Certinia joins Salesforce’s Agentforce Partner Network to drive customer success
Raju Malhotra is Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia. His focus is to shape the company’s product vision, drive the technology roadmap, and ensure exceptional user experiences across the vast customer base. Read his blog here on Certinia joining the Agentforce Partner Network and what that means for our customers.
Last Thursday, Salesforce unveiled Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI agents that augment employees and handle tasks to help drive unprecedented efficiency and customer satisfaction, and we’re proud to share that Certinia is among the first organizations to join Salesforce’s Agentforce Partner Network: a group of leading technology partners dedicated to extending the value of Agentforce for our customers.
Salesforce’s Agentforce platform promises to transform how businesses operate by deploying autonomous AI agents alongside employees, moving beyond traditional copilots and chatbots to deliver true autonomous reasoning and decision-making capabilities.
With this advanced autonomy, businesses can scale their operations while maintaining a high level of customer interaction and service. It combines Salesforce’s core metadata framework in Data Cloud and Einstein and extends the power of their Customer 360 to help customers reduce cost, scale workforces and dramatically improve their customer and employee experiences.
Partnering with Salesforce means that Certinia’s customers will be amongst the first to benefit from the productivity boost that Agentforce promises. Our early partnership is a reflection of our relationship with Salesforce as a top Independent Software Vendor, native to Salesforce’s platform, and will ensure our customers’ needs are influencing the direction of Agentforce from day one.
“Salesforce’s leading partner ecosystem is at the forefront of the AI enterprise, where humans and AI come together through autonomous Agents and Agent Actions. These latest innovations boost scale, efficiency, and satisfaction across a variety of use cases, while enabling Agents to execute complex tasks across an organization’s technology stack. We look forward to seeing our customers take full advantage of these and experience better business outcomes.”
Brian Landsman, EVP, Global Technology Partners, Salesforce
This partnership also marks a critical milestone of our AI journey to unlock new possibilities for customer success at scale. In line with Certinia’s broader AI approach, this partnership will help us more quickly innovate on tangible AI use cases to help drive major improvements across retention, CSM productivity and customer growth for Customer Success organizations.
Supercharging The Future of Customer Success with AI
As a first-mover on the Agentforce Partner Network, we are developing several use cases to help transform the potential of Customer Success organizations, including a Certinia Customer Success Agent—an AI-powered assistant designed to empower Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to automate complex processes and make more strategic, data-driven decisions.
As Customer Success Manager teams increasingly work in pooled models to support multiple customer accounts, AI-powered agents can help to proactively monitor customer health across the account, spot and prioritize potential risks, and suggest actions based on best practices. We also anticipate that the Customer Success Agent will directly assist CSMs in summarizing data, drafting customer facing material, and coaching on the right step to take next based on best practices.
We anticipate this personalized AI assistant will transform key customer success use cases like onboarding, success planning, and playbook automation, all while unifying customer data throughout the lifecycle. By leveraging Salesforce Data Cloud and Slack integration, Certinia is also imagining new ways to enhance customer experiences with personalized interactions that span across the Salesforce platform.
Certinia’s AI Philosophy: Enable Tangible Business Impact
As professional services organizations (PSOs) are increasingly adopting AI to meet key business objectives, they’re often not traveling a linear path to value realization. According to the Global Service Dynamics report, while 81% of PSOs are looking to use AI to increase efficiency, only 54% of services leaders report that adapting to AI is one of their biggest challenges, alongside economic volatility and competition for skilled talent.
Certinia’s AI philosophy is designed to meet these challenges head-on by focusing on tangible benefits that help increase win rates, reduce project delivery risk, and improve customer and employee satisfaction. This approach follows three key principles:
- Deployable: AI must be broadly distributed across the workforce and integrated into business processes, not limited to isolated use cases.
- Actionable: AI should provide insights that drive real business decisions and have a measurable impact.
- Closed-loop: AI must be part of a system that continuously learns and improves based on the data it’s fed.
AI-Driven Capabilities for PSOs: Certinia AI in Action
Certinia’s AI capabilities, built directly into our platform, extend beyond Customer Success to help PSOs maximize their AI adoption while ensuring seamless integration and robust data management. By harnessing Salesforce technologies like Einstein Discovery, Einstein GPT, and Data Cloud, Certinia enables professional service organizations to rapidly deploy AI use cases, including:
- Services estimation: We unveiled new GenAI functionality leveraging Salesforce Agent Builder in our Summer 2024 product release. Copilot Actions for Services CPQ provides hyper-personalization for scoping estimates, using account and delivery data to offer a unified view of the client, their requirements, and goals to generate project scopes. This accelerates the process of creating estimates and SOWs, and enables innovative opportunities for delivery that drive revenue and successful outcomes for customers.
- Cash flow forecasting: Predict delays in payment and identify clients at risk of extending payment schedules, enabling finance leaders to take proactive steps to ensure stable cash flow.
- Resource optimization: Pinpoint resource allocation issues, bottlenecks, and client dissatisfaction risks, allowing services leaders to adjust project timelines and reallocate resources for greater project success.
- Margin optimization: Analyze historical data to optimize services, focusing on high-margin offerings and eliminating inefficiencies.
- Opportunity win rates: Use predictive indicators to empower estimators to improve bid accuracy, increasing win rates while adhering to discount guidelines.
These solutions align directly with Certinia’s focus on driving operational efficiencies and helping PSOs use AI to protect revenue and achieve growth, and as an early member of the Agentforce Partner Network, we look forward to leveraging the latest AI innovations to further deliver on that vision.
