Professional services automation firm Certinia (formerly FinancialForce) is spreading its wings with the recent introduction of Customer Success Cloud (CS Cloud), which it is showcasing at this week’s Salesforce Dreamforce 2024 conference in San Francisco.
Natively built on the Salesforce platform, CS Cloud uses the same underlying database as Certinia’s marquee product, Professional Services Cloud (PS Cloud), but with a view to the needs of the customer success manager rather than a manager of professional services.
Raju Malhotra, Certinia’s chief product and technology officer, explained in an interview that PS Cloud fills the gap between sales and professional services organizations, while CS Cloud “helps the organization overall become focused on customer success, as opposed to just the CS team.”
CS Cloud provides a dashboard with embedded analytics to help CS managers track playbook usage and effectiveness. Its workspace provides a focused view of key account information, allowing managers to monitor everything from critical dates and deliverables to playbook tasks, as do its customizable templates and automated flows.
Salesforce not only provides the platform for CS Cloud, it is a user of the product.
“This solution is ideal for our team because it allows us to leverage our existing integrations and investments in Salesforce, along with Marketing Cloud for notifications, Einstein for AI, Slack for collaboration, and Data Cloud to ensure our Customer Success Managers know everything they should about their accounts,” said Jim Roth, president, customer success at Salesforce, in a statement.
At Dreamforce, Certinia announced that it has joined the Salesforce Agentforce Partner Network. Agentforce, Salesforce’s newly released suite of low-code tools for the creation of autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents, “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,” Certinia said in its announcement.
It is currently developing a Certinia Customer Success Agent using the technology. It will be an AI-powered assistant designed to empower CS managers to automate complex processes and make more strategic, data-driven decisions.
“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,” Certinia said in its announcement. “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.
“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.”