If you’re one of the 4.5 billion people connected to the internet today, you use a search engine to find, purchase, or learn about pretty much anything that comes to mind. Consumer search engines provide a seamless way for us to make sense of our complex world. And consumers are used to a search experience that is fast, accurate, and constantly improving. But when those same people try to search within their CRM at work, the experience is painfully underwhelming: too many clicks to find what you’re looking for and an interface that confuses more than it helps. This shouldn’t be the case today. Search should be intelligent and help you quickly find critical information, be more productive, and resolve customer issues faster. That’s why I am so excited to announce the arrival of Einstein Search, which brings the incredible power of intelligent search to CRM by making it personal, natural, and actionable. 

The complexities of enterprise search

Enterprise search has lagged behind consumer search for a few key reasons. The first is a diverse user base with a diverse set of goals. When a consumer uses a search bar on an ecommerce site, the intention is universal: they are looking for something to buy. But in an enterprise setting, users have divergent goals that can range from salespeople trying to close deals to service agents solving customer cases and email marketers creating new campaigns.

The second challenge is siloed and dissimilar data. For instance, when customers buy CRM platforms like Salesforce to customize it, they are creating an environment that is completely unique to their business, from the fields they use to the custom objects they create. This means that a search model that might work for one customer will not work for another. At Salesforce, our customers’ data belongs to them, not us. That's one of our core tenets and why so many companies trust us to run their businesses. This presents challenges for search because we don't look at customer CRM data, meaning we can't rely on traditional machine learning techniques. 

Announcing Einstein Search

Einstein Search addresses these issues. In building this feature, we had an opportunity to completely rethink search for CRM. It's already one of the most widely used features in Salesforce with more than a billion searches a month. And with our analysis showing an up to 50% productivity lift, we had an opportunity to fundamentally accelerate customer success at scale for our customers.

Personalized results for every user

Salespeople and service agents rely on Salesforce as their single source of truth for customer information. This is why we made sure that Einstein Search had the ability to return personalized results for every user. Each search result is tailored to what matters at your company and how you work as an individual. For example, if a sales representative covers accounts in the Northeast in the Financial Services vertical, Einstein Search will learn that and show them more of what matters to them. Under the hood, Einstein Search leverages innovative data mining and machine learning techniques to personalize search results, all while keeping specific user information anonymized.