Expectations for a quick resolution to customer support issues can vary in timeframe, but taking hours is not generally a good standard for cultivating client goodwill. At Smartsheet Inc., the journey from hours to minutes was a challenge until it settled on an artificial intelligence agent-driven solution.

Smartsheet’s James Watson talks with theCUBE about how Agentforce is helping the company transform customer support.

Smartsheet uses Agentforce from Salesforce Inc. to help 13 million users get answers instantly, handling help desk and billing issues without the need for wait times or even tickets.

“We had to put AI into this to be able to help us do those complex administrative tasks so much faster,” said James Watson (pictured), vice president of customer excellence at Smartsheet. “We use AI on the back side, we call it the back door, and we do all the research, we generate a response. All of that takes six minutes. We go from six hours to a six-minute experience, and that drives our customer satisfaction way, way up.”

Watson spoke with theCUBE’s Gemma Allen and George Gilbert at Dreamforce, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Agentforce is helping Smartsheet transform its customer support operation. (* Disclosure below.)

Continuous learning for customer support

Smartsheet’s embrace of AI agents was motivated by an interest in improving customer satisfaction and reducing operational strain. This goal required an ability to process a great deal of unstructured data and then train Agentforce to understand Smartsheet’s work management terminology.

“Structured data is very easy … but the unstructured data, that’s all of the cases that we’ve done in the past,” Watson said. “We can use all that unstructured data, so we had to train Agentforce to be able to do this. Now, we have this great data, unstructured and structured data, and we continue to feed it. Every case continues to feed that loop of learning.”

One of the results from Smartsheet’s use of AI agents is an elevation of the customer support function to a higher level of service. This improvement is leading to a more proactive approach, one that can leverage AI to examine solutions beyond the immediate problem to be resolved, according to Watson.

“Now that we have resolved your issue, what can we do next?’ Watson said. “How can we expand it within the customer? That becomes a revenue-generating or cross-selling opportunity. We’re working on this idea of how to use AI to really look at the entire solution.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dreamforce:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dreamforce. Neither Salesforce Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE