Salesforce brought the power of intelligent search to CRM with Einstein Search, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to increase productivity for every Salesforce customer. To showcase how this new feature is helping our customers accelerate customer success at scale, we caught up with pilot customer Jim Minichiello, Senior Director, CRM, at Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), which is the business team behind the Washington Wizards and the Washington Capitals. Here are his thoughts.
How long has Monumental Sports & Entertainment been using Einstein AI?
About 18 months. We have been exploring AI since our inception. AI is something we believe in and we’re always looking for new opportunities to implement it in a useful way.
How would you say Einstein AI overall has impacted the company?
The goal of the Business Intelligence department at Monumental Sports & Entertainment is to make data-driven decisions to drive our business forward and support our sales organization. The goal or the mission of Einstein AI coincides with what we’re trying to accomplish at MSE.
Our team relies on Salesforce as our single source of truth for all of our customer information and the tools that Salesforce provides takes out some of the guesswork and human error and drives us in the right direction.
You’ve been a pilot customer for Einstein Search. What business problem is Einstein Search solving for MSE?
Einstein Search has addressed multiple issues for us in the time we’ve spent working with Salesforce. It came down to the fact that we had wanted to serve a very diverse group of departments that utilize our system – many different properties, many different sports teams, many different sales people. All of them are using a centralized CRM system with the same account records but they may need to see different information.
With Einstein Search, we now have the ability to return personalized results for every user. Each search result is tailored to what matters to that employee and how that employee works.
What’s one of your favorite Einstein Search features?
As a B2B shop with many, many different sales departments all interacting with the same businesses on similarly named accounts, our users can sometimes get lost, unsure which account records they last used to log their activities. By being able to instantly see details and context about the accounts in the search pop out, especially the related lists, salespeople now know, “OK, this account is for the customer I work with.” It’s a faster, simpler way to retrieve and view whole sets of information surrounding an account record.
You’ve had about 115 employees working with Einstein Search. What’s their feedback?
We’ve definitely gotten feedback with people noticing how cool the new search pop out is – specifically when you can get more context about an account. People also like that you can edit directly in the pop out screen without having to go to the record page.
