Online meetings and phone calls are some of the main customer communication activities sales teams conduct when it comes to ensuring the success of a deal. Whether it’s a sales pitch, a demo, or a prospecting conversation, what if you could immediately extract key information and reliable next steps without having to take notes, listen to hours of calls, or participate in the actual meeting?
In this article, we will cover the main Einstein Conversation Insights (ECI) functionality, alongside the out-of-the-box features powered by AI and machine learning, as well as further enhancements coming your way.
Conversation Intelligence the Salesforce Way
With scalability being top of mind for any modern sales organization, employing AI capabilities to rapidly analyze hours or conversations and derive actionable insights has become a must-have. This is where Einstein Conversation Insights comes in – a native Salesforce solution that equips sellers with deeper insights into their interactions, and removes the need to take notes or identify next steps, all while allowing sellers to focus on achieving their revenue outcomes.
Einstein Conversation Insights can help your teams have visibility into conversations with automatic call transcripts available in 36 languages and dialects. AI can be leveraged to summarize conversations, facilitate meaningful next steps according to the conversation’s context and, to further enhance the experience, offer the possibility of asking Einstein any call-related question, all within the seller’s flow of work.
Salesforce continues to make significant investments in the optimization of this out-of-the-box solution in accordance with their core values and the latest technology available – such as generative AI. From a user experience perspective, the aim is to offer sellers and leadership a consolidated view of all their team’s interactions in one place, which facilitates reporting, coaching, and collaboration.
Similar to how top athletes review their last game for improvement opportunities, the best sales people go back to what happened in their calls, analyze the takeaways, and get ready for the next interaction. Leon Shlimak – Senior Product Manager Sales AI, Salesforce
Deep Dive into ECI
While I could go on and on about the advantages this solution brings to the table, let’s get into the practical aspects of how ECI will change your sales team’s experience.
1. Review Voice and Video Calls in Salesforce
For your team’s voice and video calls to become Salesforce records, Einstein Conversation Insights integrates out-of-the-box with all of the three main online meeting software providers: Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams.
When it comes to voice recordings, you can choose between quite a few of the dialers your company may already be using, including Sales Dialer, Dialpad, RingCentral, Aircall, or Amazon Connect. Some may require additional setup or API integration. You can take a look at how to integrate voice connectors with ECI here.
While the Salesforce Administrator has to complete the initial setup, once users are assigned one of the dedicated permission sets, they will be ready to connect with the provider of choice and start to see the magic of ECI in action. Depending on the type of call, calls with at least one external participant or calls with just the internal Sales Rep (for enablement purposes) will be created in Salesforce as either Voice Call or Video Call records. Don’t forget to review the additional considerations here.
Once the recorded calls start flowing into Salesforce, they can be accessed through their designated tabs, or directly from the related Salesforce records (more on this later). Unlike other types of Salesforce records, the Voice and Video Calls have an interactive player front and center, which allows users to listen to the call from the record without having to switch to the source platform.
As soon as the call is processed, the full transcript will become available on the record – this is alongside Action Items based on the conversation the sellers can complete as next steps. As an option included in Einstein for Sales, the AI-generated Call Summary based on the transcript can be obtained on demand if Call Summaries are enabled.
Participants for each call are visible, as well as the key insights from the call, which can be clicked to highlight the exact moment they happened within the call. These insights can then be defined during the ECI setup, and while a few out-of-the-box ones are immediately identified without further customization (such as Questions, Objections, Pricing, Next Steps, and even Longest Monologue), other standard ones (like product or competitor mentions) require additional setup with your company’s products and, of course, competitors.
Furthermore, custom insights can be created from scratch with a maximum of 25 keywords or phrases of your choice for each, across up to 100 separate categories. This means that you can easily collaborate with internal teams and tailor the insights to current offerings, campaigns, and the desired wording that’s expected to be used.
If the Related Record Matching setting has been enabled, ECI attempts to match an existing Opportunity or Account record based on the participant data in a predefined order (which you can find here). To further enhance the guest participant matching and identify them accordingly, it’s recommended that you also turn on the Einstein Activity Capture integration.
The best case matching scenario happens if one of the participants from the meeting is already added as an Opportunity Contact Role on an Opportunity, so the call will be immediately tied to potential revenue. Alternatively, if no Contact is found, for example, ECI attempts to match the Account based on the participant’s email domain matching with the Account’s website.
If your organization would like to customize this matching process, this out-of-the-box setting can be turned off and the Related Record field can be set using a Salesforce Flow. Regardless of the preference, the ECI functionality can accommodate your organization’s needs.
Proactive coaching on recorded calls has never been easier, with the ability for managers to add comments right on the player at any given part of the conversation. Other users, such as the call host, for example, can be tagged in a comment for further action. Additionally, the URL to a specific portion of the conversation can be copied and shared with other Salesforce users.
Call Collections are also a helpful feature. These are used to group interactions just like a playlist, which could be based on different topics or skills to facilitate training or onboarding. Collections are searchable and can include up to 100 Voice and Video Calls. A recent addition to Collection management is allowing users with Write permissions to a collection to add or remove calls, and even add more users to the Collection if needed – this enhances collaboration and empowers users to easily share attributions when it comes to Collections they cater for.
2. Conversation Insights in the Flow of Work
Even though ECI records are separate from the standard Salesforce Activities, they will appear exactly where users are already accustomed to seeing their meetings and emails – in the related record’s Activity Timeline.
Be it an Account, Opportunity, or another type of record, users will have the option to see that a meeting or call happened. They can also dive into both the insights and their transcript context on the same page. Clicking the timestamp from the insight pop-up will redirect the user to the exact moment of the call to listen to the interaction. How cool is that?
The activity captured through ECI is also natively integrated with Pipeline Inspection. Sales managers can swiftly browse multiple Opportunities alongside their activity in a single intuitive experience instead of having to click through every record. Similar to the activity timeline on the actual record above, the timeline from the Pipeline Inspection side panel allows users to go through the insights and preview the exact wording or click through to navigate to the actual call.
If your sales teams would rather work from Reports and Dashboards, as well as monitor their activity, both Voice and Video Calls (along with their insights and potential comments) are available in the out-of-the-box reporting functionality. For example, it’s easy to understand the participant types from each call while also assessing if any Opportunity may be at risk due to objections or competitor mentions.
3. Gen AI-Powered Conversation Intelligence
Along with other Salesforce products, Einstein Conversation Insights has been enriched with generative AI functionality so your team can safely leverage the technology (that has taken the world by storm!) within the context of their CRM data. With a zero retention policy, the Einstein Trust Layer ensures that your sensitive customer information remains private, all while reshaping the way sellers obtain the information they need at the right time.
Einstein Call Summaries, which was the first generative feature introduced for ECI, is an optional feature available with the Einstein for Sales Add-on. With the click of a button, users can generate an insightful summary based on the call transcript which not only includes key takeaways from the conversation but also (and more importantly) customer sentiment.
The generated summary can also be edited by users and copied for easy sharing as needed. While the Summary tab is added automatically for Voice and Video calls (unless other customizations have been made), related records such as Accounts or Opportunities have the Call Summaries Related List component – this can be added so that sellers do not have to navigate away from the record to review all generated summaries from matched calls.
The Spring ‘24 Salesforce release introduced the Call Explorer functionality to ECI customers as part of the Einstein for Sales add-on. This is meant to allow users to ask any question pertaining to previous calls without leaving the related record page. For example, if a seller inherits an open Opportunity with historical interactions, they can ask Einstein any question about what happened in a given call. This saves valuable time they may have had to spend reviewing the transcript, generating an overall summary, or actually listening to the call.
Generative Insights (GA from June 2024) can help you automatically generate the answers for those most frequently asked questions about a call. The Generative Insights tab can be made available on Video call records so that answers to any previously agreed questions can be added as soon as the call is processed.
Unlike the well-known Keyword-based insights, Generative Insights can be customized by a prompt you create, which should be as detailed and as descriptive as possible based on what information should be captured in the answer.
Finally, and perhaps my favorite ECI feature, we have Sales Signals. This will surely supercharge any team’s approach to analyzing conversation data. If you are already familiar with the Service Intelligence Einstein Conversation Mining functionality (launched towards the end of 2023), you’ll quickly notice that Sales Signals is its sales counterpart powered by Einstein Generative AI and Data Cloud.
Based on the Product and Competitor insights you define, Sales Signals extracts the context of the insight from the unstructured transcript and automatically generates Signal Themes. This can help teams understand how certain keywords are tied to revenue outcomes, as well as how often they are raised in Voice or Video calls. Through the use of generative AI functionality and Large Language Models, Sales Signals can perform advanced grouping by semantic similarity and quickly analyze large quantities of unstructured conversational data.
4. Conversations Hub Is Where Everything Will Be
Following a similar concept to the Analytics and Automation Home experiences (already launched), Salesforce will be looking forward to modernizing the activity navigation, with a brand new Conversations Hub currently planned for the Winter ’25 release.
The overview page includes different data-focused widgets for users to click, explore, and take rapid action on as needed. From the topic categories identified through Sales Signals, to any coaching feedback provided on calls, along with the voice or video call activity and later on emails, this page is a one-stop shop for analyzing conversational records for both individual reps and managers.
Through the new Conversations Hub, not only will sales reps be able to review their activity at a high level, but they will also be able to drill down into a rich list-like experience where records can be filtered based on a wide array of data points such as Conversation Type and even related records. In addition, your teams will be able to preview records and see at a glance the identified insights or choose to analyze the interactions on an automatically generated chart view based on the insights.
Down the line, this feature is set to bring even more game-changing functionality to ECI, such as the option to search through the transcripts for additional phrases or keywords, which may have not been identified through the insights already in place.
Currently targeting a go-live date in October ’24 for the Conversations Hub and February 2025 for the interactive Search Results page and other enhancements, there is no denying that the overall experience will be a new and improved version of what can already be done today. It will also be readily available out of the box with plenty of customization possibilities, so stay tuned!
5. Get Started Today
Setting up Einstein Conversation Insights only takes a matter of minutes (rather than countless days!) as it is native to Salesforce with its own dedicated Setup page. Before continuing with the actual setup, you will have the option to generate the Einstein Conversation Insights Assessor, which can help you position the functionality (for your business stakeholders) with an estimated ROI according to your Salesforce Opportunity data. You can also evaluate whether or not you meet the criteria to start the implementation, such as having a role hierarchy and video provider connected.
The sequential setup steps are clearly highlighted in a similar way to the other guided setup pages. Everything from turning on ECI to connecting voice and video recording providers, and even Permission Set Assignment and Insights Setup, can be found on this page – ensuring no critical steps are missed. Be sure to go through the dedicated Trailhead module on the ECI setup, where additional information about the available Permission Sets, limits, and considerations you need to consider are explained.
Once ECI is set up and users are successfully enabled, a new Status and Usage section will become available in Setup, where you can properly track the licenses usage, as well as whether the connection was successfully established. On top of this, you’ll be able to either export or drill down into the statuses of all users and the types of connected accounts – forget about having to go to multiple places or run reports to properly review these stats!
If your organization is using Sales Cloud Unlimited Edition, the baseline functionality of Einstein Conversation Insights is included at no additional cost. Additionally, 10 ECI licenses are included with Sales Cloud Enterprise Edition as well.
It is of course even better if your organization has acquired Einstein 1 Sales Edition, as the additional conversation intelligence generative AI functionality will be available as well: Call Summaries, Call Explorer, Generative Insights, and Sales Signals (which also requires Data Cloud). Alternatively, the product can be acquired as an add-on or as a bundle with other Salesforce products such as Sales Programs and Sales Engagement, while generative features like Call Summaries require the Einstein for Sales SKU.
Summary
If your organization is not yet making the most of its customer calls, Einstein Conversation Insights is here to help all of your teams – sales, support, or even marketing – obtain reliable and actionable insights in next to no time!
The ability to track keyword mentions and provide timely and focused coaching to users, all while individual reps leverage AI-powered functionality, is a real game-changer. Reps generating summaries based on automatic transcripts will save hours of manual work – just one of the many features that can completely revamp internal processes to significantly increase productivity.