Summer ‘21

WHAT’S EINSTEIN NEXT BEST ACTION (NBA) 

With Einstein NBA, Today you can use Strategy builder to create a flow, apply business rules and funnel recommendations to be displayed to the right people at the right time . Your strategy distills your recommendations into a few key suggestions, like a repair, a discount, or an add-on service. The final recommendations can be displayed in your Lightning app or Experience Builder site. 

WHAT’S NBA ON FLOW? 

You can now create Next Best Action Strategies using the powerful Flow Builder and leverage the power of Salesforce’s mature Automation Platform .

NBA customers will now have a brand new way of creating recommendation strategies on flow builder that is packed with powerful platform features such as Templates, Versioning, Packaging 2.0 support, Sub Strategies, Debugging enhancements and also will be home to low code AI driven Recommendation, OOTB Reporting and analytics , OOTB Integration with Bots, Enhanced Display component with Mobile support and many other cutting edge decisioning builder elements. Planned GA in Spring ‘22 (Safe Harbor applies) 

WHAT WILL BE AVAILABLE AS PILOT IN SUMMER ‘21 

In Summer ’21 pilot users will be able to perform the following

Try the pilot out by creating a sample flow as follows. The use case is to show recommendations on a Case object. For a customer whose CSAT is greater than 50 show Cross-sell and Upsell offers (stored as recommendation records) and for a customer whose CSAT is lower than 50 show some Promotional offers. For every customer irrespective of CSAT, show any other recommendations. 

Follow the steps to build this recommendation strategy on Flows!

1. Use Flow Builder to Create a new Recommendation Strategy
   1. Open Flow Builder: From Setup, enter Flows in the Quick Find box, select Flows, and then click New Flow.
   2. Select Recommendation Strategy on the, which is a new process type Recommendation Strategy, and click Create.

2. Create Recommendations: Recommendations are created the same way as they are with the use of Strategy builder. Recommendations are standard Salesforce records, similar to accounts and contacts, that are processed by strategies and associated with flows (Make sure the flows associated with recommendations are Activated).Read ‘Create Recommendations’ from the documentation here.

3. Load Recommendations using GetRecords 
   1. Use the GetRecords element to load Recommendation records that are evaluated in the strategy when the strategy executes. In the Beta version, you will be able to load records of any object and use a Map element to convert them into Recommendations. 

2. Use the Decision element to conditionally evaluate the flow based on conditions such as in the example shown below: If CSAT is lower than 50, load promotional offers to retain the customer. 

4. Sort recommendations( upto 3 levels deep)
   1. With the Collection Sort element, you can reorder the recommendations using Recommendation fields upto 3 levels deep. Choose whether you want to sort in an ascending or descending order, and decide how many recommendations to allow through.
   2. HOW: Drag a Collection Sort element onto the canvas. Or, if you’re in auto-layout, click and select Collection Sort.
   3. To reduce the number of recommendations, select Set the maximum number of items and enter the maximum number of items in the field that appears.

5. Save the flow and Activate it. 
6. Display the resulting recommendations using the Next Best Action component on record pages
7. After creating a Recommendation strategy in Flow Builder, choose a page to display your recommendations and run your strategy. You can use a Lightning record page or an app’s Home page by following the steps below. 

Lightning Page (Lightning App Builder)

2. In Lightning App Builder, create, edit, or clone a record page.
3. Drag Einstein Next Best Action from the component list to the location on the page where you want to display it.
4. In the property editor,Choose an action strategy and the number of recommendations you want the component to display.
5. Other properties, remain the same as mentioned in Einstein Next Best Action component documentation. 

7. Accept/reject a recommendation and launch a flow from the runtime component. 
   1. The screen flow associated with the recommendation can be launched on Accept /reject as specified in the configuration.

8. Report on accept/reject recommendations from the runtime component

As with Strategy Builder, custom reports can be easily created to report on and track recommendation data and strategy metrics. You can see the monthly total recommendations that a Salesforce org’s strategies served. And you can analyze which recommendations are accepted and rejected, who responds to them, and more. 

For the NBA on Flow pilot, the one primary difference is that the the primary objects to report on are Recommendation Response (As opposed to Recommendation Reactions) and Recommendation Strategy Metrics (Same as previous – for monthly metrics) 

Refer documentation on 

1. Creating Reports on Recommendation Response metrics
2. Creating Reports on Monthly Strategy metrics

9. Enable Recommendation Strategy process type to be invoked by the Flow Action endpoint
   1. In addition to being able to display recommendations on the Home page or Lightning record page, a recommendation strategy can also be executed via a call to the Flow Action endpoint. 
   2. Display recommendations on a custom component or call the recommendation strategy from a scheduled flow by making a call to the API and retrieving recommendations. 

Example of strategy execution via REST API

WHAT’S COMING UP IN BETA/GA Winter ‘22

With Beta(Safe harbor)  you will have access to other collection processor and decisioning elements that is currently available in Strategy Builder such as Filter , Map , Branch Selector and Limit Reoffer elements in the new Recommendation Strategy process type in Flow. 

 In addition to having functional parity with Strategy builder, several other features such as OOTB low code AI recommendations, Scheduled/ Triggered Recommendations , Reporting enhancements, Display component enhancements, OOTB integration with Bots, Support for Mobile display and much more! 

How do I get access to this pilot feature?

PILOT REQUIREMENT:

General Requirements

• Reach out to your AE to get nominated for the pilot, we will turn on the pilot perm on your Sandbox and you are ready to roll!
• Feature is available in Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions. 

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS FOR PILOT

1. Accessing Recommendation fields in the invoked flow 

Create an optional input variable named inputRecommendation in the invoked flow of data type ‘Record’ and Object type ‘Recommendation’ and mark it as Available for input as shown. 

Now this variable holds details of the selected recommendations on the invoked flow that the admin can choose to display a more descriptive text on the screenflow invoked or save for custom reporting purposes. Example below where the category field(custom field) of the inputRecommendation is referenced in the invoked screenflow.

2. Automatic Variables

When you open the new recommendation strategy process type, 2 variables will be automatically created in the Manager tab under resources . 

1.recordId: This is the variable that will have the value of the contextRecordId. (This is only pilot experience. In beta and beyond, this will be upgraded to support $Record variable that will hold context record

2. outputRecommendations: This is the collection variable that the user has to assign the final recommendation collection to so that the runtime component can display these recommendations (In beta and beyond an output/end node will automatically have access to the final recommendations but the admin will still have the ability to reassign it) 

3. Versioning/ Activate or Deactivate a Recommendation Strategy: Versioning is a new platform capability that will be available to NBA users on this pilot. You can have multiple versions of a recommendation strategy, but only one version of each flow can be active at a time. You can activate or deactivate a flow right in Flow Builder or from the flow’s detail page in Setup.

4. Perms:

To create or manage recommendations	Modify All Data or Manage Next Best Action Strategies
To open, edit, or create a flow in Flow Builder:	Manage Flow
To create and save Lightning pages in the Lightning App Builder:	Customize Application
To view Lightning pages in the Lightning App Builder:	View Setup and Configuration
To run a recommendation strategy on a Lightning record page:	Run FlowsORFlow User field enabled on the user detail page

To create, edit and delete custom report types:	Manage Custom Report Types
To view recommendation metrics data:	Modify All Data or Manage Next Best Action Strategies

Check out the FAQ doc for more info.