“You can’t keep adding bodies. This math doesn’t work,” said Velia Carboni, CIO of appliance company SharkNinja. “Agentforce’s advantage over legacy chatbots will be authenticity. Agentforce gives us this opportunity. It feels more like a dialogue than a black and white “I ask this question, I get this answer.”
AI agents, assistants, co-pilots – whatever term you prefer – are currently a hot topic in customer experience, whether the value lies in assisting human salespeople or directly engaging with customers. Unlike traditional chatbots, AI agents do not need to follow a prescribed pattern of responses to common queries, but can respond more flexibly to questions or issues after being trained on internal data and leveraging an extended language model. Salesforce agentic AI can be trained on data in Salesforce Data Cloud.
When is a shark a ninja?
First, it was important to clarify SharkNinja itself, at least for the benefit of those who have not yet purchased with the brand. Essentially, it’s one company, two brands: Shark and Ninja. Shark represents household and cleaning appliances, Ninja appliances for the kitchen.
“Our guys innovate, sometimes thirty, forty, fifty products. I think breaking it up helps them focus on the categories better,” Carboni explained. “I think we currently have thirty-three different categories and an insane amount of products in each.”
The relevant question that arises is whether the information services and software are distributed between Shark and Ninja or centralized. “Centralized,” Carboni said. “We serve both brands; we are one company but there are a lot of similarities. Consumers have cleaning needs, consumers have cooking needs, so there’s a lot of leverage between brands. We have two separate websites.
One thing SharkNinja is looking to do with Agentforce is build on its heritage of informative ads, a popular way to interact with customers (it has a dedicated information channel on YouTube). “The essence of what they did was to bring a product to life and make it easier for the consumer to understand if it was going to meet their needs,” Carboni said. “I want to bring the authenticity of infomercial into the way we deliver the consumer experience.”
Engage with Salesforce
Is Agentforce simply an addition to a pre-existing SharkNinja Salesforce stack? “I joined SharkNinja seven months ago, but I’ve been a Salesforce customer for a long time,” Carboni said. “I’ve dabbled a lot with Service Cloud and chatbots. » SharkNinja was not a Salesforce customer before joining.
“We’re refactoring a lot of things here at SharkNinja. Salesforce will be our new provider of commerce, customer service, and everything in between. Agentforce, for me, was the icing on the cake. This takes us to a whole new level. We offer so many things: How can I help the consumer navigate the products we sell? We want to delight them so much that they come back and buy the next thing.
Despite an established presence in big box stores, SharkNinja is now investing in direct-to-consumer, including social, and this constitutes a large part of Carboni’s responsibilities. “It’s not about how you shop, it’s about how we integrate you into the community. Our reset around everything we’re about to do with Salesforce is how we create a community, a destination, a home where people feel like they’re part of the SharkNinja family. Social is a big part of it,” she explained. Using agents on social media or other channels creates a big opportunity to achieve these goals, Carboni believes.
Customer service is another big opportunity. “I think I can solve a lot of what people are asking through the work we’ll do on the website with the platform redesign and with Agentforce. What’s wrong with my life [human] agents can be something more complicated,” she said.
Dig Deeper: Salesforce launches new generation of “more reliable” AI robots
Here is the roadmap
Despite Salesforce’s insistence that creating Agentforce agents is a quick process, Carboni told the audience at the Salesforce World Tour event that she hoped SharkNinja would use Agentforce as part of its Salesforce suite. early or mid next year.
“I absolutely want to clarify this,” she said. “It’s not because it’s difficult to create agents. This is a very strategic decision on our part. We could go with agents and maybe try a few, but we’re so obsessed with the consumer that we want to do it the right way. You get a digital reset and this is our reset. In fact, Carboni planned to create a fast agent herself at the World Tour Agentforce booth. She confirmed that SharkNinja had already done some experiments and trials.
Change management is also involved. The technical part, Carboni insists, is simple. “The hardest part is getting people to travel. I’m trying to get more people involved in this journey, whether they’re directly involved or not. If I were a product manager at SharkNinja, I would want us to be as meticulous about creating the right experiences as we are about the incredible products they offer.
