What is Einstein Analytics in Salesforce and How it Works?

Each business collects ample amounts of data, the volume of which grows day after day: customer database, analytics of interaction with customers at each stage of the life cycle, etc. Business intelligence (BI) infrastructure exists to analyze the data produced by a company's routine activities. Salesforce Einstein Analytics is an effectual BI tool powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. Einstein AI provides deep insights into vast and complex data sets.

In this article, we'll explore what Salesforce Einstein Analytics is, why to use Einstein Analytics, understand the difference between Salesforce Reports and Einstein Analytics, and will learn how to create a dashboard in Einstein Analytics.

What is Einstein Analytics in Salesforce

Einstein Analytics is designed to provide Salesforce users with insights from their data. It is a cloud-based tool where AI enables users to understand the data better: Einstein AI makes predictions, recommends next steps, and visualizes Salesforce Clouds data, external data, CSV File, etc.

How data-driven decision-making gets real with Einstein Analytics

The EY research shows that 81% of businesses admit that data should be a decision-making base. Unfortunately, the same report shows that only 31% of companies have notably changed their work process for this aim.

Having a data-driven system makes it more likely to acquire customers, retain them, and, though, be more profitable.

To apply a data-driven approach to various business issues, you should, first of all, select the questions to answer and analyze the facts to find those answers. Business transformation towards data-driven decision-making ensures that critical decisions have data in their base, not someone's intuition. Let's have a look at an example of how the following data changed an industry giant. In particular, at Starbucks real estate solutions.

Back in 2008, numerous Starbucks were closed. After that failure, then-CEO Howard Schultz promised that the company would take a more analytical approach to determine more appropriate locations for coffee stores. Now, to determine the success probability for an exact location before taking on a new investment, Starbucks partners with a location-analytics company to find ideal store locations using data. They rely on such data as demographics and traffic patterns.

And finally, let's get back to Einstein Analytics. As a practical AI assistant, Salesforce Einstein Analytics enables businesses to improve decision-making by understanding customer behavior in dynamics and at scale. Thus, marketing campaigns are better targeted, leading to higher customer retention rates. Einstein Analytics users can keep track of the latest trends and action patterns, enabling users to react quickly to changes. A few more benefits are the following:

• The tool provides users with robust data governance and security features. Einstein Analytics complies with data protection regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, guaranteeing confidence.

• Salesforce Einstein Analytics provides automation for many time-consuming tasks related to data analysis.

• Salesforce Einstein Analytics is highly scalable and customizable, enabling businesses to gain deeper insights into their data.

The difference between Salesforce Reports and Einstein Analytics

Standard Salesforce Reports enable management to get answers to valuable business questions: about employee efficiency, lead conversion rates, etc. To find solutions, users can create a report from the records. The users can filter, group, and do math on Salesforce records. Information can be visualized as a bar, line chart, or donut. Thus, Reports allow users to filter, use formula fields, bucket fields, display highlighting, and export. The great benefit of Salesforce Standard Report is that they satisfy basic analytic needs without any additional software.

"So, could we ever dream about anything greater than that?" - someone would ask. Not you, of course. An obvious question is: “What am I supposed to do with all those metrics?"

Salesforce created an AI solution to overcome the Standard Reports limitations, assist users in analyzing the metrics, get more valuable insights from data, and recommend the next steps of strategy development. Einstein Analytics uses machine learning algorithms to analyze data and identify patterns and trends, while Salesforce offers built-in reporting capabilities, which can't analyze complex or large data sets. At the same time, Einstein can process 5000 fields, sync up to 100 objects, provide advanced formula field calculations, work with data sets up to 2 billion rows, and more. The data visualization in Einstein Analytics is optimized for both web browsers and mobile apps.

While Standard Reports work in the descriptive model, Einstein Analytics is beneficial in the predictive and prescriptive. While a person can't keep in mind every tiny detail, AI can. And that's why with Einstein Analytics, you have much greater chances not to miss unobvious trends and be ahead of the curve.

Don't forget to check out: Salesforce Announces: Einstein GPT integration with Flow Data Cloud

Salesforce Einstein Analytics Licenses

Einstein Analytics has a 30 days free trial. But enabling Einstein Analytics requires additional paid licenses. There are 4 main licenses for Einstein Analytics:

• Einstein Predictions: enables building predictions across Salesforce objects and getting insights from multiple data combinations
• CRM Analytics Growth: includes applications for sales and service with prebuilt KPIs and data management tools.
• CRM Analytics Plus: include all previous licenses' features but also enables summarizing critical takeaways from report data and defining trends with charts and metrics.
• Revenue Intelligence: includes all CRM Analytics Plus features, but plus enables gaining performance insights with out-of-the-box dashboards and improving accuracy with new forecasting capabilities.

How to create a dashboard in Einstein Analytics

To create a Dashboard, go to App Launcher > Analytics Studio.

There is a menu on the left side of the screen. Select Browse there, and then click Create.

Select Dashboard from the opened menu.

There is a choice between Blank Dashboard or Dashboard from Template.

If you choose Create Dashboard from Template, you will see the page where you should select the template you need.

But now, let's create a Blank Dashboard to do everything from scratch.

After choosing a Blank Dashboard, you will see a massive page with various settings. For example, a menu with components for our dashboard on the left, a field for the dashboard's name on the top left, buttons for Preview, Save, Layouts, Filters, and others on the top right.

Name the Dashboard and add the necessary components. For example, Accounts Revenue by Countries and several components such as:

• Text

• Number

• Container

• Chart

Now, let's add a chart to the Dashboard layout.

Click on it twice. You will see the bar type default chart, which has no filtering, sorting, or anything else. Now let’s create a chart to combine Account Country and their annual profit. To do this, select the Column type, select Billing Country for Bars, and select Sum > Annual Revenue for Bar Length. The result should look like this:

Next, save it and add a few more components to the Dashboard. For example, a Container and several Numbers, namely the sum of the annual income of all accounts in all countries, the median of the annual income, and the arithmetic mean of the annual income. As a result, you’ll get this kind of dashboard:

Save the changes, then click Preview. If you click on a country on the chart, you’ll see that it lights up in blue, while the rest is gray. And moreover, the statistics on the left are recalculated for the selected country.

Check out another amazing blog here by Sparkybit: How to Send Messages from Salesforce in Slack?

To sum up

Salesforce Einstein Analytics enables users to understand their business data better. Einstein Analytics ensures better decision-making and helps to visualize ample amounts of data from multiple sources, including Salesforce CRM, external data sources, and IoT devices. Using this, users ruin barriers in Salesforce CRM, such as limitations in Salesforce Standard Reports. The tool includes machine learning and artificial intelligence: all on the duty of advanced analytics.

Sparkybit, Salesforce consulting and development company. We make Salesforce perform at its best by fitting it to Clients’ custom business needs. 9 years of sharpened expertise, 25+ successful long-term projects globally.

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