AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Engage360 is an Amazon Kendra-Powered App to Optimize Search and Recommendation Experience in Salesforce CRM
By Swapnil Paranjpe, Chief Architect Data and Integration – Persistent Systems
By Vijai Gandikota, Sr. Product Manager – Amazon Kendra
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| Persistent Systems |
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Salesforce is renowned for its rich and popular customer engagement, case and opportunity tracking, and business workflow capabilities.
It can be difficult, however, for a Salesforce user to accelerate a customer conversation, make an informed decision, or complete a business workflow when the information required for these activities is distributed across a variety of websites, file sharing services, intranet portals, collaboration applications, and enterprise applications.
In addition, this content may be present in the form of plain text, PDF files, Microsoft Office document files, scanned image documents, or even multimedia formats such as audio and video.
For those who are trained on and prefer to use the Salesforce Console interface, retrieving content from other enterprise repositories into Salesforce can be frustrating, time-consuming, and ineffective.
When combined with the pressures of critical client or business-facing roles such as sales representative, account executive, customer support agent, IT service agent, or executive leader, these challenges can lead to diminished business performance indicators, poor customer satisfaction, and a loss of customer trust and loyalty.
Engage360, built by Persistent Systems and powered by Amazon Kendra, is a security-certified app on Salesforce AppExchange that lets you provide machine learning (ML)-powered search and recommendations right inside Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, and Salesforce Financial Services Cloud.
Figure 1 – Set of challenges overcome with the Engage360 app.
Engage360 transforms how Salesforce users securely discover, access, and deliver relevant knowledge distributed across disparate enterprise information silos and content formats—right inside their workflows in Salesforce CRM.
Persistent Systems is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, and its Engage360 app is a managed package solution that leverages the capabilities of the Amazon Kendra intelligent search service and is extendable to use the power of other AWS artificial intelligence (AI) services, including Amazon Textract, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Comprehend.
Transforming the Search Experience with Engage360
Engage360 is built on top of the Salesforce platform and embraces the omnichannel approach to deliver transformational customer experiences by providing accurate, single-window, and actionable outcomes in the familiar Salesforce console view.
With Amazon Kendra’s capabilities to centralize knowledge from scattered silos of information, interpret natural language questions (besides keyword and phrase queries) and its machine learning capabilities that comprehend text from 14 industry domains, Engage360 delivers continuously optimized answers and accurate search results.
Figure 2 – In-app intelligent search and recommendation experience.
How a Paradigm Shift is Helping Organizations and Businesses
To overcome the systemic issues presented by disparate, unstructured information assets, a paradigm shift is necessary. Engage360 accomplishes this with the following key capabilities:
- Proactive and accurate recommendations surfaced at the fingertips of sales and service professionals, with the focus on delivering the most accurate answer right at the top.
- ML models that are pre-trained on domain-specific terminology to produce contextual answers.
- ML techniques that continuously optimize the search results.
- Rich search and recommendation experience natively embedded within the system of engagement (Salesforce).
- Support for all important constructs of information discovery, navigation, and filtering.
- Compliance with the fundamental constructs of information access, such as enterprise permissions and access control.
Differentiated Capabilities of Amazon Kendra
With its ground-up ability to unify large scale content, comprehend large unstructured text, and interpret natural language queries, Amazon Kendra breaks the information access barrier to deliver precise answers and accurate results.
With its deep learning-based domain optimization, Amazon Kendra delivers intelligent search accuracy across industries such as banking, financial services, pharmaceuticals, legal, telecommunications, insurance, and IT, and in a wide range of use cases like HR, support, operations, and research and development.
Amazon Kendra is available as a fully managed service that continuously optimizes the search quality based on refreshed content, user interaction signals, and other feedback inputs, without requiring any explicit tuning or training by the end customer.
Figure 3 – Amazon Kendra offers a paradigm shift from keyword-based to intelligent search.
Engage360 App Overview
By leveraging Amazon Kendra’s intelligent search capability integrated through secure APIs, the Engage360 app provides effortless and proactive delivery of accurate and contextual answers within Salesforce experiences such as Sales, Service, and other consoles.
Relevant answers extracted from documents and knowledge articles from Salesforce CRM and other enterprise repositories are delivered within the context of the support agent’s selected Salesforce case object. This results in significant improvements to response accuracy, case resolution time, agent collaboration, first-call resolution, and ultimately successful customer satisfaction.
Figure 4 – Single-window experience with Engage360 configured in Salesforce.
Based on its configuration, Engage360 proactively delivers the Amazon Kendra-powered recommendations to the agents, without requiring extra clicks unless the agent determines the need to customize the query.
The image below illustrates how Engage360 helps support agents eliminate context switching between different cases and stay productive. Recommendations shown are contextual to the specific case open in the Salesforce console.
Figure 5 – Engage360 offers case precedence and case agent collaboration opportunities.
When the available knowledge base lacks the right content to help resolve the case, Engage360 offers instant access to unsolved cases in related topics. This enables agents to collaborate and swarm with other agents to accelerate the issue resolution.
Figure 6 – Engage360 offers in-place search faceted filtering and sorting of search results.
Tapping into Amazon Kendra’s rich search refinement, ranking, and navigation features, Engage360 offers faceted filtering, sorting, pagination, and other widget controls. This lets Salesforce users prioritize and filter through the list of recommendations based on their understanding of the case.
Figure 7 – Engage360 offers in-place search faceted filtering and sorting of search results.
Additional Transformational Impacts of Amazon Kendra
Beyond the above-listed improvements to productivity and effectiveness, there are a few additional behind-the-scenes capabilities of Amazon Kendra that provide a significant difference to knowledge-driven outcomes.
Search Analytics Dashboard
To help administrators and content managers, Amazon Kendra offers a search analytics dashboard to easily measure and interpret the adoption and usage metrics of Engage360.
Metrics include the ease or difficulty faced by users in finding relevant information, quality of the results, and potential gaps in the indexed content. Customers can use the out-of-box visual reports, or build custom dashboards to present and track the quality measures relevant to their support or sales key performance indicators.
Relevance and Accuracy Tuning
Search results shown in Engage360 can be fine-tuned to boost the delivery of answers and results based on customer-specific business needs. For example, customer business vocabulary, in the form of custom synonyms and frequently asked questions (FAQs), can be configured to align the results more accurately.
When business teams better understand their end client and user intentions, the influence of certain content attributes and other metadata can be tuned to deliver results that are best for their use case.
Domain Optimization
Amazon Kendra has been pre-optimized to interpret domain-centric content and natural language queries, which enables Engage360 to be adapted to a wide range of industries and use cases—without requiring the additional effort of tuning and training.
Incremental Learning
As an on-demand search service powered by machine learning, Amazon Kendra is continuously adjusting search results based on a variety of signals, including new and updated content ingested into the index, user search queries, and their interaction and feedback on the results. This enables Engage 360 to deliver answers and results that are relevant to the user’s intentions.
Functional, Operational, and Business Benefits
By delivering single-window, in-place, proactive recommendations, Engage360 enables users to transition to an intelligent, contextual, and actionable search within the familiar Salesforce application consoles.
As illustrated below, the benefits to the customer support and service workflow are visible across the functional, operational, and business spectrum.
Figure 8 – Multi-tiered benefits to business functions such as customer service.
Measurable Return on Investment
Here are a few examples of how businesses can earn a measurable return on investment (ROI) after implementing the Engage360 app.
The graphic below illustrates the gains in agent productivity due to proactive information access, which reduces the time and effort in the discovery of knowledge from disparate content sources. These savings add up for businesses.
Figure 9 – Service agent productivity ROI example.
Below, you can see an example of Engage360 and Amazon Kendra making a significant productivity impact—elevating the capabilities of the support agents above the respective tiers for which they have been trained and onboarded.
Figure 10 – Support tier maturity ROI example.
Here are a few additional benefits that Persistent Systems customers are seeing after deploying Engage360 app:
- Increase in first response resolutions.
- Enhanced utilization of enterprise knowledge.
- Improved employee and customer satisfaction scores.
- Reduction in case regression.
- Reduced cost across case lifecycle.
- Reduced productivity impact from agent attrition.
Prerequisites and Configuration Steps
Setting up Engage360 in your Salesforce instance is easy, requiring just a few steps between the business’s Salesforce org instance and the AWS account.
If you already have a working instance of Amazon Kendra index with the content relevant to the Engage360 use case, it can be used right away. If not, then setting up Kendra is a three-step process:
- Create an index: An index is the place where you add your data sources to make them searchable in Amazon Kendra.
- Add data sources: Add and sync your data from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), SharePoint, Salesforce, and other data sources to you index.
- Test and deploy: Visit the search console page to test search, and configure and tune, for integration with Engage360.
The Engage360 app involves the following four simple configuration steps:
- Provision and populate Amazon Kendra index (as described above). Configure FAQs, synonyms, searchable/facetable/sortable fields, and any additional tuning as required.
- In the chosen Salesforce org, define named credentials to enable connection with AWS service where Amazon Kendra is provisioned. Install the Engage360-Salesforce package in the org and assign relevant Salesforce profile and permission sets.
- Configure Salesforce custom settings for Engage360, such as Amazon Kendra index info, default search query field, field mapping per widget, sort attributes, and more.
- Set up the application component within the Salesforce page template (case record in Service console or opportunity record in Sales console).
Whether deployed for Sales Cloud (sales representatives, account executives, business development, or executive leadership) or Service Cloud (support agents, customer service representatives, contact center agents), Engage360 and Amazon Kendra effortlessly connect users in Salesforce CRM to accurate answers and information from their entire enterprise – relevant to their business needs and context.
Conclusion
The Engage360 app is easy to configure and can be put to a trial within a few hours. A pre-configured Test Drive option is available for organizations and users that would like to understand the user experience, functionality, and quality of outcomes.
Contact Persistent Systems to schedule a session to review your business needs, discuss the solution evaluation process, and learn more about the business gains you can achieve with Engage360 app powered by Amazon Kendra.
Persistent Systems builds software that drives the business of our customers; enterprises and software product companies with software at the core of their digital transformation.
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Persistent Systems – AWS Partner Spotlight
Persistent Systems is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and global systems integrator and enterprise digital transformation partner.