of the call, as well as a sentiment analysis if you turn that feature on. There\u2019s a ton here. We\u2019ll talk about the recording and transcript below in more detail, but I just want to call out something on the metrics \u2013 the time in queue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those of you working with some of those telephony vendors that have poor connectors, your eyebrows probably went up with that. This is part of the big difference in having a unified and integrated process between the telephony and Salesforce vs. just having a connector popping calls. With the open CTI connector, Salesforce isn\u2019t even aware<\/em> of the call until it\u2019s routed to an available agent and passed to the connector. So, all of the time the customer spent in your IVR \/ contact flows, what they entered into the IVR, and how long they sat on hold \u2013 all of that was unknown to a Salesforce user. With Service Cloud Voice, you can see the entire interaction from when the customer called, to what they put in the IVR, how long they were on hold, and also the call time itself. All of this is captured right on this new Call Record object, which means you can run your call metrics inside of Salesforce \u2013 with<\/em> your Case data metrics \u2013 all from standard Salesforce reports and dashboards. Huge.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Service<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Omni-Channel<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

As we\u2019ve mentioned, Service Cloud Voice fully supports Omni-Channel. This solves another big issue that most of the telephony providers have when connecting to Salesforce (unless they built their connector to support Omni-Channel as Vonage did) \u2013 basically, the phone channel becomes isolated from all of the digital channels Salesforce controls like Chat, Social, Messaging, and Email. For example, let\u2019s say your agent is in a chat session; if your telephony is using the standard open CTI connector, they can\u2019t see that your agent is unavailable and would try to route a voice call to them. Usually, you avoided that by breaking agents out to support one live channel at a time \u2013 don\u2019t make yourself available for chat if you\u2019re available for calls \u2013 but this isn\u2019t really ideal, especially if your team isn\u2019t big enough to support dedicating agents to a single channel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With SCV, Omni-Channel can control all of your channels, route work from any channel, and ensure that you\u2019re not sending double work to agents. Your agents can be available for both<\/em> chat and voice for example, and when either is accepted by them, Omni-Channel can see they are no longer available. This was previously a major pain point, and having this all controlled by Omni-Channel opens up so many possibilities to route work more efficiently. In addition to the overall Omni-Channel routing, with Voice in routing, you can now also see what calls your agents are on from the Omni-Channel Supervisor page. Now supervisors can truly see across all channels what work their agents are handling and what channel that work came from \u2013 and don\u2019t forget this is all real-time. I\u2019m stealing my own thunder here, but with Winter 21 this gets even cooler as you can actually peek into a call from here and watch the real-time transcript of the call \u2013 just like you\u2019d peak into a Chat. Super cool (pretend like you\u2019re surprised when you get to this below). The only missing feature, which I\u2019m sure is coming, is that you can\u2019t see into the Voice queues from here as you can with Chat. You still are able to do this, but you need to be within Amazon Connect to monitor the queues themselves. Once that gets connected to the Supervisor page, watch out.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Contact Flows \/ IVR<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Now we\u2019re going to talk about some of the power on the Amazon Connect side \u2013 starting with the Contact Flows. Amazon Connect has the ability to create multiple contact flows that guide your customers through their call experience in a really easy-to-use interface (very similar to Flow \/ Process Builder). Amazon also has its Lamba service, which you can leverage from within Amazon Connect to build out dips to Salesforce to get information about the caller easily. Typically that type of dip functionality requires building real integrations to support it \u2013 with SCV, you can do it right within the contact flows. Finally, the contact flows can also be extended to leverage Amazon\u2019s Voice Bot capabilities \u2013 Amazon Lex Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Polly (where Amazon gets these names, I have no idea. Polly, I get as a robot voice \u2013 \u201crobot wants a cracker\u201d \u2013 but some of the rest seem random. I guess it\u2019s tough to complain when Salesforce uses the same name for all of their products \u2013 like Lightning\u2026).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With all of these services combined, you have the ability to build super robust flows for your callers, including guided menus even with the IVR style \u201cpress 1 for Service\u201d or with voice recognition. In addition, the ability to dip into Salesforce allows you to lookup Contacts, Accounts, or even Cases to get entitlement levels so you can automatically route to different queues \u2013 or maybe even see that a case is in progress and route to the agent that was handling that case if they are available. A lot of IVRs can do the same kind of functionality, but to say it was hard to do would be an understatement. There\u2019s a reason a lot of companies just have a simple IVR menu \u2013 it\u2019s brutal to do anything more. However, this is just like building out a flow within Salesforce. That said, you do need to understand how these functions work within Amazon to really build these out, so I don\u2019t want to make it seem like a Salesforce admin can do this immediately if they know Flow. However, once you know it, the ease of maintaining these and building new ones is a huge benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Real-Time Transcription<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

When this was announced at Dreamforce last November, the real-time transcription was the part that jumped out the most during the demonstrations. It simply looks super cool and as an admin, is definitely pretty wild to show off. It doesn\u2019t just look great though \u2013 it can be a game-changer for your case process if done correctly. The real-time transcription does basically exactly what it says \u2013 it provides a transcription of the call, while it\u2019s happening \u2013 for the agent to see in near real-time. The transcription is a conversational transcription, so it can identify the agent from the caller, and the conversation bubbles are broken out to show the different speakers. Once the call is completed, this transcription record is automatically saved and linked to the Voice Call record. So, the big question is \u2013 why does an agent need a real-time transcription of their call while they are actually participating in the call anyway. That\u2019s actually a great question and the answer is for multiple reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, it\u2019s basically a real-time reference for the agent. Remember, most agents are multi-tasking while they are on a call \u2013 they are trying to fill out the Case, trying to look up information within other systems, and don\u2019t forget also trying to find the answer to the problem the customer is calling about \u2013 and they need to do this all while the customer is talking to them. If they miss something the customer said or want to double-check something the customer said, now they can simply scroll up quickly and it\u2019s right in the transcript. Asking a customer to repeat themselves is always frustrating, and this is a great reference to help agents avoid that. Second, this can be a huge<\/em> time-saver for the after-call work. Most agents\u2019 call processes with Salesforce are as follows: Answer the call, start the case record, spend time resolving the issue, hang up the call and then fill out the case \u2013 usually writing a small novel repeating all of the adventures you just had on that call. What if the entire conversation is already captured for you? Why do you need to repeat what happened during the call in the case details when you can just refer to the transcript now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With real-time transcription, that is exactly what you have. Now an agent can just focus on what needed to be done to resolve the issue and not worry about repeating the call details in the post-call follow-up. Depending on your call types, this could dramatically cut down on your post-call time. Finally, as I mentioned above \u2013 stealing the Winter 21 thunder again \u2013 in just a few weeks, this real-time transcription will also be able to be watched by supervisors so they can get a sense of what\u2019s going on in their agent\u2019s calls without having to jack into a phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Call Recordings \/ Playback<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In addition to the transcription record that is saved with the Voice Call Record, SCV has the ability to automatically save a recording of the call and allow users to play it back right from the Voice Call Record itself. The fact that the recording is linked automatically to the Voice Call Record is awesome \u2013 we\u2019ve built functionality like this in the past, but it usually involves almost like a triangle of integration between the telephony platform, the recording platform, and Salesforce. With SCV, it\u2019s effortless. The recording itself is stored within Amazon Connect \u2013 using S3 \u2013 but you can play it directly from Salesforce without having to go into Amazon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in 2016, we wrote a blog post focused on how to leverage Salesforce and Omni-Channel to streamline your QA process and SCV basically handles everything we spoke about in that post automatically. Think about how much this can change your QA process, though. Now it can be done all within Salesforce \u2013 flag the Cases to review, open the Voice Call Record to view the Case Details, Survey Details (assuming you\u2019ve integrated that to Salesforce), the call recording, and the transcript \u2013 all centralized. You can dramatically reduce your QA time leveraging this \u2013 and also make it even more intelligent \/ less random by leveraging the recording and transcripts with other services like sentiment analysis which I\u2019m going to jump into next. We\u2019ll definitely update that QA post because if our old approach streamlined it, this basically double-streamlines it (I don\u2019t know what\u2019s faster than streamlining).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Analytics & Reporting<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Service Cloud Voice has multiple reporting and analytics options. As I mentioned above, with the Voice Call Record storing key information for the full lifecycle of the voice interaction you have the ability to combine your call data with the case data. This is extremely powerful. Think about how you\u2019re doing call reports now \u2013 you have your telephony side where you can analyze average call times by agent, by queue, and maybe some limited information based on what you captured in the IVR. With that data now linked to the case records, you can start to slice and dice by case types, resolutions, and even customer data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are particular case types really taking long conversations to resolve? Maybe there are certain case types that are very quick to resolve \u2013 while this is nice, these types of cases tend to be ripe for self-service and deflection. Are there case types causing transfers or escalations? Then you can get down to the case-type-by-agent grid to see if certain agents are really struggling with specific types of cases. There\u2019s so much you can do here \u2013 and that\u2019s not even getting into the stats around sentiment analysis that you can mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of how you do it, you have multiple options. First, with the case data and call data combination, you can do a lot with standard Salesforce reports and dashboards. This will give you a lot of the slice-and-dicing that you need to analyze how your team is performing over time, and to do a lot of the analysis we just discussed. In addition, with SCV you get the Service Cloud Analytics app. This app focuses on some KPIs and lets you get a handle on call volume, AHT, speed to answer, first call resolution (of course this doesn\u2019t count channel switching), abandonment rate, and calls to cases. This dashboard is pretty nice; there\u2019s some really cool stuff you can do with Einstein Analytics here mixing some of the data we mentioned to see trends. We\u2019re on our way to building some nice packaged dashboards that will be a great starting point for customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, you also have reporting on the Amazon side. The Amazon side allows you to get metrics around the call flows and the paths customers are taking through your call flows. Finally, you have the combination of Amazon and the Omni-Channel Supervisor page for real-time analytics. Amazon Connect shows the live queue stats, while the Omni-Channel Supervisor side shows the agents and who are working on calls as well as other channels. In general, reporting is a huge feature of SCV and the potential for what you can glean from this is really exciting.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Dashboard<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Extended Amazon Services<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Amazon Web Services is a powerful platform, and Amazon Connect is just one of the services available within it. I\u2019ve already mentioned several different services that SCV leverages, but you also can extend its capabilities leveraging other AWS functions as well. Below is a table listing all of these out \u2013 but this is an area Amazon is constantly expanding, so these possibilities keep growing with each new release Amazon does. A good example of one way to extend SCV is to leverage Amazon Comprehend to do sentiment analysis. Basically, leveraging the recording being stored on S3, you can get sentiment scores of how the tone of the call was overall \u2013 including breaking out the agent\u2019s and the caller\u2019s scores. In addition, you can even expand this to look for certain keywords \u2013 like if you\u2019re a financial company and want a call flagged if your agent used the word \u201cguarantee,\u201d or maybe you\u2019re a manufacturer and you want to flag calls that have the word \u201cfire\u201d in them. You can build this functionality out with the Amazon Comprehend service and bring the database to the Case record. This is just one example. Another is Amazon Translate for when you have multilingual recordings, leverage that to always store an English version. Tons of potential here and it\u2019s definitely an area that we\u2019ll see Salesforce leverage more and more as part of the standard package in future releases.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"AWS<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Winter 21 Upcoming Features<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Alright, that covers all of the amazing features in SCV currently. However, Winter 21 is just around the corner \u2013 hitting everyone by mid-October \u2013 and there\u2019s an impressive list of enhancements to add to it. Clearly, this is a strong focus for Salesforce, and we expect to see this continue with future releases. One important thing to note, the 3 big core releases a year that Salesforce does is really just half of the story. This is improving the agent experience and the Salesforce capabilities, but it\u2019s not like Amazon is sitting around not updating the telephony side. Basically, you\u2019re getting enhancements to both sides as Salesforce & Amazon release their new versions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n