Einstein Bots interact with your customers quickly and accurately with automation and artificial intelligence (AI) capability. In terms of AI initiatives, the biggest challenge is measuring business impact. One reason most AI projects fail is that people are looking at “model performance” instead of business value, such as how much money, in either additional revenue or cost-savings, can be created. Measuring value is part of an operational challenge when implementing a chatbot. So, let’s explore what you need to know to make Einstein Bots a success at your company.
Einstein Bots is simply a chatbot which is an application that simulates human conversation via text message. Instead of speaking with a person, like a sales rep or support agent, a customer can have a conversation with the bot. Einstein Bots has the distinct advantage of connecting to your CRM that stores your customer data, and leveraging AI technology called Natural Language Processing (NLP) that allows it to understand the intent behind a conversation.
Here’s a list of common use cases for Einstein Bots.
As you can probably tell by now, Einstein Bots is highly customizable. You can tailor it to your company’s specific needs and build it to any industry standard. Here are some of the customer use cases our industry clients have adopted.
There are three ways Einstein Bots performs an action to complete the preceding use cases.
A rule-based bot is the first approach Einstein Bots can leverage. A rule-based bot provides guidance as a menu, where a customer can select a path where they want to ask or resolve a question. It’s the most effective way to understand what the bot can do for a customer. You can consider putting a rule-based bot on your common inquiries.
The second approach is an NLP-based bot. Using NLP through intent management is uncharted territory for most admins. NLP bots allow the end user to enter text about what they want to ask first. Also, NLP bots can interpret multiple pieces of information within one phrase sent by the customer, which can reduce the number of steps required to complete a task.
You can have a hybrid bot as well, which uses rule-based methods and NLP methods at the right time to create a blended experience. Including a menu can help customers who need an idea of what the bot can do. Also, integrating NLP helps the bot sound smarter and more conversational.
It’s important to remember that building bots is iterative—starting off with a small bot and then building it into a complex machine is part of the journey. As a best practice, there are five steps to implementing bots.
To start, implement your bot before configuring settings. Careful planning is essential to making your bot effective and your customers happy. You must consider a couple of plans from different perspectives.
When preparing business planning, typically, you have the following KPIs, which are the cost of operation savings due to Einstein Bot.
After you’ve defined the business KPIs, the Einstein Readiness website will help you estimate ROI with some assumptions. On the website, you can easily estimate outcomes of how Einstein contributes to your business across other Salesforce AI products including Sales, Service, and Bots.
You can choose multiple options to build a bot based on the requirements outlined above. In accordance with your business purpose, you can also choose to build a bot from a prebuilt template, or Template Bot.
Here are five steps to build a bot.
After you’ve built your bot, small-scale testing is key to its success, since most AI projects must be iteratively improved step by step. Here are four aspects to testing a whole bot experience.
First of all, you must test your bot with multiple channels, browsers, and devices from a technical point of view. Using Events Log is helpful to view a history of all your bot conversations when you run into issues.
After you’ve confirmed your bot works technically, it’s time to deploy it in production where an agent can test it. Since a chatbot can handle a case without an agent, why test an agent experience? Because Einstein Bots can provide a seamless experience to transfer the conversation when your customer wants to talk with a human agent or another bot that can handle different scenarios. So, a chat agent can handle a case without asking the customer for their issue and information.
You must refine the conversation experience to see what it looks like as a customer. Natural conversation experience is strong, however, it’s tricky because a perfect and fluent natural conversation can’t be done without iteration. You must provide data, train a model, check model performance, test it as a customer, and iterate repeatedly.
Lastly, the most important thing is to test the customer experience by putting your bot in a place where your customer can interact with it. It’s not enough to test it one time; you must keep testing the customer experience repeatedly. Keep reading for information on how to do this.
To launch your bot, perform the following steps.
After you’ve deployed one bot, it’s a starting point for a whole bot journey. Consider the following plans after deployment.
The last two items are needed iteratively. Let’s explore how you can do that with a useful tool.
It’s important to keep tracking bot performance and adjust it to market and business changes in terms of business value. Use the Einstein Bots Value Dashboard to visualize and monitor bot performance and business KPIs, such as reduction in agent handling time, case deflection rate, and goal completion rate.
The value dashboard is very useful to track performance and how your bot brings business value over time. You can easily get the dashboard package through AppExchange (for free).
A customer in the travel industry got a result with the dashboard showing 198.15% ROI and 7,000 cases completed by Einstein Bots in 6 months. They are leveraging chatbot capability with both rule and NLP to handle an inquiry to check reservations, change an appointment, and handle common questions.
Other useful resources to improve bot performance:
AI and automation are efficient ways to improve the service experience and satisfaction for customers. But simply looking at this technology isn’t enough to get success in terms of business value on the whole chatbot journey. Now, you can grasp the importance of trying it, seeing how it works, measuring the value, and iterating it. Your chatbot journey is just starting!
For even more details, check out the Einstein Readiness website. And learn more about Einstein Bots on Salesforce Help.
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