Say goodbye to scattered data with Salesforce Unified Knowledge

Salesforce is introducing a new feature to gather an organisation’s data in one place, and they’re doing it for two reasons. First, the new Unified Knowledge system gives staff a one-stop-shop to find what they need without hopping between different systems. Second, it creates a single unified pool of data to train AI.

As anyone who’s ever worked anywhere can tell you, an organisation’s knowledge is often fragmented, scattered and siloed in different systems and storage. Staff and customer service agents waste time and mental energy switching between these silos, trying to find what they need to know – if they can access the data at all.

That’s why Salesforce’s Unified Knowledge system reunites scattered data in one place, drawing on internal company storage as well as third-party sources such as SharePoint, Confluence and Google Drive.

This means customer service agents using Salesforce can find all their company’s data at their fingertips. And that customers can be informed by a wider range of information when using self-service systems.

How Salesforce Unified Knowledge helps customers and agents

Unified Knowledge helps improve a variety of Salesforce features.

A chatbot system, Knowledge Answers in Bots, will give better answers when drawing on both the company’s internal and external knowledge base. A bot on a retailer website, for example, can use bots to access knowledge and instructions from a manufacturer.

A feature called Search Answers draws on multiple sources to deliver answers to customer service agents and customers using self-service systems.

For internal use, Einstein Copilot for Mobile Workers helps staff members on-site and those unable to talk to colleagues still get help sourced from across the company’s organisational knowledge. 

According to the Salesforce announcement, clients including Sonos are already using the system. 

“Unified Knowledge is helping us deliver proactive, predictive, and preventative service to our customers,” said Dharam Rai, a Customer Service VP at Sonos.

“We have over 500 agents who are educating our customers on different aspects of our products. Now, all of our resources and data points can be unified through the same system, quickly, so our agents can provide solutions faster.”

Fragmented data and AI

Siloed knowledge is also a problem for a business trying to integrate artificial intelligence into its processes. Generative AI gives more accurate and better-quality responses when it has a wider, consistent body of information to draw on. Unified data grounds the responses from generative AI, helping a business to integrate and scale AI.

According to Accenture, 76% of C-suite executives acknowledge they struggle when it comes to scaling AI across their business. In a recent IBM survey, 47% of C-level execs expressed uncertainty about where and how much to invest in generative A. A similar number were concerned about security. But the headlong race to integrate AI into business continues.  

Unified Knowledge is developed in partnership with software company Zoomin, which specialises in gathering scattered or siloed knowledge and unifying it in one secure platform. 

A company’s data is protected by a collection of safety features Salesforce calls the Einstein Trust Layer, which safeguards data sent to external LLMs. 

Salesforce Unified Knowledge availability

Unified Knowledge is available in open beta, free to Salesforce customers with Service Cloud Unlimited Edition, Einstein 1 Service Edition or the Knowledge Add-On.

Salesforce has also introduced new features including Einstein Copilot for Mobile Workers and Search Answers, available now, as well as Knowledge Answers in Bots coming in June.