Rider Bot (and the CEO Service Experience)

I’m super excited that I recently had my second Salesforce AppExchange posting listed. This one is branded under the Salesforce Labs publisher (the unofficial conglomerate of Salesforce Employee’s Apps), and is unmanaged, so it’s open source! w00t!

It’s called Rider. Rider is an Einstein Bot and Messaging enabled App-less experience for customers to interact with their FSL Service Appointments over SMS (or other messaging channels). Essentially what that means is that it’s a digital engagement overlay to Field Service Lightning. Have you ever been texted appointment confirmations by your cable provider for an upcoming home visit? Do they allow you to reschedule right over the same message thread? That’s what this bot will help with!

Rider speaks to the fact that we are starting to see a new wave of app-less or “Alexa-ified” experiences (hint: nobody wants another app). Anything we can do on websites and apps can now be done through conversation! This has me really excited about the future of how we problem solve. More and more people just want to speak their intent/problem, and have it resolved simply through conversation. I see this as the holy grail of the best service experience (assuming we can’t avoid never having a problem in the first place).

The “CEO Service Experience”

This “speak-comprehend-resolve” process is what I call the “CEO service experience”. I imagine that when a CEO has a problem/need, they’ve designed a network of “assistants” around them to comprehend and quickly resolve things. The CEO speaks what they want, and it just magically happens. Not only would they never call in and wait on hold to speak with anyone (nobody does that anymore), but they also wouldn’t be going to google, and searching through websites/portals to find what they are looking for. Time is their most valuable resource, so searching/chasing/tracking/waiting all has to go. And because one of technology’s major trends is to scale the elite luxuries of the past to the masses of the future, we can expect the same “CEO Service Experience” for everyone in the future.

Whenever I talk about “the service experience of the future”, I simply try to think about what experiences are like for the most affluent members of today’s society.

Wait, so does this mean that google searching/navigating websites will be less and less relevant? Probably. I don’t see as much value in websites as AI and other conversational technologies advance. Why would I go searching on a website to find what I want, if someone/something already found it for me? Why would I go browsing for entertainment if someone/something serves up the right content for me without me having to choose?

New technologies/form factors/media quickly make others obsolete. AI and machine learning have the promise to erase all of the unnecessary artificial media/form factors we’ve created (forms, websites, spreadsheets, folders, passwords, apps, etc). These may all be replaced one day with something more instinctually natural to us humans… a protocol we’ve used to exchange information since the beginning of our existence, conversation. (That is, until our linguistic bandwidth limitation can be solved. Get on that Elon)

Back to Bots

Getting back to Rider (and back out of the future a few years), it is a simple AI driven conversational bot that you can use today for free to overlay messaging on top of your existing FSL implementation. It allows for customers to perform all the functions below over any supported messaging channel, without ever having to call in or search through some website:

• Be notified of any Service Appointments and their status updates
• Schedule a Service Appointment
• Reschedule a Service Appointment
• Cancel/Confirm Appointments
• Get Service Report/Invoice PDF
• Connect to a live Agent over chat

Check it out and let me know how it goes!

https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N3A00000FMdIiUAL