Explore Core Components and Architecture
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define the solutions and components for managing products and prices.
- Explain the features that sales teams use to enhance their customer outreach and order capture.
- Describe how Agentforce Communications simplifies order fulfillment.
Purpose-Built Solutions and Components
Now that you’ve learned how Agentforce Communications removes the common roadblocks that telcos encounter, it’s time to take a look at the features and tools that help your teams succeed.
Agentforce Communications includes specially designed components for products and pricing, sales, and order fulfillment. It also seamlessly connects all of these business operations.
Product and Pricing
In Agentforce Communications, product and pricing configuration is a centralized and modular experience. Let’s explore the tools you use to create and price your products, and build the foundation for consistent and accurate order processes.
Product Catalog Management
Product Catalog Management provides a standardized structure to define and organize your company’s offerings. It helps you create, organize, and manage products, services, and bundles that align with TM Forum standards. Rather than manually creating a separate instance for every product variation, you can reuse product components. This way, you can quickly set up new variations, make your catalog data more manageable, and reduce ongoing maintenance.
For example, on the Structure tab of the Platinum Internet Plan product, the product designer can quickly view and configure nested hardware and services by using a visual interface.
Product designers can configure and connect commercial products and the underlying technical products required for back-end fulfillment. For each product, they include attributes to define commercial product characteristics, such as color and storage capacity. You can also define technical attributes, such as download speed, storage capacity, and port configurations, and configure advanced rules to control how products are sold based on customer qualification and other criteria.
Salesforce Pricing
Agentforce Communications gives you a robust framework to automate and manage complex pricing strategies across all of your sales channels. Using Price Management, you can be confident that every quote is accurate, consistent, and reflects real-time business rules.
Agentforce Communications also uses the core Salesforce Pricing data model to quickly define list prices, costs, and discounts.
The price book contains the full list of your products and list prices.
You can price products based on attributes, apply dynamic discounts and promotions, and provide your sales reps the flexibility of contract-based pricing and price waterfalls.
Use Business Rules Engine expression sets and lookup tables to automate complex calculations and determine the right price based on a variety of conditions. Context Service helps you factor in customer and transaction data, such as location, loyalty tier, or existing assets, to help you further personalize product pricing.
Sales and Guided Ordering Experience
Due to the complexity of products, the communications sales process is often slow and error-prone. With Agentforce Communications, you can be sure that every order is personalized and transparent and give sales teams more bandwidth to build customer relationships.
Reps have a 360-degree view of each customer, and can see all of their active devices and other assets, billing history, and previous interactions on a single screen. Using Product Configurator, reps can build orders and customize products for customers through a structured interface, rather than relying on static spreadsheets.
Sales teams can verify compatibility between products in bundles, quickly facilitate service transitions to new addresses, and modify orders by adding line items to existing business accounts.
With pricing rules in place, applicable discounts and promotions are automatically applied to line items based on context, and sales reps can make manual price adjustments when needed. You can set up Omniscripts to give reps a step-by-step questionnaire so that even the most junior sales team member can correctly capture all the necessary data for complex enterprise quotes.
The system can also use AI and Business Rules Engine to provide intelligent recommendations for upselling based on customer data.
After the order is in place, your order details are automatically compiled into professional proposals or legal contracts, and reps can quickly transmit documents for customer review and signature.
Order Fulfillment and Execution
Order fulfillment is often a messy, logistical nightmare for telcos. Many orders and even individual products include separate pieces of hardware, along with required additional services that need to be completed in a strict sequence. Teams must collaborate closely to resolve all dependencies in the correct order, including shipments, installations, and activations.
Through a process called decomposition, Agentforce Communications automatically breaks down products, including complex bundles, into their individual technical components. Then, Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator manages the execution of the associated tasks by using a fulfillment plan, which contains all the steps for completing the order.
Fulfillment plans contain groups of steps, which can include automated and manual tasks, callouts to external systems, or milestones. You can set up dependencies between the steps so that prerequisite steps are completed before dependent ones begin. For example, the plan can require fiber line activation before a technician arrives to install a router.
When teams fulfill an order, they can view order products, decomposition details, and the fulfillment status right from the order record.
Customers, sales reps, and support agents get real-time visibility into the progress of each order, and can see the exact current stage of the fulfillment pipeline. To avoid potential delays, the system flags delayed or overdue tasks as “in jeopardy” so that teams can intervene before the customer is impacted. If a technical error or “fallout” occurs, Agentforce Communications surfaces the issue so that operators can resume automation midstream without having to restart the order from scratch.
This modular design makes it easy for companies to innovate products and incorporate new technologies, without overhauling entire backend processes.
Customer Support
A unified system also simplifies ongoing customer support. Through the Communications Service Console, support reps can quickly access account records and review a full list of a customer’s purchased assets. They can follow guided troubleshooting steps to identify and resolve underlying issues across any channel, including customer calls or web portal conversations.
With Asset Management, support teams can use built-in Move, Add, Change, Disconnect (MACD) features to quickly modify, relocate, or discontinue service.
For example, on an account record, customer support reps can view all of a customer’s provisioned assets with lifecycle dates, and quickly make necessary changes.
You can expand your customer support with AI and Tableau Analytics add-on features. AI agents can surface intelligent recommendations to customers, and help reps upsell by suggesting money-saving switches or relevant new services. Tableau Analytics dashboards help you track trends in customer support and monitor orders.
AI Agents
In addition to all the features you just learned about, AI agents help you to simplify and scale your operations by fast-tracking common, time-consuming tasks. This table lists some of the prebuilt agents included in Agentforce Communications.
Agent |
Description |
|---|---|
Service Level Objective Insights |
Gathers performance insights for an asset by comparing network usage data against service level objective (SLO) compliance criteria. Teams can quickly identify if service standards are being met or if intervention is required. |
Revenue Quote Management |
Assists in the end-to-end quoting process by helping users create, edit, and manage sales quotes and orders. |
Quote Recipients Grouping |
Organizes and manages groups of recipients for quote documents, automates stakeholder categorization, and routes the documents to the correct recipients. |
Contract Intelligence Agent |
Provides visibility into large volumes of executed contracts by extracting key clauses and identifying potential risks. It can also analyze inbound contracts against corporate playbooks to suggest redlines and prevent noncompliance. |
Billing Resolution |
Helps customers and service reps quickly resolve billing disputes and analyze charges. It can also view unpaid bills, explain invoice line items, and raise disputes based on payment history. |
Billing Employee Assistance |
Assists employees with managing collections and billing foundation tasks. Staff can navigate billing profiles, manage amendments, and align service dates with billing cycles more efficiently. |
Billing Service Assistance |
Resolves billing inquiries through customer-facing channels, provides automated support for invoice explanations and resolves common billing-related service requests. |
Product Description Generation (subagent) |
Automatically drafts compelling and accurate product descriptions by turning technical specifications into customer-facing marketing copy. |
You can also use Agentforce to quickly create quote recipient groups, analyze service level objectives against usage data during service degradation, or help your technicians and service reps upsell or cross-sell by surfacing asset-specific upgrades or add-ons. On top of all that, you also get access to a growing number of Sales, Service, and Field Service agents.
Wrap It Up
In this unit, you learned how Agentforce Communications tools and features help your teams efficiently design, sell, and deliver intricate telecommunications products and services.
Next, you explore how different roles at your company use Agentforce Communications and related workflows and responsibilities.