Salesforce unveils AI Help Agent with pay-per-resolution pricing

Salesforce today announced Agentforce Help Agent, a new pre-packaged service agent that organizations can connect to their knowledge base to provide support to customers and employees across chat, portals, and other digital channels using text or voice. The new agent is also the first offering from Salesforce to feature a new pay-per-resolution model in which organizations only pay when the agent autonomously resolves an issue from start to finish.

“It’s a packaged, opinionated solution targeted at the customer service team, built on the Agentforce platform,” said Kishnan Chetan, EVP and GM of Agentforce Service at Salesforce. “Customers pay when their customers’ questions are resolved, i.e., it doesn’t get escalated to human or the customer doesn’t abandon it.”

Salesforce built the new service agent on experience from millions of customer service interactions. Chetan noted that tens of thousands of Salesforce customers use Agentforce across sales, marketing, and commerce, but the majority start with service. Salesforce itself has followed that trajectory. Its Help.Salesforce.com service portal has handled 4.3 million customer inquiries since release and has resolved 70% of them.

Emphasis on usability and trust

Chetan said the team has focused on making the Help Agent easy to deploy, even by business users. Users can enable voice, web, portal, and messaging channels from a single screen, allowing the agent to answer customer questions and manage cases. Users can add additional actions, including order management, appointment scheduling, and account management via existing setup options in Agentforce Builder or through a coding agent of their choice. The agent will even provision a phone number for the voice channel.

Because Help Agent runs on the Agentforce 360 platform, it leverages Salesforce’s Trust Layer to ensure that customer data remains protected, all agent actions are auditable, and that role-based access controls are in place.

Salesforce has also revamped the customer service portal experience. When an organization deploys Help Agent as a portal, it consists of a single conversation bar that surfaces personalized responses and dynamic cards through which users can complete tasks, such as ordering or scheduling an appointment, within the conversation flow.

“We’re bringing the search plus conversation experience in a seamless way,” Chetan explained. “I can have a single Google-type bar. When I do a search and get an answer, it’s part of a contextual conversation.”

Pre-purchasing for resolution

Under the new pay-per-resolution pricing model, customers will pay $2 per successful resolution.

“We define successful resolution as the user’s question doesn’t need a human escalation,” Chetan said. “If it gets escalated to a human to solve it, that’s not a resolution in our books. If the user explicitly says, ‘I didn’t get my answer,’ then that’s not a resolution.”

Chetan added that any actions that happen in a 10-minute window during a call and in a specific window for a chat count as a single resolution, regardless of the number of questions the agent answers. Customers can pre-purchase a packet of resolutions, with a minimum of 1,000.

The Agentforce Help Agent, Agentforce Customer Service Portal, and pay-per-resolution pricing are all expected to be generally available in July.