As professors Hirotaka Takeuchi and John Quelch stated in their famous Harvard Business Review article, “Quality is more than making a good product,” emphasizing that in manufacturing, excellent customer service and support are just as crucial as the product itself. Since this maxim was formulated in 1983, it has only become more relevant, as today’s customers have exceptionally high expectations for service quality. Consequently, AI-enabled CRM systems such as Salesforce now play a more critical role than ever, serving as a backbone of effective customer service and support.

Beyond leveraging essential customer service features like contact or case management, implementing a Salesforce solution for manufacturing enables companies to deploy AI agents capable of processing unstructured data, interacting across multiple systems, and handling multi-step customer service workflows in a manner similar to human reps. With their help, manufacturers can provide customers with self-service support options, efficiently route support cases, and augment human agents, improving customer satisfaction and retention rates.

In this article, we’ll explore how Salesforce’s agentic AI helps manufacturers enhance customer service and support processes.

Elevating customer self-service

Many of today’s customers prefer to find answers to their questions independently and solve issues without contacting human support. According to the 2026 CX Trends report from Glance, 44% of customers always turn to self-service first. Manufacturers can meet this demand by using Salesforce’s agentic AI, which enables customers to efficiently handle various issues without involving human agents.

Autonomous agents can process and interpret common questions about a manufacturer’s products, services, or policies across different channels, including live chat and email, connect to internal knowledge bases via APIs, search for answers, and provide customers with instant, personalized responses. They can also effectively address more specific inquiries, such as “Where is my order?” by connecting to a company’s order management system, checking order status, and providing updates directly to the customer.

Beyond basic question answering, AI agents can use reasoning capabilities and real-time integration with knowledge bases to effectively guide customers through step-by-step troubleshooting for technical issues. They can also take immediate actions in response to a direct customer request, such as initiating product returns or exchanges, resetting user passwords, or scheduling appointments with field service teams.

Real-life example:

Endress+Hauser, a Swiss-based manufacturer of laboratory measurement technology, received more than 95,000 support cases yearly, many involving complex technical questions or personalized product guidance. As human reps struggled to resolve them in a timely manner, the company used Salesforce to deploy AI agents. By quickly searching through 32,000 knowledge articles and providing customers with instant responses, they can help the company handle 47,500 cases yearly.

Improving customer inquiry escalation

For support inquiries requiring human empathy and judgment, the involvement of human reps still remains essential. However, 70% of customers who participated in the 2025 State of Service Expectations report by Front say that they find it challenging to escalate their issues to a live agent when needed. Salesforce agentic AI helps address this challenge by enabling seamless escalation to human support teams.

When a customer asks to speak to a human or when an AI agent determines it cannot resolve an issue, the agentic AI system can automatically transfer the interaction to a support team representative. During this process, agentic AI evaluates a combination of factors, such as the inquiry’s subject matter, issue urgency, and customer sentiment to match and route the customer inquiry to the most suitable rep based on availability, subject expertise, and skills. Before handing off the inquiry, the AI agent also provides a brief summary of the entire customer interaction, relevant account details, and any actions already taken to help a human rep better understand the context of the situation, therefore ensuring a smooth escalation.

Real-life example:

Fisher & Paykel, a home appliances design and manufacturing company from New Zealand, implemented Salesforce’s agentic AI capabilities to support customer self-service and help them troubleshoot their issues independently. When agentic AI cannot help a customer solve an issue, it automatically routes the inquiry to a human support rep based on location, time zone, and skills, while providing a summary of the customer account and suggesting relevant knowledge base articles for the human agent. As a result, the company could reduce call handle times from 12 minutes to under 6.

Enhancing the efficiency of human agents

Last but not least, Salesforce’s AI agents can function as co-pilots, working alongside human reps to enable more efficient, faster case resolution. For instance, during live chat sessions, AI agents can analyze incoming messages and suggest relevant solutions, recommend responses, or next best actions, such as initiating a product return, making an empathetic reply, or escalating an inquiry to a supervising agent.

Similarly, agentic AI can offer in-the-moment assistance to field reps through their mobile devices. For instance, AI agents can provide technicians with instant access to repair manuals, guide them through repair steps for complex issues, or handle routine tasks like data logging.

Real-life example:

Luminator, a U.S.-based manufacturer of transportation lighting solutions, used Salesforce’s agentic AI to streamline service operations for service teams, including field technicians, who struggled to handle large volumes of complex repair requests. Now, when encountering issues with repairs, Luminator’s field teams can chat with AI agents via tablets or phones, and agents can instantly provide them with the required technical specifications or troubleshooting assistance. The company estimates that agentic AI can improve its tech team's efficiency by 20%.

Final thoughts

Salesforce’s agentic AI technology plays an increasingly critical role in customer service and support, particularly in the manufacturing industry, by autonomously resolving common customer issues, handling inquiry escalations, and assisting human reps in real time. A reliable provider of Salesforce services can help your company implement the platform with its agentic AI capabilities by outlining your functional and non-functional requirements, selecting the right Salesforce edition and feature set, and providing an actionable implementation roadmap.