Use AI to Increase Accessibility for Your Users.

Use Salesforce’s AI Capabilities to Increase Accessibility for Your Users

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This post describes new and planned features, so we want to remind you of our forward-looking statement, which states you should only make purchasing decisions based on existing features and functionality.

In a world where the internet is woven into the fabric of our daily lives, accessibility is a human right. If we don’t make the technology we build accessible for everyone, we exclude large groups from not only using that technology but also participating in our society. And with artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly embedded into our lives, making technology accessible is more important than ever. Fortunately, AI also presents unprecedented opportunities to help us with accessibility—and Salesforce Admins are at the center of bringing those opportunities to life.

Here are a few examples of how you can use Salesforce’s AI capabilities to increase accessibility for your users and customers in Service Cloud.

Make your Knowledge content accessible

One of the main ways you can make critical information accessible to your customers is through Knowledge. Knowledge articles typically contain answers to frequently asked questions, troubleshooting procedures, and other information that helps customers when they need it the most. You typically expose Knowledge through self-service websites, but since Knowledge contains such a rich variety of information and multimedia, it can be difficult to make all Knowledge content accessible. A commonly heard joke is that authors need “a PhD in WCAG” (the W3’s standard that outlines the internet’s guidelines to accessibility) to make Knowledge articles accessible.

We’ve changed that with the new Lightning Article Editor. The editor’s built-in Accessibility Checker intelligently scans articles according to WCAG standards and flags any violations. It also explains how you can fix them right from the editor. This means every Knowledge author, no matter how familiar with accessibility guidelines they are, can make their content accessible to low-vision users. You can enable the Lightning Article Editor today and put these accessibility tools in the hands of all of your users.

Lightning Article Editor displaying the Accessibility Checker modal with an error highlighting text contrast issues.

Break language barriers to create equal opportunities

Accessibility goes far beyond supporting screen readers, making navigation keyboard accessible, and ensuring proper color contrast. Although most people don’t immediately think of language barriers in the context of accessibility, they do form a significant obstacle to equal opportunities for non-native speakers.

Now, you can help your users overcome language barriers with generative Einstein Service Replies, which automatically creates a chat or email response that’s grounded in your organization’s trusted Knowledge base and tailored to your customer’s inquiry. This not only has the potential to cut average handle time by 20% but also creates more equal opportunities for service agents whose native language doesn’t align with the organization or customer’s primary language. Agents in offshore contact centers report that the AI-generated replies have helped them feel more confident when communicating with customers. Enabling your service agents across every country to generate service replies in the customer’s native language removes a critical disadvantage that non-native speakers used to have compared to their colleagues, which enables more equitable opportunities for career growth!

Suggested Service Replies next to a chat conversation; through citations for each suggested reply, the user can see which Knowledge article the Service Reply was grounded in.

And there’s more…

We are at the advent of a generative AI-powered revolution in the service industry, and admins, you are going to be the ones to bring this revolution to life! You already have the technical and business skills to do this because you already know Salesforce, and every AI-powered feature is built in the same metadata framework and UI that you’re used to.

Imagine all the new possibilities that AI unlocks when it comes to accessibility, from ensuring visual standards to overcoming language barriers to… what else? We’d love to learn from you as you discover new use cases, so share them and tag us!

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