Are You Smarter Than an Einstein Bot?

If you’ve been following along, I’ve been writing a lot about my Salesforce Chat implementation over the last couple of weeks. Having chat on your website adds another level of customer service, and I for one think its a level up! But what if you don’t have enough service agents to answer every chat in a timely manner? Or… what if you don’t have any service agents at all? A chat experience for your customers is still possible! And this is where Einstein Bots come into play. Using a bot allows you to triage all incoming chats to determine which ones actually need to be routed to an agent and which ones just need to ask simple questions or do simple tasks that the bot can take care of.

The Einstein Bot workspace is pretty neat. You can either create your own bot from scratch or you can create an Intro Template bot with a bunch of dialogues and flows created for you. Since I’m new to the bot world, I first created the intro bot so that I could see what I was getting myself into. This was SUPER useful for me. I was able to go through each dialogue to see what it was doing, how actions worked with rules and how to use variables to send dynamic messages. I thought it was also super helpful that it created a bunch of example flows that were then used in actions inside the dialogues. Seeing that in action and how it was setup was great learning. Once you create this intro bot, you can just start customizing it for your own needs. I opted to create a new bot from scratch, but referred back to the intro bot pretty often in the beginning. I created my own for two reasons:

1. Once I started editing the intro bot, it would never be that clean best practice version ever again and I wanted to be able to reference it without having to create another one each time.
2. Starting from scratch and rebuilding dialogues was a great learning experience!

Dialogues

I keep mentioning dialogues and am just realizing that unless you’ve played with one of these bots before, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Dialogues are conversation snippets that control what your bot can do. There is amazing documentation on dialogues and what you can do with them. Actually, I have to say that overall, Einstein Bots have some of the best documentation in Salesforce Help. I was really truly impressed with it and found it actually helpful! But back to dialogues… imagine you are having a conversation with someone. You greet them. You ask them how they are. You ask them a question and wait for a response and then answer. You tell them to go away because you need to wash your hair. Or you know, whatever. Each of these different parts of your conversation would be organized as a dialogue, which in turn would be comprised of messages, actions, and rules. And this is what runs your bot!

So, I’m thinking let’s create an Einstein Bot together! We are going to create a bot that asks a series of quiz questions and you have to answer them all correctly in order to be routed to an agent. Ready? In order to follow along, you’ll need to setup a new Trailhead Playground and then follow the steps in the Prep for Einstein Bots unit. This unit will walk you through publishing an Experience Cloud site, running the Chat Guided Setup Flow, and adding the Embedded Service Chat to your site. I recommend completing that whole project as a great introduction to bots! We are going to touch on a lot of things with our bot, but I will probably also skip over a lot.

5th Grader Questions

I’m grabbing my questions from this Scary Mommy blog with 160+ Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader questions. She has a bunch of different categories of questions, but I think I’m going to stick with the math section so that we have simple number variables to work with. Here’s the questions our customers will need to get through before being routed to an agent:

1. If I have five apples and you have four apples, how many more apples do I have? 
2. If your mom buys 52 grapes and your dad brings home 34 grapes, how many grapes does your family have? 
3. How many minutes are in a half-hour? 
4. 23 x 4 =
5. If you need 1/2 cup of flour and you only have a 1/4 measuring cup, how many times do you need to use it to get the right amount of flour? 

Now that we have a general idea of what our bot is going to be asking, let’s map out what happens if someone gets a question right vs wrong. If they answer the question correctly, I think we just move on to the next question. If they answer any of the questions wrong, I think we’ll end the chat and tell them to try again next time. After the 5th correct answer, we’ll congratulate them and route them to an agent. So this will be a pretty simple bot, but fun to build out. Let’s get to it, shall we?

Watch and Build!

I walked through this build with the Salesforce User Group, San Diego. Follow along as we build that sassy bot!