Einstein Bots for Service Cloud: Invigorate Support with Intelligence

We are in the first month of 2019 and the hype around bots and AI is waning. The market is maturing. Chatbots are out of beta and brands are counting on them to drive business. Consumers seem eager to embrace the trend:

61% of consumers feel that having chatbots in customer services is the way of the future.

Nearly 50% of consumers already engage in automated conversations with chatbots.

Salesforce is leaving no stone unturned to prove that AI is a godsend for many businesses. It launched several Service Cloud capabilities last year. The most impressive one was Einstein Bot.

There are a number of reasons that make Einstein Bots for Service Cloud intriguing. A code-free interface, however, is the last of them. Others include:

• Einstein can be configured to pass the data it gathers to separate applications in Service Cloud.
• Einstein and bots can pivot to new dialogues based on key phrases and words with a click-based utility.

Service apps are the most natural and popular domain for bots because many simple service tasks—such as tracking packages, checking bank balances, and changing passwords—lend themselves to straightforward automation.

Einstein AI makes bots even more exciting

Einstein AI will power exceptionally intelligent service bots, and many are expected to be in mainstream use, not just IT, over the coming year.

Some fast-food restaurants have a self-service kiosk where you can order and pay by tapping a visual interface. These interfaces can be clunky and cumbersome and take longer than just speaking to the person at the counter.

Something like this could be a job for the Einstein bot. Users can give orders to a bot in a fraction of the time it takes to scroll through kiosk screens, achieving the same result, while eliminating the need for a human.

Winter ‘19 release has beefed up Einstein bots. Let’s get you through some of the pathbreaking new features:

Launch Flows with Bots: Users can now launch a flow to guide a customer through a process right from within chat windows. This is truly terrific as users can now leverage the flow platform to build sophisticated guided processes. The ability to re-use a flow across multiple channels is a huge time saver for admins. Bots will be coming to LiveMessage and Voice soon, so it will be curious to see if the flow can be used across all channels. For now, this is a great new feature to use with chat and Einstein Bots.

Literal Matches: Identifying dialogs gets a major boost with this. It is easier for the bot to figure out what a customer is asking for. However, when you start getting more nuanced dialogs around the same topic, things get trickier.

With Literal Matching, you can have the bot look for exact matches of a phrase and when they find it, it’ll know exactly how to interact with your customers. Super handy, but also an area you probably don’t want to go nuts about and get to a point where your bot is fully hard-coded versus analyzing.

Bot Sessions: The upgraded functionality allows users to analyze individual sessions easily and with more detail. Previously there wasn’t a ton you could do with the Session records that the bots were creating but now you can see the steps the bot took in a session and use the information to debug or analyze your bots. The sessions come with some filtering to make it easier to track different events.

Intents: Two key improvements:

1. Users can now use Data Loader to load up Intents in bulk. It is a huge time saver as users are not liable to add one intent at a time.

2. Users no longer need to maintain Intents across different bot versions. Now, they have a unified Intent set that can be leveraged across all bot versions making maintenance easier.

Live Agent: One of the best parts is that you might already have Einstein Bots if you own Live Agent. With each Live Agent license you have, you get 25 Einstein Bot conversations per month.

Anything above and beyond that, you will need to invest more. For those of you on the Unlimited Edition, each user that you have has Live Agent.

Need to learn more about Einstein bots deployment? Contact us.