2-way Agentic Conversational Email
Client:
Salesforce
Year:
2025
Transforming Email from "Do Not Reply" to "Please Reply"
Objective
Enable both B2B and B2C customers with true Conversational Email—shifting from the era of ‘Do Not Reply’ to ‘Please Reply.’ With AI agents managing inbound responses and intelligently routing conversations to the right departments, every email can now become a two-way interaction. Given that trillions of emails are already sent through Salesforce each year, this represents a massive opportunity: transforming traditional marketing emails into meaningful conversations, and ultimately, conversions.
Stakeholders
Executive Leaders
4
Designers
9
Product Teams
14
Primary Personas
Salesforce Administrator
A Salesforce Administrator is responsible for configuring and maintaining the platform to support a wide range of business needs. This includes managing system settings, user access, data integrations, channel setup, and AI agentic configurations.
Marketing Specialist
A marketing specialist uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud, to design and execute multi-channel campaigns, personalize customer experiences, and create content.
End User
This persona represents the end customer. In this context this is the person that replies to a Marketing Email and interacts with agents and human representatives.
Human Representive
A Human Representative may take the form of either a Service Representative or a Sales Agent. This individual engages directly with customers during key moments—such as escalations, high-touch service needs, or sales inquiries.
Marketing Manager/ Executive
A Marketing Manager manages marketing efforts within the Salesforce platform by developing marketing strategies, analyzing performance metrics, and collaborating with sales and product teams to drive customer engagement and growth.
Conceptualization
Through a series of collaborative working sessions with product leadership, I played a key role in clarifying and refining product requirements. Together, we aligned on what functionality was critical for the current release versus what could be considered aspirational or part of a longer-term roadmap.
This effort involved:
Prioritizing features and aligning on delivery timelines
Establishing and leveraging frameworks to guide decision-making
Iterating on interaction models and validating design directions
Understanding technical architecture constraints and opportunities
Facilitating cross-functional collaboration with stakeholders from engineering, product, support, and sales
Sharing and refining design work based on feedback and evolving priorities
As a UX team, we led much of this work—driving alignment, facilitating discussions, and ensuring a user-centered perspective remained central throughout the initiative.
Low- Fidelity
In collaboration with product leadership, I helped define the key focus areas for our end-to-end story. Along the way, we mapped out critical team dependencies, creating the foundation that now anchors our E2E vision.
We then broke the chapters into Personas and Key Moments, which allowed us to shape the end-to-end story in a way that surfaced critical questions and paved the path toward a more holistic narrative.
Within each Key Moment, we mapped out the Critical Interactions and worked through a wide range of engineering, product, and design questions. This systematic approach ensured that every moment was explored in depth and fully accounted for.
High-Fidelity
We began creating higher fidelity screens for each of our chapters. We would hold review sessions and present to various stakeholders throughout the process. We additionally reviewed all designs with our documentation teams, and additionally had frequent reviews with engineering. In the end we had a cohesive story that had incredible impact throughout the organization. This feature was eventually chosen to be one of the main keynote topics at Dreamforce 2025!
Chapter 1: Agent Setup
Persona:
Salesforce Admin
In this Chapter the Admin builds and configures an AI agent for use in conversational email. This is the agent that will be used throughout the platform for Conversational Email.
Chapter 2: Email Setup
Persona:
Salesforce Admin
Here, we established email as a channel that works seamlessly across the Salesforce Platform. This includes enabling capabilities such as Agent Conversational Messaging, which allows customers to engage through inbound interactions directly at the ‘From Address’ level.
Chapter 3: Design Time (Marketing)
Persona:
Marketing Specialist
This is where marketers design the journey for their end users—setting up the logic that allows AI agents to step in and handle inbound interactions seamlessly.
Chapter 4: Run Time
Persona:
End User
This is where we showcase the end-user experience with Conversational Email—how a standard marketing email transforms into a two-way conversation with an AI agent, and when needed, transitions seamlessly to a human representative, all within a single thread.
Chapter 5: Human Rep Experience
Persona:
Sales and Service Human Representative
At this stage, the human representative engages directly with the customer—equipped with full context from prior marketing touchpoints and AI-driven interactions—ensuring the conversation feels seamless and personalized.
Chapter 6: Reporting/ Analytics
Persona:
Marketing Manager/ Leadership
At the end of the process, we ensure the right stakeholders have access to accurate reporting and analytics on the performance of these conversational email interactions.
Press & Recognition
Dreamforce 2025
https://youtu.be/Gce2DhADtK4?t=1299 - Moment (21:40) where Marc Benioff mentions 2-way Agentic Email.