Salesforce is one of the premium CRM software that businesses use to scale their support efforts. Despite having an in-house chatbot ‘Einstein bot’ (a good fit for companies starting off with support automation), Salesforce provides businesses with an option to natively integrate any chatbot that they feel can fulfill their business needs better.
These chatbots usually offer advanced features that align with their industry and are backed by powerful AI. Not sure what qualifies as a powerful AI Chatbot?
To make Salesforce chatbot integration simpler, they have listed a variety of chatbot options on AppExchange. Most of these bots are backed with AI but here are a few support-based features you can scout for to land your best fit.
There will be times when your Salesforce chatbot would require more information to understand a customer query in order to give a precise and accurate answer.
In such scenarios, you would need a chatbot that has the ability to create decision trees and get precise with the follow-up questions. Multi-step conversations can help with this.
- AI-chatbot without multi-step - Question → Answer
- AI-chatbot with multi-step enabled - Q1 → A1Q2 based on A1 → A2 (precise understanding)Q3 based on A2 → A3 (precise answer)
Multi-step enables you to map out your chatbot support by creating follow-up questions that can clarify the user intent and align customers with your line of thinking.
90% of customers rate immediate support as important or very important when they have a customer service question.
Exactly why you should look for a chatbot that can automate most of the common queries and deflect cases that otherwise would’ve landed in your agents’ inboxes.
Related read: What is Customer Service Automation?
For product troubleshooting and product tours, the Salesforce chatbot would be required to conduct a smart search based on the question the user has just asked.
The AI Search would then scan through all the indexed guides and list the knowledge articles inside the chatbot based on the user intent.
The Salesforce chatbot should be able to Search and Inline the knowledge articles on the chatbot. It’ll be a plus if the chatbot can display the guide on the same chat window.
The Salesforce chatbot should be able to understand what the user is trying to ask even when the question is misspelled.
Also, users might not always phrase their questions the way your chatbot has been trained to understand. Exactly why the Salesforce chatbot should be able to understand different synonyms for the intent keyword and alternately phrased questions without getting stuck.
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To make the integration hunt easier for you, Salesforce has listed a variety of chatbot options on AppExchange. Most of these bots are backed with AI but here are a few support-based features you can scout for to land your best fit.
There will always be some queries that the chatbot won’t be able to answer without an agent’s intervention. For such scenarios, the chatbot must be capable of handing over the chats to a live agent as seamlessly as possible. The integrated chatbot should be able to -
Update custom case fields based on the data shared by the user during the chat. For example, updating the delivery address or adding a new device that the customer has started using your services on.
Apply different logic before routing the case to the right agent based on the user-bot conversation. A high-priority case (delivery-related queries) would be stacked inside a high-priority queue and vice versa.
Automatically log user-bot transcripts and chat records into your Salesforce account. This would help your agents understand the query before entering a live chat and save more time.
Appointing a chatbot to respond to your frequently asked queries takes care of your L1 support. However, in order to bring the support steps down to a bare minimum, you would need to check advanced automation functionalities.
This requires a chatbot to understand the structured user inputs and offer graphic interactions through which the user can book an appointment, enter their preferred delivery time, select a seat in an airline, or select items from a catalog.
Hoping to live up to the customers’ expectations? Skipping external system integrations and add-ons might put you in a backseat.
A chatbot that can talk to external systems through APIs can answer more support queries and will delight customers. Most businesses nowadays use a multitude of systems outside of Salesforce to handle tasks such as Order Management, Returns Management (RMA), Account Management etc. A chatbot that can integrate with Order Tracking systems will be able to answer questions such as “Where is my order?”. Similarly, a chatbot that can integrate with systems handling returns can answer questions such as: “What is the status of my return?”.
Another way of extending the functionality of chatbots is through add-ons that provide pre-built functionality for common tasks, such as:
Addons to enable two-factor and one-time password authentication to verify the user.
Image processing addons that scans and detects the serial ID of a product.
Appointment booking addons that provide a way for users to pick a date/time and schedule meetings on calendaring systems such as Google Calendar.
Customer Satisfaction surveys that make your support functions cost-effective for your business and hassle-free for the customer.`
Let’s now quickly jump on to the platform capabilities that make it easier for the internal teams to deliver outstanding support.
10 minutes, 7 days, or 4 weeks. You should have the option to decide how soon you wish to publish a new skill (a new support query).
Training a Salesforce chatbot for a new skill (for example - order status) doesn’t have to take an entire month. There are chatbots that let you publish a new skill in just 10 minutes with only a few examples.
Quick deployment of your Salesforce chatbot gives you ample time to analyze how the users are responding to the published skill. You can always continue this training using more examples and the performance report later.
A flow builder is the backbone of powerful automation. It lets you create, edit, update and publish your automated chat flows and reduce dependence on the platform provider. While a natively integrated third-party flow-builder can get the job done, it’ll never offer the same user experience as an inbuilt flow-builder.
There are chances that you’ll encounter inconsistency in the data sync. And because you’re on a third-party platform, resolving these bugs would take longer as it is not built on the chatbot platform you have integrated.
Be where your customers are.
Although users end up visiting the website when in need of support, a more pleasant experience would be to bring your salesforce support where the users’ hang out.
WhatsApp Business and Messenger have simplified customer support by letting you personally connect with your users. They let businesses share transaction details and ticket resolution updates right inside a user’s inbox.
Salesforce allows you to connect your WhatsApp business account and Facebook Messenger page with the integrated chatbot if there’s multi-channel support enabled.
Support reps shouldn’t have to take up training to understand how an integrated chatbot or its platform work.
Therefore, a Salesforce chatbot that is specifically built for the support teams would be your best fit for the integration. What this means is that the custom chatbot features and the basic functionality would be developed keeping the challenges faced by the customer support teams in mind.
You can go through the platform website and try to understand who their target audience is. If built for support teams, the chatbot would be far easy-to-understand and easy-to-use.
If you want more information regarding Conversational AI chatbots, head to our DeepConverse Blog section to find it all.
