What is a Salesforce Einstein Bot?

According to Salesforce a bot is “a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods.”.

So, before we get more into what a bot is let’s first look at the platform they are created on, Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics.

Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics provides impressive mechanisms that assist organizations and their users of the Salesforce platform to connect, communicate & interpret customer needs. By implementing elements of artificial intelligence, data mining and predictive analytics Salesforce users can get deeper insights into their customers data and begin to build an improved base of knowledge related to their business. With an underlying engine tuned for performance and a presentation layer which can display key details or high level metrics on dashboards Einstein Analytics is the next step in reporting on the health of your sales pipeline, exposing opportunities and providing suggestions to help guide you in identifying & visualizing growth which aligns to your business.

Now, back to bots …

Basically, a bot is a means to facilitate communication between humans and computers with either voice or text and subsequently executing an action tied to the input provided. Bots can learn over time to interact with humans by leveraging Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics platform and your data which resides in Salesforce and respond using Natural Language Processing. According to Wikipedia, “Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of linguistics, computer science, information engineering, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages, in particular how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data.”

Why are Salesforce Einstein Bots important?

Organizations are creating and implementing bots at an ever-increasing rate. By creating and implementing a bot an organization can begin to get a handle on support cases resolving many of them very quickly and for some scenarios eliminating the need to open one at all.

Of course, a bot isn’t something that is intended to supplant interaction with a human. However, they can be leveraged to provide a decision path for customers and route customer’s requests quickly based on their general needs while providing a positive initial reception which can augment your current customer service model.

Not only can bots improve productivity of agents by freeing them from having to spend time addressing some of the simpler, frequent requests but can now allow them to focus on more time consuming, complex issues.

Bots in a sense can also be considered another channel for content. However, instead of thinking of new ways to formulate questions from scratch organizations should try to marry current content to bot questions. Reusing content is good but it should rely on content that is based on existing knowledge. This reuse of inhouse documentation & materials will ultimately bring development costs down leading toward a more uniform experience with a higher degree of excellence for the interaction.

How to configure the platform for Salesforce Einstein Bots?

Before you jump in and start creating bots you would be best served by allocating time to plan your bot and consider how it will interact with your customers.

Collaborating and soliciting feedback from agents regarding the issues they experience with customers that are potential areas a bot could address is a good start.

Think about the bot’s persona, what its name should be and how you would like it to convey & reiterate a consistent image of the company overall.

Decisions related to which channels to use, ways in which customers can enter their questions, which licenses are required, which profile to use, whether to provide a menu, what is not in scope for the bot, … etc. should all be worked out in advance of bot development.

At what point does a human need to take over from the bot’s interaction with the customer, if at all?

In Salesforce you will need a Service Cloud license and a Chat or Messaging license. Once that is obtained you will need to turn on Lightning Experience. There is a guided setup flow for Chat you will need to run through. If your organization has Knowledge articles you want to make available to customers through the bot that will need to be enabled also. In your Salesforce Org if you go to Setup and type Einstein Bots in the quick select area it will return Einstein Bots you can click on. Then under Settings there is a toggle to enable Einstein Bots.

When ready make an Embedded Chat button available on your published Salesforce site or community site for your customers to interact with. A Salesforce community site is preferred.

Check out the https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/home free training to find out more about how to create bots within Salesforce.

Things to consider when maintaining Salesforce Einstein Bots.

Salesforce documentation indicates that the following items also be considered when planning bot creation:

• Chat and Messaging licenses support different channels (such as SMS or Facebook Messenger) and might have different requirements.
• Each org is provided 25 Einstein Bots conversations per month for each user with an active subscription.
• To make full use of the Einstein Bots Performance page, obtain the Service Analytics App.