Salesforce CEO Pressed on Cutting 4,000 Customer Support Reps
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has responded to the media frenzy surrounding his company's decision to shrink its customer support team. That frenzy ensued after Benioff's appearance on The Logan Bartlett Show.
During the conversation, the CEO explained how Salesforce's AI agents now handle 1.5 million of the company's incoming customer queries. At the same time, human support agents handled approximately the same number of conversations, with "nearly identical" customer satisfaction scores. Benioff continued:
I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads.
Since the podcast aired, Salesforce shared a statement with journalists, claiming to have successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas like professional services, sales, and customer success.
However, some industry observers have been quick to question not only the ethics but the details of Benioff's account. Indeed, one former Salesforce employee accused Benioff of sharing an outright lie, claiming Salesforce's AI is "not ready for primetime" in a viral LinkedIn post.
Others have referenced how its market rival ServiceNow had kept its headcount steady, despite implementing AI agents across customer support and deflecting 75 percent of queries.
Meanwhile, some have predicted that Salesforce may suffer the same fate as Klarna. It leaned too heavily on AI customer service, only to then reportedly draft in employees from marketing, engineering, and legal to answer the phone.
Against this backdrop, analysts pressed Benioff on the claim during his company's latest earnings call. The CEO responded by stating:
It's hard for everybody to get their head around what's possible.
"Salesforce has the opportunity to… reduce everybody's support cost, to make everyone's sales organization a lot more productive, to make everyone's marketing have a much higher ROI, to make every field service technician a superman or superwoman, and to make every Slack user far more empowered in their organization than ever before, and I could go on and on and on."
Benioff also isolated three reasons market rivals may struggle to emulate Salesforce's results.
The first is timing. Indeed, the CEO claimed that the industry hasn't matched Salesforce's rapid innovation curve, with the CRM leader releasing Agentforce 3 little more than nine months after the platform's debut.
Second is noise. Here, Benioff stated: "There are very smart people in our industry and other executives who are saying absolute nonsense." In other words, don't always trust what's on LinkedIn.
Finally, the Salesforce man tagged "fear". That's understandable, given how intimidating significant change can be and the task vendors face around AI education.
Nevertheless, despite facing that fear, Salesforce is seemingly starting to overcome it, as Agentforce adoption ramps up.
More Big News from Salesforce
12,500+ companies are now building on Agentforce, up from 8,000 as announced during Salesforce's previous earnings call three months ago.
Salesforce execs credited the company's strategy of delivering industry- and department-specific Agentforce offerings as a critical driver. These equip businesses with ready-made components to build AI agents that align with their needs, lowering the barrier to entry and building confidence in the technology.
Indeed, that strategy is seemingly working with Salesforce reporting a 60 percent increase quarter-over-quarter in customers moving from pilot to production.
Alongside all the Agentforce chatter, Salesforce looked ahead to October's Dreamforce event, where it will officially enter the ITSM (IT service management) space.
Reaffirming the move on the earnings call, Benioff stated:
A lot of our existing customers have been asking for this, [and] we're bringing a whole new level of capability.
Finally, in regards to Salesforce's actual earnings, it enjoyed a ten percent year-over-year (YoY) increase in revenue growth, reaching $10.25 billion for the quarter.
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