The relationship between your business data is complex. There are a number of factors that impact the desired business outcome. Even when taking into account those factors which are under your control, unravelling it can be quite a tedious task.
Often you may end up spending a significant amount of time trying to make sense of what is available. More often than not, you may overlook important connections between data. This could have a significant impact on your business.
What Is Einstein Discovery?
Einstein Discovery can help you cut through the clutter, identify relevant correlations and point you in the direction which will be helpful for you. Some of the answers you may get from using Einstein Discovery include:
- Are there any anomalies in the data?
- What factors contributed to the output?
- How does this input-output compare with other results?
- Is there any statistically significant trend that is visible?
- What needs to be done to improve the outcome?
Like any tool, Einstein Discovery will answer the questions you ask – garbage in – garbage out. More than anything, you or the business user needs to know the nuances of the business and ask the correct questions.
How To Start Using Einstein Discovery?
- Prepare your dataset and upload to Einstein: Go to Analytics Studio and upload the file. You can do so in CSV format (and others – screenshot here).
- Frame the question you want answers for: Based on your dataset, Einstein may already do it for you. Do note, these are your business questions. As Einstein is doing all the number crunching for you, now you can spend time in making sure you ask the correct questions.
- Create Stories: Once you confirm the parameters, Einstein Discovery does all the analysis in the background. It processes the data, draws all the correlation, does the statistical testing and runs predictive analytics. The output is a comprehensive analysis of your business data.
- Explore the magic: Like any good analytics process, Einstein Discovery provides insights into what happened, why it happened and what could be done next.
What Is The Analysis Framework of Einstein Discovery?
What happened
When doing business analysis, your goal is to first find the factors that have contributed to a change in the business scenario. Einstein Discovery highlights statistically significant correlations in your data and displays them in descending order.
You will be able to visualize the data with comparisons across time periods, geographies, product lines and any other parameter that your organization may have.
For example sales for 6 of your SKUs out of 100s shows a downward trend in 3 regions during a specific time period. If this has the statistically most significant impact on the desired outcome, it would be displayed first. Output like this would take hours a human to analyse. Einstein Discovery can do so in minutes.
Why it happened
As much as correlations help in gaining insights, we know that correlation is not equal to causation. Identifying anomalies will help you understand why things went wrong and Einstein is really good at doing exactly that.
While explaining the Why, Einstein Discovery is also able to show some other aspects of the data. It is able to tell how much did the external/ related variables have an impact on the factors impacting the chosen variable as well.
For example: For an online education company, every time a new course is launched, the enrolment follow a pattern. Einstein may help you discover that there are 4 courses that have a reverse pattern because they are always launched in the last week of a month and are at a higher price point.
What next
Based on trends, correlations and a host of other factors, Einstein Discovery can help you discover what the next steps could be. In other words, it can help you answer questions that start with “What if?”. It could be as simple as changing the dates or the price. However, you can also get the potential impact of each step based on the parameters set by you.
You need to note that predictions made by Einstein are based on statistical analysis with a probability attached. They do not guarantee outcomes. But they are there to point you in a direction which may have a higher chance of succeeding.
Conclusion
Arriving at all these answers takes a lot of time manually using spreadsheets. With the power of Einstein Discovery, this manual task can be delegated to your smart team member who will do all the boring work in a jiffy.
Your human team members can now spend their time doing more interesting and relevant stuff. They can be investigative, they can be creative, they can focus on the outcome rather than just data collection.
This is part 2 of our series on Salesforce Einstein. The first part is a primer on Salesforce Einstein. Click here to read.
