My name is Nick Squares, and I'm a senior director of digital customer success at Salesforce. Really, what my team looks after are those digital experiences that customers engage with in the post sales journey. So if you're a customer and you've signed that contract and are purchasing our products and or services, you're essentially your next step is going to be engaging with of the digital experiences that my team owns. This can include our help site, our in app experience, or even things like our chatbot experience, which will guide you to a resolution for whatever your need is. And we focus on three core journeys in that post sales experience. One of those is onboarding. You have your new product and you need to get it set up and configured. The second and ongoing journey is continuous education and adoption. We, as digital customer success, want to ensure that you're getting most out of the products that you purchase with us. The last journey and the one I'm really most familiar with given my background, is support issue resolution. Right? We wanna ensure that if you run into any problems that we can help you solve those problems ideally through self-service. Typically when you think about a self-service experience, the first thought that comes to mind is case deflection. How can we as a business deflect cases in order to save costs on our support to three teams. However, we actually don't like to use the term deflection because it implies that we're avoiding cases at all costs through our experiences. When in reality, we want to ensure that the customer's issue is actually resolved one way or another. So the term that we use what we actually build through our experiences is self help success. So with self help success, really, what our aim is to do is to build frictionless experiences where customers are empowered to self serve. How does this help the customer? Well, self-service is actually key from a customer perspective because it's general faster to solve an issue at hand, but also depending on your role, and we definitely experience this at Salesforce, given admins are our primary users within our help portal, these admins can build expertise by doing self-service. Right? From a business standpoint, there is a cost mitigation approach. You know, that doesn't go away. With self help success. Right? We can save, money by, you know, avoiding cases that could otherwise be served through self-service. But it also generates more loyalty and trustworthiness on behalf of our customers by providing them with an experience that is personalized and contextualized to their needs, helping them adopt our products even faster. So as much as we wanna drive customers to self serve, right? Because it is faster and you do have that needed build expertise, there are scenarios where customers will need to submit a case. And in those scenarios, what we ultimately wanna have happen is a seamless handoff between whatever the customer's done within that self-service experience to the actual support engineer that will ultimately help that customer. Now previously before some of the changes that we made with through the help of Kaveo, that experience was very frustrating for customers for really two reasons. One, and this goes back to the deflection piece that I mentioned earlier, we had multiple screens of self-service options that we put in the way of customers before they could actually access our case form. So the scenario being I'm a customer. I actually now need to create a case you had to jump through multiple hoops in order to just get to that case form. Customers were frustrated. They tended to abandon that experience. And as a result, they'd go back to account execs or success managers and tell them how bad that experience was. Even still, once customers got to the case submission form, They were presented with anywhere from fifteen to twenty different required fields for most cases that did not require even half of that. And so again, customer frustration was paramount because I'm having to fill in all these fields that ultimately aren't relevant to my case. And again, we saw huge abandonment rates, low c sets as part of that experience, and it was something that we needed to change. To facilitate easier case submission, and also just a smoother experience for customers as they were coming into our help world. So why was it important to improve this experience? Well, for one, we wanted to ensure that when our customers needed help. They got it. Right? So if it wasn't gonna be self-service, we wanted to ensure that they had easy access to those assisted support engineers when they did it. The key for us, however, is when customers did recheck case form and ultimately submit the case, we saw a problem on the back end where nearly twenty percent of those cases were misrouted given the complexity of the form that we presented to customers. In addition to all the required fields that we had, customers actually had to manually select which product they had the issue with, as well as a specific topic. And if you look at the the ecosystem of Salesforce products and the the sub ecosystem of all the different topics that and features that are associated with this product, that is essentially like finding a needle on a haystack when a customer is just trying to get case submitted. And so we ultimately needed to make that experience easier because what ultimately happens with higher re routes is It's longer wait times. You have to deal with multiple assisted support engineers, and ultimately customers get frustrated because their issue takes a while to get resolved. So we as Salesforce, had a longstanding relationship with Cavell years ago. We actually started with Federated Search, which is been a boon for us from a self-service standpoint because we're ultimately bringing in content and solutions from multiple different repositories into one bite experience. And as we've continued to engage and partner with Kuvei over the years, we've started kind of surfacing some of the other problems issues within that experience to our Caveo team. One of those issues, of course, being the problem that is case classification today. Right? And so that's where Koveo came back to us and said, Hey, we actually have a solution for this through Koveo case assist. So as we think about that case submission form and how customers having to manually figure out their product and topic and a huge amount of re routes that we saw, the low c set that we saw. Koveo came to us with a solution that not only would help meet customer needs, but do it in an accelerated fashion so that we wouldn't have to wait around for custom development to happen or some other vendor to come to us or something. So one of the things I love about working with Coveo is they're not just a vendor. They're not just a, a team that work with to improve our experience, they truly are a strategic partner of ours. And this comes through in the type of relationship that my team, as well as the rest of my leadership team, as with our Cavell counterparts. One of those examples is that Cavell has a roadmap that they deliver and publish each year and and One of the meetings I look forward to each year is how does that roadmap intersect with what we wanna do from a business standpoint at Salesforce each year? And I love how Cavell pushes us to think, beyond the box to, around emergent technologies and to really be innovative, which is actually a core Salesforce value. So as a strategic partner of ours, we've relied on Coveo to accelerate experience improvements for us across all of our self-service portals. Which has really helped establish Salesforce and customer success specifically as an industry leader in our space. Perhaps most telling is Covayo pushes us to adopt emergent technology and really kind of expand our scope of understanding what we can do within this space, which ultimately drives better customer experiences and better results for our business. So we use case assist in two primary ways within our case submission experience. First and foremost is solving that issue with the product topic selection. Manual today. And through case assist, we actually recommend the product and topic that is most relevant to the issue that the customer submits as part of the case submission form. The second way in which we use the case assist function is actually still recommending relevant self-service content even within the form in a non intrusive manner in case customers see that self-service content as a way to more quickly resolve their issue versus submitting. The case. So once we implemented case assist into the case submission form, the feedback from customers was almost immediate. One of our primary ways of tracking that feedback is through a survey in the form. That's really what we call our digital CSAT survey. And it's a way for customers to rate on a scale of one to five, how they feel about our experience. Prior to implementing case assist, and the beginning of February two thousand twenty two. Customers were rating the case submission experience between a three point three and three point four on that one to five scale, which is slightly above average, but certainly not where we want to be, which is four and above. Immediately upon integrating case assist into the experience, that CSAT jumped from three point four all the way to four point one, and has been trending consistently at or above four point one since implementation. We're excited because as the model continues to learn, especially as we release new products and change products and rebrand products, The model is learning on the fly, and we expect that CSAT to continue to increase as we ease customers into that experience and allow them to seamlessly and submit a case without the friction we had before. Once we implemented case assist, we obviously saw a huge bump in our customer satisfaction. Rate, but that's not the only KPI that we track within that experience. There's a few others that also saw improvements as well. One of those is our case submission success rate. So this actually tells us whether customers when they enter the case form, if they truly intend to create a case are actually successful in doing so versus abandoning the experience. Our case submission success rate prior to implementing case assist was around sixty three percent, which means that we had a thirty seven percent abandon rate in the experience even after some other improvements that we had made. So clearly, customers were getting frustrated with having to manually select that product and topic. That sixty three percent case submission success rate jumped all the way to eighty three percent, which conversely means that our abandonment rate is now under twenty percent at seventeen percent. Still an opportunity, but a huge bump from where we were before, and gives us the ability to support customers to create a case if they need to. The second key KPI that really jumped out to us is our reroute rate. So prior to implementing Kuveo case assist, our reroute rate was trending around twelve to fifteen percent. So pretty high. That means that for one almost one of every five cases that was submitted, it was being routed to a support in engineer that then had to reroute it to another engineer on another team. This obviously adds time to case resolution, and it also means that there's more burden part of the customer to have to regurgitate essentially the case details from one engineer to another. However, after we implemented O case assist, we saw that twelve to fifteen percent reroute rate dip all the way below six percent. And so what this meant is that customers were getting their cases all the first time without having to talk to multiple engineers in the process. Last but not least, while COBEO case assist has been most impactful in terms reducing our reroute rates and and reducing that customer frustration as a result, it's also played a role in helping us with our self up success rate even within the case in form. While we don't expect a high percentage of self help success within the form, because at this point, customers are ready to submit their case, we essentially went from zero percent and no self help success to what seems like a modest two percent that two percent actually translates to sixteen hundred cases that it would have otherwise been submitted on a monthly basis to self-service success. While this obviously saves Salesforce some costs and allows our engineers to focus on those cases that are submitted. Again, it's also faster for the customer through self-service and depending on who you are as a customer you gain expertise in doing so. So it's a win win on both sides. Once we implemented case assist, we obviously saw a huge bump in our customer satisfaction rate. But that's not the only KPI that we track within that experience. There's a few others that also saw improvements as well. One of those is our case submission success rate. So this actually tells us whether customers when they enter the case form, if they truly intend to create a case are actually successful in doing so versus abandoning the experience. Our case submission success rate prior to implementing case assist was around sixty three percent, which means that we had a thirty seven percent abandon rate in the experience even after some other improvements that we had made. So clearly customers were getting frustrated with having to manually select that product and topic. That sixty three percent case submission success rate jumped all the way to eighty three percent, which conversely means that our abandonment rate is now under twenty percent at seventeen percent. Still an opportunity, but a huge bump from where we were before and gives us the ability to support customers who create a case if they need to. The second key KPI that really jumped out to us is our reroute rate. So prior to implementing Koveo case assist, our reroute rate was trending around twelve to fifteen percent. So pretty high, that means that for One almost went out every five cases that was submitted. It was being routed to a support engineer that then had to reroute it to another engineer. The other team. This obviously adds time to case resolution, and it also means that there's more burden on part of the customer to have to regurgitate essentially the case details from one engineer to another. However, after we implemented Koveo case assist, we saw that twelve to fifteen percent reroute rate dip all the way below six percent. And so what this meant is that customers were getting their case resolved the first time without having to talk to multiple engineers in the process. Last but not least, while COBEO case assist has been most impactful in terms of reducing our reroute rates and and reducing that customer frustration as a result, It's also played a role in helping us with our self help success rate even within the case submission form. While we don't expect a high percentage of self help success within form because at this point customers are ready to submit their case. We essentially went from zero percent and no self help success to what seems like a modest two percent that two percent actually translates to sixteen hundred cases that have would have otherwise been submitted on a monthly basis to self-service success. While this obviously saves Salesforce some costs and allows our engineers to focus on those cases that are submitted Again, it's also faster for the customer through self-service. And depending on who you are as a customer, you gain expertise in doing so. So it's a win win on both sides. Once we implemented Koveo case assist, the verbatim feedback that we received from customers was overwhelmingly positive. Words such as simple, intuitive, easy to use, fast, or really coming through in our CSAT survey feedback. And some of my favorites were a direct result of the Cobeo case assist functionality. For instance, we had customers saying it's great that I no longer have arbitrary buckets to choose from in terms of what my issue is about. Or this experience used to be terrible. There were too many screens, too many options, and now it's simplified from be able to submit my case. In addition to the scores that we receive through CSAT, as well as the implicit KPIs that we track across the experience, Hearing this feedback directly from customers has been a boon for us to continue working on this experience and delivering more improvements over time for customers.