Use Einstein Next Best Action with Flow

As an #AwesomeAdmin, you know the many benefits of automating business processes with flows. But, what if you could encourage/help automate actions that your users might want to do in context? With Einstein Next Best Action, we can champion user productivity by guiding our users on the most optimal course of action based on business rules and AI.

What is Einstein Next Best Action?

Next Best Action is a rules-based platform that blends data in Salesforce, external sources of insight, and AI predictions to help deliver the best recommendations at the optimal point of impact. When a recommendation is accepted, you can follow up on your decision through a Lightning flow automation or guided workflow. Simply put, it’s a way for Salesforce Admins to display one or more flows to your users based on intelligence that you build.

Let’s review the steps for using Einstein Next Best Action to help you get started and learn some new terminology.

Build an “Offer” Flow

First, you’ll need to create a Screen Flow. This could be something like an “Upsell Offer” or “Send a Technician” flow for a Service Agent, or a “Project Feedback” flow like the one in our Be An Innovator with Flow video series. Think of these flows like “offers” — these are things that you might want your users to do, but not all the time, and they should only show up based on sets of criteria that you’ll define later. Don’t forget to activate your flow, or you won’t be able to use it later! For this post, we’ll use an example of a Service agent who is talking to a customer and needs to send a technician out to help fix some equipment.

Create a Recommendation

Once you’ve created your flow, you’ll need to create at least one Recommendation. Think of a Recommendation like a small banner ad for a specific flow that will appear on the screen based on the logic you will create later. You’ll want these to appear to a support agent using Salesforce to advise them at the right time to upsell a customer or send a technician out to fix some equipment. You could also use them for a Community user who may want to find out more about a new product. These recommendations are ways you get people launched into a specific flow at the right time in your business process.

The best way to create a new Recommendation is to go to the Recommendations tab right from the App Launcher (if you don’t see it, make sure it is not hidden for your current profile). You can have a name, an image, and some custom labels for your users to either accept or reject the recommendation that shows up on the screen. You’ll also tie that recommendation back to the specific flow that you built earlier. Each recommendation can be tied to exactly one flow. You can create multiple recommendations, one for each flow you might want to appear. If you anticipate building a lot of Recommendations, you might want to add custom “category” and “ranking” fields to the Recommendation object, just like you would add any custom field, to help with sorting and ordering your recommendations.

Create a Strategy that Surfaces your Recommendations

Now that you have your flow(s) and recommendation(s), you’ll need to decide when and where they will appear. This is where the real power of Einstein Next Best Action comes – your strategy allows you to surface those recommendations you created and tied to individual flows to the right users at the right time, based on exactly what your business requirements are. For a tech support agent, this might be a recommendation to send a technician out but only for certain sized customers in a specific geographical region, and we may only want it to appear once every 90 days. Your strategy model can be as simple or complex as you need, it’s completely up to you.

The most important thing to do in your Strategy is to select which object the strategy will apply to. You’ll use the “Strategy Builder” tool in Setup to create your strategies. This tool looks very similar to Flow Builder, with some slightly different components.

Once you’ve selected your object, like “Case”, then you’ll need to Load your Recommendations by adding a Load element. Use Filter to weed out recommendations that don’t make sense, and use Branch Select to shut down branches that don’t make sense.

Once your strategy is created, you can test it by using the “Test” button in the upper right to see how it will appear on a record. Note that the images in your recommendations won’t show up during testing in Strategy Builder. Also, the flow tied to the recommendation won’t actually launch. Test mode helps you determine that the strategy shows the correct set of recommendations.

Add the Next Best Action Component to the Record Page

The last step is to actually add your Next Best Action Lightning Component to where you’d like to display the recommendations to your users. Once we have built our Next Best Action strategy, flow, and recommendations, we want to make this available to our users in their UI. You can also get recommendations via the REST API.

Use the Lightning App Builder to add the Einstein Next Best Action standard component to a record page, the Community Builder to add the component to a community, or even add it to a Visualforce page using Lighting Out. On a Record page, you can auto-hide the component based on whether or not there are any recommendations available.

And that’s it! Now that you’ve discovered the power of Einstein Next Best Action, let us know in the comments what use cases work for your business, and give it a try!

Resources

• Review the documentation in Help & Training
• Dreamforce Session: Einstein Next Best Action: Optimal Recommendations At The Point Of Maximum Impact
• Video: Getting Started with Einstein Next Best Action