Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most frequently discussed topics nowadays. How can we use it for content generation? Will AI technologies replace humans? How can we preserve the much-needed human touch while leveraging AI?
There are many more questions to answer, and we are still to decide how to use AI properly. But one thing can be said for sure: this technology saves costs, boosts productivity, and drives business growth.
Salesforce is a market leader in the sphere of customer relationship management software. The company understood the potential of AI and introduced its tool back in 2016, Salesforce Einstein. Apart from that, it integrates the technology into various features. This transformation has encouraged people to opt for Salesforce development services, as more businesses want tailored solutions to meet their needs.
But why is AI in Salesforce so valuable? In this article, we’ll look at AI-powered Salesforce capabilities to improve business processes.
Delving into Salesforce’s AI: The Birth and Journey of Einstein
Before the Einstein tool came to the stage, Salesforce attempted to introduce AI to its software. The goal? To make their product not only user-friendly and convenient for storing lead information. The company’s CEO Marc Benioff wanted to make AI accessible for every non-technical user to predict consumer behavior and suggest practical actions.
The idea emerged in 2014 and continued with acquiring RelateIQ. The company focused on capturing data from workplace communications, analyzing it, and helping employees understand what and when leads needed.
But the real progress happened in 2015. Salesforce presented the Opportunity Scoring app for its internal teams, which was one of the first solutions relying on predictive AI. By using this app, sales teams could spot the most promising leads and opportunities for converting them into buyers. It was a predecessor of Salesforce Einstein.
In September 2016, Salesforce rolled out Einstein to perform the following activities:
- automate tasks;
- provide customer insights;
- proactively suggest actions;
- visualize conversation information;
- compile relevant and converting emails, etc.
The tool turned into something that makes over a trillion predictions weekly nowadays.
Specialized Salesforce AI Features for Enhanced Business Operations
AI simplifies employee work in various forms, from freeing up time for inputting customer details to analyzing tons of data. Einstein is a versatile tool, taking part in sales, marketing, service, and other operations. Here, we’ll break down its capabilities in various spheres.
Einstein for Sales
Strangely enough, sales reps dedicate a significant portion of their working days not to their direct purpose: selling. Unfortunately, they have to fill out similar forms, look for the needed client in the database, and switch between different channels.
Not only this behavior harms their productivity and leads to burn-out. It also raises a risk of losing or messing up crucial information.
Einstein can lend a helping hand to your sales department. It assists with sales activities at their different stages, for example:
- Activity Capture: scanning emails, offering the best way to respond, creating events in the calendar, adding accounts to the Salesforce database, and building Salesforce records.
- Lead Scoring: categorizing contacts based on their willingness to buy.
- Opportunity Scoring: defining deals with the highest chances of success.
- Opportunity Insights: recognizing client sentiments from the collected and analyzed data.
- Account Insights: getting information on accounts, their spending decisions, company changes in leadership, mergers, and acquisitions.
- Forecasting: analyzing CRM data, tracking sales teamwork, and predicting future deals.
- Automated Contact: looking for new contacts and opportunity contact roles to add to your system.
How-to: To get started, hop into the Sales Cloud, enable all Einstein App Permissions, and give users access rights. Connect Einstein to Accounts, Leads, and Opportunities in the Lightning App Builder and let the tool rank leads for you, automatically log emails and meetings, and do other chores.
Einstein for Service
What do clients expect when contacting your company? Right, they want to resolve their issues fast, preferably without having to switch between agents and repeating the same complaints over and over again. Yet, it puts a burden on customer support agents.
Einstein assists with numerous service tasks, including routing cases, personalizing interactions, and providing agents with real-time advice. Here are some of the Einstein features for service:
- Bots (Bots Builder): multilingual and multichannel communication.
- Case Classification: categorizing cases based on historical data.
- Case Wrap-Up: autocompleting forecasted final field values depending on closed cases and chat transcripts.
- Case Routing: assigning the right agent to the correct case per the client’s request.
- Article Recommendations: presenting suitable articles from the Knowledge base to help agents resolve the issue.
- Reply Recommendations: identifying common responses to client inquiries and suggesting the best option.
- Conversation Mining: recommending how to optimize the processes based on customer interactions.
How-to: Use the Service Cloud to activate Einstein capabilities. For example, you can enable Case Classification there. The solution improves with time, providing more accurate suggestions.
Einstein for Marketing
Marketing aims to build relationships with consumers before they make a purchase. To instill an idea to buy into them, you need an impeccable user experience, tailored offers, and efficient sales funnels. Check how Einstein improves marketing performance:
- Engagement Scoring: categorizing subscribers by their engagement with emails and push notifications.
- Engagement Splits: sending messages to subscribers who are likely to open them.
- Path Optimizer: defining the most efficient marketing strategy, such as content, sending frequency, and channel type.
- Send Time Optimization: finding the best time slot to send emails to maximize the open rate and engagement.
- Messaging Insights: notifying you about changes in marketing performance, such as open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, etc.
- Engagement Frequency: establishing the optimal number of emails to deliver to your audience.
- Copy Insights: optimizing email headlines.
- Content Selection: determining the most engaging content for every subscriber.
- Content Tagging: tagging files to find them faster.
- Email Recommendations: analyzing subscriber behavior, detecting their preferences, and choosing the best strategy for each.
- Web Recommendations: analyzing website visitors’ behavior, developing preference profiles, and choosing what each lead will like the most.
- Behavior Scoring: assigning scores to prospects according to the likelihood of conversion.
- Key Accounts Identification: categorizing accounts based on their willingness to buy.
- Campaign Insights: collecting information about prospects, including job title, location, and company industry, and analyzing their engagement activity.
- Attribution: discovering which marketing effort contributed to conversion.
How-to: To unlock these features, you need to purchase Marketing Cloud and Account Engagement (Pardot).
Einstein GPT
You might’ve heard of GPT from the realm of chatbots and virtual assistants. Einstein GPT supercharges CRM with advanced natural language processing, helping businesses communicate better, understand customers, and craft content.
Conclusion
Salesforce is a big name among CRM vendors. It values its reputation as a trusted company with a focus on recent technology, including AI. The Salesforce Einstein platform is a game-changing solution to most business problems, including:
- getting more done in less time;
- understanding customers better;
- staying ahead in a rapidly evolving market;
- streamlining sales processes;
- making customer service more intuitive;
- making marketing strategies more precise.
To sum up, there are many opportunities to introduce AI to your business via Salesforce. And the best part, it will optimize your operations for maximum efficiency. So combine the best of two powers: humans and technology. And let your company thrive.
