Einstein Call Coaching gives users insights and trends from sales calls – taking the rich fabric of a conversation and splicing it into key moments. Never before have sales managers and reps been able to analyse their conversations like this – at scale and at speed – which would be impossible without the help of AI.
To summarise it in two words? “Conversation intelligence”
Einstein Call Coaching: Quick Facts
- A feature that’s part of Salesforce’s High Velocity Sales (HVS) product.
- HVS is available for an extra cost, with ECC included as ‘a product in a product’.
- Generally available since Summer ‘20 release, enhancements with every release (see Winter ‘21).
- Uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify key moments in conversations (‘the needles in the haystack’)
- Designed with the sales manager front of mind, but not exclusively for them!
- Best suited for large sales teams and/or high volumes of calls.
- Einstein Call Coaching for Video has just been announced, available in the Spring ‘21 release.
You may have heard about Einstein Call Coaching (ECC), but have you taken it for a test drive yet?
Rami Segal, Senior Product Manager for ECC, approached us to get our thoughts on this breakthrough feature. After reviewing AppExchange apps as part of the AppAssessor series and other Salesforce Einstein products (like Pardot Einstein Attribution), we were looking forward to applying that same eager eye to ECC!
What we’re looking out for
There are many Salesforce add-on products available to customers, a number that grows with every release cycle. Every Salesforce org has someone controlling the budget, likely the Admin or Salesforce product owner. It’s someone’s job to assess the value an additional purchase could be relative to its cost.
Beyond thinking ‘wow, that’s cool!’, which products should you be investing in? We put together this overview on ECC’s features, use cases, impact and setup effort, then had our questions cleared up by the Salesforce product management team.
Features
ECC consists of two parts: Voice calls (object) and Call Coaching (dashboard). ‘Voice calls’ is a separate object, separate from standard Salesforce activities.
Key Moments
Key moments: Finding insights within hundreds/thousands of calls ‘the needles in the haystack’.
Automatic insights (out-of-the-box):
- Next steps: eg. ‘follow-up’, ‘scheduling’, other action items.
- Pricing: eg. ‘quote’, ‘cost’, ‘payment’, ‘purchase’, and more.
- Challenges: eg. issues such as time, additional approval, or need related
- Trending: eg. recent words or phrases that appear in a significant pattern across calls
Mentions (keywords you define)
- Competitor mentions (up to 25)
- Product mentions (up to 25)
- Custom mentions (limitless)
Custom mentions work by defining a term eg. ‘Discovery’, then adding related phrases:
This way, you can extend ECC as much as you need to – getting broader (more keywords) or granular (more specific phrases) depending on what you want to track. Admins define these standard and custom keywords in Salesforce setup.
Here’s what the competitor mentions set up looks like. Notice how you can filter ‘said by’ to create the key moment when anyone says the competitor name, or only when the sales rep does, or only the customer.
Call Recording Player
Recordings are accessed on Voice Call records in the ‘Call recording player’, a visual component that ‘slices and dices’ the recording, serves up post-call insights, and colour codes each participant.
The ‘Call recording player’ is exclusive to ECC and only for the Voice Call record page (it’s a custom component).
The component also features the following metrics:
- Duration
- Playback speed (to slow down or speed up the recording)
- Talk/listen ratio (the best salespeople have a ratio of 43:57, according to research, but the typical salesperson talks 65-75% of the call!)
- Mentions: eg. pricing, which you can click to locate where these are in the call.
The Voice Call record is related directly to the call participant’s lead, contact or person account records (there is also the option to relate Voice Calls to accounts and cases).
Call Relevance
Below the Call Recording Player users have the option to rate and share feedback on the insights ECC has surfaced. Any input you, as a user, share will help the product improve itself.
Chatter for Feedback Requests
Sales reps and managers can communicate on Voice Call records using Chatter (coming in Winter ‘21). Chatter will keep the conversation on call feedback close to the recording itself, and will prove a great reference for sales reps to refer back to.
Share Voice Call Button
Voice Call record owners (and managers with access) can click to share the voice call with other users*, ideal for distributing model call examples.
*with any other user that has an HVS license.
Call Coaching Dashboard
This summary dashboard visualises Voice Call data. It’s all ‘plug-in-and-play’/WYSIWYG but I don’t see anything else a sales manager would need.
Here you can see mentions by sales rep, trending mentions, and jump to the relevant Voice Call records.
Filters
The following filters come out-of-the-box:
- Sales rep: an individual or multiple individuals.
- Call date: a specific date or pre-defined time period.
- Related Records: by Account, Contact, or Person Account (see this video for a tour).
- Mentions – and trends over time in a line graph, can filter by mentions also.
Daily Call Summaries (via email)
Designed for sales managers, this provides a quick overview of the previous day’s call activities and key highlights (the top 10). A scoring system in the backend takes not only the number of ‘mentions’ into account, but also the variation, for example, a call with challenges and custom mentions featured will score higher than one with only next steps keywords.
Summary emails also help maintain user adoption, in other words, getting that information into a sales manager’s inbox will keep them coming back to ECC, with the insights proving it’s worth!
I think it’s the perfect balance between ‘snapshot’ and giving useful context – check it out for yourself:
CTI Integrations – How ECC Gets Voice Call Data
Now the burning question, how does ECC get the voice call recordings? There are a number of options available, depending on your current technology stack, location, and budget:
- Lighting Dialler: this Salesforce native telephony product is a logical option for organizations heavily invested in the Salesforce platform. Read up on its geographic limitations first.
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Partners: Tenfold and Red Box bridge the gap between ECC and 100+ voice platforms.
- Open API: develop your own integration using ECC’s open API. As a frequently changing product, you may be concerned about building a custom integration. In fact, this is a safe option, as a one-time investment. The work itself should only take a few days including end-to-end testing. The ECC core team support are willing to assist customers to connect with the API.
Einstein Call Coaching for Video
Einstein Call Coaching for Video has just been announced, expected in the Spring ‘21 release.
In a nutshell, recordings of Zoom video calls will be synced and uploaded to Salesforce ‘Video’ records. This video page has its own layout, with an insights sidebar that lists the participants and calls out the Call Coaching mentions.
Final details on licensing will be shared upon general availability.
Use Cases and Impact
High Velocity Sales was developed for sales development teams processing a high volume of calls. Einstein Call Coaching was designed especially with the sales manager in mind.
- Sales manager: enables effective analysis that has not been possible before! With the straight-forward ‘plug-in-and-play’ dashboard and clear interface, sales managers can access the information they need, faster.
- Sales: reps can ‘self-service’ insights on their performance, supplementing the coaching their managers give.
- Marketing: although not an official target persona for the ECC product, the marketing team would find value in hearing objections and competitor mentions to better position your organization’s brand and messaging.
Impact
How could ECC positively impact an organization in the long run? Here are some direct and indirect benefits we picked out:
- Build a highly-productive sales team and replicate top performers,
- Upsell opportunities: managers can show reps the moments where they missed a chance to sell another complimentary product or upgrade.
- Optimised call scripts: refine objection handling and help reps predict when objections are brewing.
- Future training: great if you have a fast-growing team, need to onboard new reps (high rep turnover), or frequently changing product offerings.
Setup
The good news is that there is minimal setup effort here, so you won’t be burdening your Admin with the extra workload! In fact, the setup could even be done by a non-technical user (if they have access to Setup).
Don’t believe me? The ‘Set Up Einstein Call Coaching’ module on Trailhead will take you 5 minutes to review – a testament to how simple and intuitive this setup is.
Still don’t believe me? The setup is controlled from one page in Salesforce Setup, and is so simple to add keywords.
The only additional setup I identified, is to assign permission sets (access to ECC) and ensure that your role hierarchy is set up correctly to your organization’s needs (define the teams by sales manager for reporting).
Our thanks goes out to Rami Segal, Product Manager for Einstein Call Coaching, who contributed to this article, and was patient in answering my questions as I wrapped my head around how it all worked!