Einstein Analytics at Scale with Preena Johansen

This week, for the first Salesforce Admins Podcast episode of 2021, we’re joined by Preena Johansen, Einstein Analytics Consultant at Telstra, Einstein Analytics Champion, and the co-leader of Women in Technology Brisbane. She has some great tips about how you can be more analytics-minded as an admin.

Join us as we talk about how to set up your data on your records for Einstein Analytics, the power of visualizations, and why you shouldn’t be scared of analytics.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Preena Johansen.

What is an Einstein Analytics consultant?

So first question, what does it mean to be an Einstein Analytics consultant? “At Telstra, my role is to work with the business to understand what their requirements are and what their end goal is—what they want to achieve,” Preena says, “and then we use the data we have from Salesforce and our external legacy systems being brought into Einstein to develop a dashboard.”

Telstra is the biggest telecommunications company in Australia, so Preena’s normally working with a huge amount of data at an enormous scale. She works with every department in the organization, from sales to finance to marketing, which naturally leads to a large range of projects. She’s built a suite of dashboards to help her support team get a better picture of how they’re hitting their SLAs on the various case-types they have, and another for marketing that lets them follow lead generation from each of their campaigns, which is also useful for sales.

“One of the main things about my role is understanding what the end-goal is for our users,” Preena says, “how are they going to use what we’re developing for them?” Every dashboard they make is embedded within Salesforce, which ultimately means users spend less time “swivel-chairing” between legacy databases and more time focusing on what the customer needs.

The tools of the trade

Preena does a large amount of work directly on Salesforce and Einstein Analytics, with some help from an internal team to get information from legacy systems into a data hub that brings it onto the platform. She also leans on Excel to double-check things, Jira to track her Agile stories, and Confluence to document her work and coordinate with her team. For development, she uses Validator, an online JSON editor, and Notepad++ on desktop to write out JSON and check it.

If you’re trying to start working with your data in Einstein Flows, Preena has some advice. First of all, make sure that your permissions are set up correctly to allow anyone working with your fields to be able to see everything they need. Also, field validation can greatly minimize the need for data cleanup further on down the road, especially when you’re talking about free text fields.

“To get started, I didn’t go to uni, I didn’t study anything analytics-related,” Preena says. Instead, she created her first data visualizations in Tableau and then moved onto Salesforce when her company was one of the first in Australia to adopt Wave. “It was really about getting in and giving is a shot,” she says, “the skills that I have today are from on-the-job learning.” With all the great content out there between Trailhead and other resources, the best thing you can do if you’re interested in doing more with Einstein is to get started and create your first visualization.

Links:

• Build & Administer Einstein Analytics Trail

Social:

• Preena: @PreenzJ
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full Show Transcript

Gillian Bruce:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I’m Gillian Bruce, and welcome to 2021, admins. We are going to kick off the year with a fantastic guest. We have the Women in Technology Brisbane coleader and Einstein Analytics champion Preena Johansen joining us. She works as an Einstein Analytics consultant at Telstra over in Brisbane, Australia. She has some amazing tips about how you can be more analytics-minded as an admin and talking about what it means to be an Einstein Analytics consultant and to really deliver some amazing visualizations and dashboards across a huge, huge company. A really fun conversation that I had with Preena. So, without further ado, let’s welcome Preena to the podcast.

Gillian Bruce:
Preena, welcome to the podcast.

Preena Johansen:
Thank you so much for having me.

Gillian Bruce:
Well, I appreciate you joining me from a much warmer part of the world. My winter here in the North America region is not quite the same as the beautiful weather you have over there in Brisbane. What is the weather like there right now?

Preena Johansen:
So, right now, I think we’re sitting at around maybe 28, 29 degrees Celsius, but our humidity is probably at about 90% today. So, we’ve got a little bit of rain and storms coming through this afternoon, though.

Gillian Bruce:
Well, that sounds a little better than me putting on seven layers to go for a walk with the dog outside right now, but so, thank you for sitting inside and chatting with me today.

Preena Johansen:
That’s okay. I’ve got the air con going.

Gillian Bruce:
Excellent. Well, Preena, I wanted to have you on the podcast for quite a few reasons, but mainly because I wanted to learn a little bit more about what it means to be an Einstein Analytics consultant, which is your title at Telstra. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do? What does being an Einstein Analytic consultant mean?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah, of course. So, at Telstra, my role is to basically work with the business to understand what their requirements are and also what their end goal is, what they’re wanting to achieve, and then using the data that we have, not only from Salesforce but from our external legacy systems being brought into Einstein. We basically go and determine what metrics are required, and then go ahead and develop a dashboard.

Gillian Bruce:
Okay. So, it definitely… I mean, Einstein Analytics, it’s in the title.

Preena Johansen:
Yes. Yes.

Gillian Bruce:
I mean, I love that you mentioned how you’re working both within Salesforce and with external legacy systems, and Telstra is quite a large organization, correct?

Preena Johansen:
Correct. Yes. We are. We’re one of the biggest, or the biggest, telecommunications company here in Australia,

Gillian Bruce:
It’s amazing. Okay. So, you just have a really easy, low-scope job, correct?

Preena Johansen:
Of course.

Gillian Bruce:
It sounds like you don’t do a whole lot. Yeah.

Preena Johansen:
Not much at all.

Gillian Bruce:
So, actually, tell me a little bit more about that. I mean, I’m sure… Huge organization, huge company. When you’re talking about working both in Salesforce and legacy system, can you tell me some examples of some projects that you work on?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah, of course. So, we work across the whole business. So, our sales teams, service teams, marketing, finance. So, we work on a big range of projects. So, a few to name that we’ve done over the past year, we’ve built a suite of dashboards for our service support teams, where they’re using it to review their customer SLAs on the various case types that we have, but they also use them to understand their team performance across the cases and activities linked to those cases. Another example that we’ve done is for our marketing team, we’ve built a dashboard which allows them to follow the lead generation from various campaigns that they run throughout the year. So, actually not only marketing uses that, but also our sales teams as well, to see where they’re at with incoming sales and possible opportunities that come through.

Gillian Bruce:
So, I definitely am hearing… I mean, of course Einstein dashboards are really powerful, but I really like how you string together the impacts of those dashboards. So, basically you’re telling very powerful stories for folks to help inform how the company runs. So, can you tell me a little bit more about what is the impact of some of this work that you’re doing? When you’re able to string together those stories and get those insights, what are some of the effects that you see across the business?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah, of course. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, one of my main things in my role is understanding what the end goal is for our users. How are they going to use what we’re developing for them? And so, when we look at it from the impact in the business, currently, all of our dashboards that we have are embedded within Salesforce. So, we have dashboards embedded on their own separate tab. We’ve got them embedded within an actual account page as well. So, the information that we’re providing is right in front of our teams as they’re doing their day-to-day activities. So, we’ve been able to bring, as I mentioned, the legacy data in, combine it with Salesforce information, and it’s reducing the need for our teams to then swivel-chair between all of these legacy systems that we’ve got. And they’re spending the time, then, looking for different bits of data when they could really be focusing on their customers’ needs. And so, where we see our impact is being able to provide them that information right in front of them. So, reducing that need for swiveling.

Gillian Bruce:
I mean, I love how you described that you brought a dashboard directly into the account page, because, I mean, as we all know, especially sales folks, they have little desire to click around and find things. And so, if you can put it right where they are, it’s a lot easier for them to get the information that they need at the right time. So, that’s a good pointer.

Preena Johansen:
It is. Yeah. I mean, and as I said, all of our dashboards are embedded in Salesforce, so we currently don’t have any access through to the actual studio because it is just making them have those few extra clicks if they are having to navigate to a studio. So, yeah. Right now everything’s just right in front of their face in the objects that they’re using day to day.

Gillian Bruce:
That’s great. That’s great. So, you mentioned some maybe non-Salesforce tools that you also use. You’ve got a lot of complex projects and things that you’re working on. Can you talk to us a little bit about which tools that you use and how they work together to accomplish the goals that you and your team do?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah, of course. So, obviously I work mainly within the Einstein Analytics platform, and in and out of Salesforce as well, bringing in all of our legacy data. We work with our internal data teams. We use a range of tools that bring information into what we call our data hub, and then that’s ingested through to Einstein, but other tools that we use, I mean, of course from an analytics background, I use Excel. I’ve always used Excel. Haven’t been able to get away from Excel. Right now, I use that mainly just for double-checking our data or queries that we’re putting together. Within our wider digital team, we use Jira to track our agile stories. We use another online tool called Confluence, where we document all of the work that we’re doing. In terms of development, I use an online JSON editor and validator, and also Notepad++ as a desktop application just for writing out our JSON and checking it and writing out the cycle for our dashboards as well.

Gillian Bruce:
So, I’m hearing a lot of different types of communication and tracking tools, and yes, I don’t think any of us will ever be able to escape Excel totally, although that is my dream someday. I see an Excel document and I’m like, “Put it in Salesforce. [inaudible 00:08:28]. Destroy it.” But hearing a lot of collaboration, a lot of communication tools. So, I would imagine, especially given the world the way it is these days, everyone is feeling a little isolated. You’re not having those office chats and swinging by someone’s desk. So, I imagine those collaboration tools are probably more important than ever. Are those things that you had really set up before COVID became a thing this year, or how has that changed at all?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah. I mean, with the team that we work in, we do have quite a large digital team that sits across multiple states in Australia. So, collaboration has always been a key thing that we work towards. So, we have always had these tools set up. I think in the last year, with COVID, we’ve really learnt how to better use those tools and use them more to our advantage. I mean, because there are so many developers and BAs and testers in our whole digital team, not everyone was using those tools. Not everyone was in and out of them. So, it’s now just allowing more people to jump in and understand them a little bit better and have that build their skills in collaboration, I guess.

Gillian Bruce:
Yeah. I mean, I know that I’ve had to learn different platforms and learn where people live on certain chat… about forms and whatnot [crosstalk 00:09:55] want to reach them.

Preena Johansen:
Yeah, exactly. And working with our business, I mean, we’re now collaborating more closely with our sales teams and our service teams and bringing them into Salesforce and doing a lot of training sessions and teaching. So, it’s definitely been a year of learning.

Gillian Bruce:
That’s great. That’s great. Hey, it’s always a good way to get more of your teams on board with learning how to use and navigate within Salesforce. So, that’s great. So, being an Einstein Analytics consultant, I can draw some parallels to being an admin and a lot of the tasks and responsibilities that a typical Salesforce admin has. Can you maybe elucidate a little bit for me, why should an admin think like you, think like an Einstein Analytics consultant? What are some of the things that you do and that you’ve been able to bring to the business that maybe admin should think about?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah, of course. So, I have my admin set and I’ve got sort of a high-level understanding of the Salesforce setup. It definitely helps with that knowledge when you’re bringing data into Einstein Analytics and joining multiple objects together in data flows. And I think a few of the key things that I’ve seen and have actually worked closely with our admins on is when we ingest information which is going into Salesforce, we’re often being asked to see or reference specific fields. And when you’re trying to pull that into a data flow, sometimes we can’t see those fields. And usually, the reason for this is we’re not provided any access.

Preena Johansen:
So, as an admin, when you’re creating a new object or a new field, you need to provide the access to make sure that we can pick it up in our data flows. And I think on a similar note, I mean, fields which are free text entry… I’m sure if admin’s ever been in the position, they do cause a lot of issues, not only within Salesforce, but you’ve got to think about when it’s coming into Einstein Analytics, and we’re being asked to group this field as a chart, you can imagine the mess of data of some of the values that are the same but have different spellings or have different caps letters.

Preena Johansen:
And so, thinking about field validation. And it kind of minimizes the issue of a data cleanup that’s needed further down the track, or a tech debt cleanup that’s needed. So, again, having fields that have similar names to them, as well… Telstra, huge organization. A lot of conflicting priorities coming through from the different teams. You end up with a field that is required for similar information, but has an underscore in it to differentiate it from the other field that’s there, or… So, yeah. It’s just all about that setup. That initial setup helps us have that clean data coming through.

Gillian Bruce:
Oh, I think your point about clean data is so important. I think every admin struggles with that. I mean, how many underscores can we add to this? Because this is a special field just for our team.

Preena Johansen:
Yep. Yep. That’s what I mean. You have those conflicting priorities that come through from the multiple teams that all want to report on the same information, but just have that tiny little difference that they’re requesting.

Gillian Bruce:
Yeah. And also, I mean, your point about free text fields, yeah. You’re talking about reporting. I mean, those are a nightmare. They’re almost as bad as multi-select picklists, right?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yep.

Gillian Bruce:
Fun times. Fun times. Well, I think you’re speaking admin’s language there, and one of the things I think that’s really cool, Preena, is that you do have the admin cert, so you know the principals, right? You talk a lot about data modeling in this kind of context. And I think that, hey, any admin, you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “Maybe I want to play around with Einstein Analytics.” Well, being an admin is the foundational knowledge for being good at your job if you want to be like Preena.

Gillian Bruce:
So, we talked about how Telstra is a huge organization, and we talked a little bit about collaboration and the multiple teams and competing priorities. How do you manage getting stuff done? Because, I mean, like you said, you’ve got so many different teams who may want all of their own fields with all of their own underscores, and yet they all want to be able to make powerful decisions. How do you work across the company to make sure that you are able to pull the data together to get what you need and deliver these great insights using Einstein Analytics?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah. So, our team’s actually got a pretty interesting setup. So, we have our wider digitization team. And then under that, we’ve got a Salesforce team that’s split into different areas. So, we have a team that looks after the sales cloud, the service cloud, upon our community team, and then, of course, our Einstein Analytics team. And we also have a change in UX team which works across all of those.

Preena Johansen:
So, in terms of painting a picture, we have around 3,000 Salesforce uses, around 2,000 Einstein Analytics consumers. We also have around 1,000 users within our partner community, and our teams are accessing around 40 active dashboards, which are all embedded and set in the Salesforce platform.

Preena Johansen:
So, the way that we actually all work is we work in an agile methodology. We have stories that are created based on requirements coming through the business, which all sit in Jira. And then we work in three-week sprints. So, as our sales and service teams work through their requirements, they’ve got their own BAs, their devs, their testers who work towards developing these requirements. And then through our weekly sprints in the agile methodology, they engage the other teams. So, it could be the data team, the change team, the Einstein team.

Preena Johansen:
So, then we pick up these Jira stories and our specific requirements that sit within them, and then through weekly or fortnightly sprint meetings, we work with them to complete these. And obviously, that ends up with a dashboard for the business. And then we work closely with our comms teams, as well, to then develop the communications that go out to business, to push the adoption and market these dashboards to them.

Gillian Bruce:
I mean, 40 dashboards, that’s a lot. So, people are using 40 dashboards across your organization every day? That’s incredible.

Preena Johansen:
Again, I mean, a lot of them have a lot of different aspects to them. We have a lot of dashboards that are sort of the landing pages, and then there’s dashboards that sit behind them and stem to other areas. So, with the amount of data that we have in the business, there are currently 40, but I think there’s a long way to go still.

Gillian Bruce:
I love it. More dashboards, more dashboards. Okay. So, I think that’s really interesting because I like, also, how you broke it out between just Salesforce users, Einstein Analytics consumers, and you’ve got the partner community. So, you kind of got those three buckets, and clearly there’s a lot of crossover there, but I think that’s really… I think it’s very interesting to know how you organize that as an organization, working with all the different groups and division of labor/process there to get things done pretty quickly. So, thanks for sharing that with us. I’m sure some people listening are like, “Oh, so there is a way to organize this. This is exciting.”

Preena Johansen:
There is. It may not seem like it at times, but there definitely is.

Gillian Bruce:
Hey, as long as there’s something you can go to, be like, “Nope, this is how it’s supposed to go. It may not be going like that right now, but we can get there.” So, let’s talk a little bit, Preena, about some of your favorite projects that you’ve delivered. I mean, you’ve done quite a bit, and I would love to know a little bit about, maybe, some of those 40 active dashboards. What are some that you’re especially proud of, you’re excited about?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah. I think I’m going to go with one that we’ve delivered recently. And so, we’re naming it our Customer 360 dashboard. And what it’s doing is, as I said, we’ve got this landing page, and this landing page has around 11 different tiles on it with different data sources which display different metrics. And then, as part of each tile, we actually have a detailed dashboard which sits behind it. So, for example, one of the dashboards… Or, sorry. One of the tiles that are on it is our service tile, which has a metric just that’s saying how many open cases we’ve got and what are the top support types of those cases. And then behind that, we actually have a more detailed dashboard which dives into a number of other metrics which relate to that tile. So, that service tile. More about the cases, more about the duration of the cases, and then a table which has the action menu where they can make actions directly on a case that’s there.

Preena Johansen:
So, the whole great thing about this Customer 360 dashboard is that we’ve been able to combine all of our external legacy data and our Salesforce data to provide our users with this 360 view of their customer. And so, it works towards our vision of users not having to swivel-chair between the multiple systems. And as we work to decommission more systems that we’ve got, it gives the users one place where they can focus on what they need to find. So, it’s definitely still a work in progress, and as we bring in more legacy data and decommission more systems, we’ll add new tiles to this Customer 360 landing page where, as I said, the users just have one place that they can go for all of the information.

Gillian Bruce:
I mean, that’s great. I mean, Customer 360 is what it’s all about these days, right? Having that single view of the customer and all of the different aspects of the touch points you’ve got with them. And I think it’s really great how you’re… I like how you say it. “As we continue to decommission more old systems.” That makes me excited. It’s like, “Bye, you’re old. Let’s put this single source of truth together to where there’s only one place to go to get everything that we need to know when we’re talking to our customer.” I think that’s amazing.

Preena Johansen:
Yeah, exactly. It’s all about that single source of truth.

Gillian Bruce:
That’s awesome. Well, Preena, I’m hearing all kinds of awesome data-nerdy stuff happening here. I’m imagining this beautiful tiled dashboard that you have on there that you describe. You can click in and then we can get case data. We can do this. I would love to know, Preena, with this analytics mind that you have, can you maybe share some tips for those of us who maybe aren’t necessarily… Or maybe we don’t think we’re analytics minded. Anything would maybe help us dip our toe in a little bit and not be intimidated, to get into the grit with the analytics side of things?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah, of course. I mean, to get started in it, I didn’t go to uni. I didn’t study anything analytics related. I started by doing Microsoft Excel data work, and I then moved from that into creating data visualizations from that with Tableau. And then I got my break into Salesforce, where the company I was working at rolled out all of the clouds and Wave.

Gillian Bruce:
All at once. That’s great.

Preena Johansen:
All at once. All at once. And so, they were one of the first companies in Australia to get Wave as well. There wasn’t a lot of resources. And so, it was really about just getting in and giving it a shot. So, the skills that I have today, I mean, I’ve learnt through on-the-job learning. So, they make it so easy for someone to jump into Einstein Analytics and point and click to get results rather than now having to code, whereas back then it was all about the code.

Preena Johansen:
But, I mean, other resources… Trailhead. Trailhead is amazing. There’s also a huge Einstein Analytics community who are releasing content constantly. There’s so many great blogs out there. So, there’s always still a long way to go, though. There’s always new features being added, and you’re always up-skilling and constantly learning. And with the analytics community growing, as I said, there’s so many resources to help. But I think the biggest thing I would say is just get in there. Get in there. Start clicking. As an admin, having that understanding of the data structure of Salesforce already, it’s a really good head start to then go, “Okay. I want to visualize this on the page. This is where the data comes from.” And then, yeah. Pulling that in and create your first visualization.

Gillian Bruce:
I love that. Yes. Just do it. I love it. Get in there.

Preena Johansen:
Yeah. Well, pretty much.

Gillian Bruce:
And I think one of the things that I hear a lot in you sharing with us today is that it’s not just about troubleshooting data and figuring out how to pull everything together. It’s, you really are delivering stories and information, right? It’s about painting a picture. That’s why I’ve always loved talking about visualizations, because it is. It’s a pretty picture, and it happens to look beautiful on the dashboard, but you’re really giving a picture of something that you can’t get just by looking at words on a page. Right? And when I hear that from you, I’m hearing this, “Yes.” You get excited about it. You have a passion for it.

Preena Johansen:
I do, and, I mean, as I said, it’s about understanding what the user’s end goal is. Yes, they can come to you with a list of requirements and fields that they want to see on a page on a dashboard. But it’s understanding what they want to do with that to then go, “Well, actually, you don’t need that field. You actually want to see this output, and this is what will help you to solve the problems that you’re coming to me with.”

Gillian Bruce:
Totally. It’s, don’t tell me what color to use on the canvas. Just tell me what you want to use the canvas for. What feeling do you want to get from it?

Preena Johansen:
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what it is.

Gillian Bruce:
That’s awesome. Well, Preena, I so appreciate you sharing with us today, and it’s been so fun to get to know you more and learn about all of the amazing 40 dashboards and 3,000 Salesforce users that you work with over at Telstra in a much warmer part of the world these days. Do you have any last words of wisdom to leave our amazing, awesome admin audience before we wrap today?

Preena Johansen:
Don’t be scared of analytics. Just, as I said, jump in, give it a shot. There’s always something out there that you’ll learn from it, and it’s fun.

Gillian Bruce:
I love it. It’s fun. There you go. Don’t be scared, jump in, and it’s fun. Great, great pieces of advice to leave us with. Well, Preena, thank you so much for joining us, and I look forward to hopefully joining you in a warmer part of the world at some point in the next year or two. We’ll see.

Preena Johansen:
Yes, hopefully. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been such great fun chatting.

Gillian Bruce:
Ah. Preena is a joy to speak with, and it was so wonderful learning more about her role as an Einstein Analytics consultant. Got some great pieces of advice and tips in there about data modeling, which all of us admins, we do that all of the time. I loved how we had a little moment there. We talked about how security settings are really important, making sure that if you’re working on Einstein Analytics, that you have access to see all those fields that people want to see in the reports, and free text fields. Not so great when you’re talking about recording. So, really thinking about how you set up the data on your records so that you can really use them to create these visualizations.

Gillian Bruce:
Another great thing that I thought Preena pointed out was really the power of the visualizations, how she’s able to really bring those insights using Einstein Analytics directly to her users where they are.

Gillian Bruce:
So, whether that’s embedding them on the page, like on an account page, or embedding them within a certain tab that they’re used to seeing, really bringing them out of the Einstein Analytics platform and into Salesforce where people are working so they can get those insights right there. Her Customer 360 dashboard… I mean, that sounds super cool, right? All those tiles, getting, really, that full picture of all of the aspects and the touch points that a customer has with the company. Very, very powerful. We talk about that a lot at Salesforce. And, look. Hey, Preena’s doing it for her company. So, pretty amazing.

Gillian Bruce:
One last thing Preena left us with that I think is really important to think about is, hey, don’t be scared of analytics. Go in, play around, start building some visualizations on your own. You can do it. She did not study analytics. She kind of found it through a nontraditional route, so to speak, like most of us as Salesforce admin. So, go ahead and play around with it. It’s really powerful. There’s a lot of community support and resources to help you on your journey. And I bet even if you reached out to Preena, she would also help you out a little bit. So, make sure that you check out some Einstein Analytics and just analytics in general. Really powerful tool for us all to use as admins.

Gillian Bruce:
All right. So, as we start out 2021, I want to remind you all to please get engaged with us. We have so much great content for you to help you be an awesome admin, whether that’s a blog or a podcast or maybe a Trailhead live segment. You can get all of that information at admin.salesforce.com.

Gillian Bruce:
And guess what? The party, the awesome admin party, is all over Twitter. So, if you’re on Twitter, make sure to follow us at @SalesforceAdmns, no I, and you can use hashtag #awesomeadmin to see what admins all over the world are doing and talking about and sharing and getting excited about. So, make sure you get engaged with us. Now, I wish that you all have a fabulous start to your year. Let’s make 2021 a much better one than the last one. And I’m so excited to see what you all are going to do with Salesforce this year. With that, we hope you stay tuned for the next episode and we’ll catch you next time in the cloud.