NBA – Best Practices

Best Practices (Strategic)

  1. Whiteboard! Whiteboard! Whiteboard!
    •  Spend time in determining
      • What: are the use cases? 
      • Who:  are the recommendations for- is it for the end customer or is it for the agent themselves?
      • Why: do you want these recommendations? what  are the target KPIs 
        • A few common target KPIs
          1. Agent productivity
          2. CSAT
          3. NPS
          4. Revenue
          5. Conversions
          6. Closing rate
          7. Cost savings
      • When: to surface ? What  are the key touch points? 
        1. Inbound communication – customer call
        2. Stages of the Purchase funnel
      • DATA: Recommendations are only as good as the data! 
  2. Start small and build up more complex use cases
    • Start with 1 or 2 use cases
    • Seed the recommendation system with only business rules, then augment with AI
  3. Make use of OOTB Reporting 
    • The NBA OOTB reporting infrastructure helps evaluate how your strategies are performing, # of accepts,rejects etc

Best Practices (Tactical)

  1. Categorize recommendations- easier to manage
    • Add a category field to the Recommendation object 
  2. Make sure flows that are invoked upon accept /reject are built and activated 
  3. Split strategies rather than having a giant monolith strategy*.
    • *Current limitation is that there is a 1:1 mapping with the display component and the strategy it executes but versioning and sub-strategies are on the roadmap. 
    • Using the Generate node to split strategies work today. 
  4. Requests consumed can be viewed under Company Information 

Some common issues and workarounds

  • Reporting and Limit Reoffers on Dynamic Recommendations
    • Recommendation Id is not persisted when using dynamic recommendations with the generate node. Read this blog post for workaround
  • Advanced Formula Support: The Load node doesn’t support dynamic formulas or $Record because under the covers Load node is a SOQL query and does not execute formulas, but use the Filter/Branch node to freeform write formulas and access $Record and formula fields. 
    • Navigate to the advanced tab of the Filter/Branch node for advanced formulas such as shown
    • All standard salesforce operations are evaluated in the advanced tab including $Record.
Use of the advanced tab to write a filter expression using $Record and the OR operator.