I hope every single one of us, at some point in time, has come across a chatbot. Remember the old Skype Call Testing bot guiding on the volume & microphone configurations or the CNN’s Facebook Messenger bot helping to provide you answers or the automated menus on the phone that one must struggle through to get an answer, those were the early stages of chatbots. They could easily drive a person mad because of not having that human factor to understand natural language.

Customer Challenges Today

As a consumer, just think of the hours you’ve spent trying to negotiate automated phone menus or surfing through web searches and toolbars to find the topic that most closely resembles your problem. Personally, when on the phone I resort to pressing 0 as quickly as possible and hope that I will actually be connected to a person. Of course, that often means I’m sitting on hold for a long time.

On the other hand, say you are in the market for a service or product. You find something that looks good and send off an email inquiry to get more information. How often is that email answered while you are still enthusiastic about the product? From a business perspective, these are active leads that are getting lost in the email time delay. And from a public relations perspective, the results aren’t good. Consumers now complain loudly about not being able to speak to a real person. Why? Because the human reps are hidden by a wall of computerized menus, I’m sure we’ve all heard this: “Listen carefully, options have changed, push 1 for…”

Providing superior customer service is key to your company’s success. A Harvard Business Review study quantified the effects of good customer service and found that in transaction-based industries “customers who had the best past experience spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience.” That’s a significant difference!

How Salesforce Helps You Leverage the Power of AI

This year at Dreamforce, AI was a huge topic, where we also heard of the Salesforce Einstein being embedded into all of the Salesforce Clouds. This was an exciting news because it allows the users to have access to the data and reports effectively without having to dig into the tool and manually fetching actionable insights. Salesforce also announced at the Dreamforce 2017 that it has updated its Einstein machine learning platform with new predictive insights and chatbot capabilities.

With a new functionality dubbed “myEinstein”, the goal of the platform remains the same, lowering the barrier to entry for developers looking to work with AI. With myEinstein, the Einstein platform maintains its methods of allowing users to click through a setup guide to build, train, and deploy AI models. However, two new features, Einstein Prediction Builder and Einstein Bots will be adding more depth to the user experience.

Einstein Prediction Builder

Einstein Prediction Builder allows admins to create predictive AI models in Salesforce to help them better forecast potential business outcomes with a point-and-click model through which admins define the parameters of the prediction, including which Salesforce field to build it on and what data to use.

Einstein Bots

With Einstein Bots, developers and admins can use the same point-and-click interface to build custom chatbots. Because they leverage natural language processing, the bots can be used to communicate with customers. The bots use historical service data and CRM data to form their answers, but they can also hand the conversation off to a human employee if needed, the release said. Some examples of Einstein Bots would be a chatbot that helps track a customer’s order, add or remove an item from the order or one that can reset passwords.

Advantages of Using Chatbots:

Ultimately, these chatbots and their AI capabilities are there to support your human workforce and customers. Your sales reps will benefit from the information a chatbot can mine from a customer interaction or the series of recommendations for solving an issue it develops based on past history, but it is up to that employee to choose from the options. If an issue gets too difficult for the chatbot, it will seamlessly transfer your customer to an employee to sort it out, but that human will have a wealth of knowledge already available to help personalize and focus the conversation. Here is a quick demo video of what Salesforce can do for you. Some of the obvious benefits include:

• Saving costly time of your sales and service reps.
• Improve customer experience.
• Higher up-selling and cross selling opportunities with Einstein recommendations.
• No down time for chat or other customer service channels.
• Efficient performance of the sales & service teams.

Changi is an innovative Salesforce Gold Consulting Partner, deploying intelligent solutions powered by Artificial Intelligence, including Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Einstein® solutions, to provide compelling customer experiences and improve employee productivity. Let’s connect and allow us to share how Changi could be your partner in success and enable you to take your business to the next level.