How to create Einstein Bot in Salesforce: A step-by-step guide

Let's be honest, you’re here because you want to automate your customer support. You're probably tired of your team answering the same five questions a dozen times a day and you'd love to offer help 24/7. In the world of Salesforce, the tool built for this job is the Einstein Bot. It’s the native solution designed to handle customer chats right inside your CRM.

A screenshot of the official Salesforce Einstein Bot page, which is a great way to learn how to create Einstein Bot in Salesforce.

While it's a really powerful tool, setting one up isn't exactly a five-minute task. It’s a real project that takes some planning, a little technical comfort, and a good grasp of how a few different pieces of Salesforce fit together. That’s exactly why we put this guide together, to give you a clear, step-by-step walkthrough for building your first Einstein Bot from the ground up.

Prerequisites for creating an Einstein Bot

Before you jump into the fun part of building your bot, you need to make sure your Salesforce account is ready for it. You can't just flip a switch and have a bot; it relies on other features being set up correctly first. Think of it like gathering all your ingredients before you start trying to cook dinner.

Here’s a quick checklist of what you'll need to have in place:

• A Service Cloud license: This one’s non-negotiable. Einstein Bots are part of the Service Cloud package, so you need it to even get started.

• A Chat or Messaging license: Your bot needs a way to actually talk to people. This license opens up the channels, like a web chat or Facebook Messenger, where your bot will live.

• Lightning Experience enabled: Einstein Bots are built on the modern Salesforce platform. All the tools to build and manage them are in the Lightning UI. If your organization is still using Classic, you’ll have to make the switch.

• Salesforce Knowledge (highly recommended): A bot is only as smart as the information you give it. For your Einstein Bot to give decent answers, it needs a well-cared-for knowledge base to pull from.

• An Embedded Chat deployment: You need a chat widget set up and ready to be placed on your website or help center. This is basically the front door for customers to come in and talk to your bot.

How to create an Einstein Bot in 7 steps

Once you've checked off all the prerequisites, you’re ready to get into the Bot Builder. We’ll break the whole process down into seven straightforward steps.

Step 1: Enable Einstein Bots in your org

First things first, you have to tell Salesforce you want to use this feature. Head over to Salesforce Setup and type "Einstein Bots" into the "Quick Find" box. Click on it, and you'll land on the main setup page. All you have to do here is flip the toggle to switch the feature on.

If this is your first time, Salesforce will pop up a window asking you to review and accept their terms. Once you’ve checked that box, the feature is officially active in your account. Simple as that.

Step 2: Launch the bot creation wizard

Now that bots are turned on, you’ll see a button to create a new one. Clicking this launches a guided setup wizard that holds your hand through the initial steps. The first big choice you have to make is whether to start "from Scratch" or use a "Template."

Templates, like the standard "Intro Template," are a fantastic starting point. They come with pre-built conversation flows (which Salesforce calls "dialogs") for common things like greeting a user or handing them off to a human agent. Starting from scratch gives you a totally blank slate. For your first bot, I'd strongly recommend using a template. It'll help you get a feel for how everything is connected.

Step 3: Configure your bot's basic information

The next screen asks for some basic details about your bot. This is where you give it a bit of a personality and define what it's supposed to do.

You'll need to fill out a few key fields:

• Bot Name: Pick something clear and friendly that fits your brand. This is the internal name your team will see.

• Welcome Message: This is the very first thing your customers will read. Write a warm, helpful greeting that lets them know they're talking to a bot and sets the right tone.

• Main Menu Options: Think about the top 3-4 reasons a customer starts a chat with you. These will become your main menu buttons, like "Check Order Status," "Ask About a Return," or "Talk to an Agent." Each of these will kick off a different conversation path for your bot.

Step 4: Get familiar with the Bot Builder

After you finish the wizard, you’ll land in the Bot Builder. This is your command center for customizing every little detail of your bot's conversations. It can look a little overwhelming at first, so let’s break down the three most important parts:

• Dialogs: Think of these as the building blocks of a conversation. Each dialog is like a mini-script for a specific topic your bot can handle. You’ll have a "Welcome" dialog, a "Main Menu" dialog, and a separate dialog for each of the menu options you just created.

• Entities: An entity is just a specific piece of information you need to get from a customer. Salesforce has some ready-to-go ones like Date, Number, and Email Address. So, if you need to ask for an order number, you'd use the "Number" entity to make sure the bot recognizes it.

• Variables: Variables are little containers that store the information you collect. When a customer gives you their order number, you save it in a variable (you could call it OrderNumber) so you can use it later in the chat, like when you need to look up their order details.

Step 5: Build your first conversation dialog

Okay, let's make this real. Imagine you want to build out the "Check Order Status" dialog. Inside the Bot Builder, you'd create a sequence of actions.

It would go something like this:

1. The bot kicks off the dialog with a message: "I can help with that. What's your order number?"

2. Next, you add a "Question" element. This tells the bot to pause and wait for the user to type something.

3. You then link that question to the "OrderNumber" variable you created, which uses the "Number" entity. This tells the bot to listen for a number and store it.

4. This next part is where things can get a bit more technical. To actually look up the order, the bot needs to do something with that number. This usually means calling a Salesforce Flow or an Apex class that takes the "OrderNumber" and searches your records. It’s a good example of how Einstein Bots often need to work with other, more developer-focused tools to get things done.

Step 6: Connect your bot to a channel

Right now, your bot is just a bunch of logic sitting in Salesforce. To bring it to life, you have to connect it to a place where customers can find it. In the Bot Builder, go to the "Overview" tab and look for the "Channels" section.

Click "Add," and you'll see a list of the channels you have available. Choose the Embedded Chat deployment you set up earlier. That one click links all the conversation flows you’ve built to the chat widget on your website. It's a simple step, but it's the one that officially makes your bot public.

Step 7: Activate and test your bot

Before you let your bot loose on your customers, you absolutely have to test it. The Bot Builder has a great "Preview" feature that opens a little test window. You can click through every option and type in different responses to make sure the conversation flows just like you planned.

Once you’re feeling good about it, you can hit the "Activate" button. This pushes all your work live on the channel you connected in the last step. A word of advice: always test the live bot on a hidden or internal web page first before you roll it out on your main website.

A simpler alternative to the Einstein Bot

So, you've just walked through the native Salesforce process. It's robust, deeply tied into your CRM, and gives you a ton of control. But let’s be real, it’s also a lot of work. Between setting up the prerequisites, dealing with the technical side of Flows and Apex, and just learning your way around the Bot Builder, you're looking at a pretty hefty time commitment.

For teams that want the benefits of an AI helper without a month-long setup project, there’s another way. An autonomous AI agent like eesel AI is designed to go live in minutes, not months. It plugs right into your existing tools, including Salesforce, and makes the whole process much simpler.

A screenshot of the eesel AI landing page, which is an alternative way to learn how to create Einstein Bot in Salesforce.

Here’s how it’s different:

• One-Click Integration: Instead of juggling multiple Salesforce licenses and complex setup flows, eesel AI connects to your helpdesk and knowledge sources with just a few clicks. You don't have to wait around for a developer to get started.

• Unified Knowledge: Einstein Bots are great if every piece of your company knowledge lives in Salesforce Knowledge. But what about all that helpful info scattered across Confluence, Google Docs, or Notion? eesel AI pulls all of it together instantly, giving your bot a complete brain to work with. It even learns from your past support tickets, so it understands your brand voice and common problems from day one.

• Risk-Free Simulation: How do you really know if your Einstein Bot is going to be helpful? You test it, one conversation at a time. With eesel AI, you can run a simulation on thousands of your past tickets before you even go live. It gives you a clear forecast of its resolution rate, so you can launch knowing exactly how it will perform.

Here’s a quick side-by-side look:

Feature	Salesforce Einstein Bot	eesel AI
Setup Time	Hours or even days	Under 5 minutes
Prerequisites	Several (Service Cloud, Chat License, etc.)	A simple helpdesk connection
Knowledge Sources	Mostly Salesforce Knowledge	100+ sources (Confluence, GDocs, tickets)
Pre-launch Testing	Manual preview of individual flows	Bulk simulation on thousands of old tickets
Custom Actions	Needs Apex or Flow development	Simple prompt editor & built-in actions

Tips and common mistakes to avoid

Whether you decide to stick with the native Salesforce route or check out a tool like eesel AI, a few rules of thumb always apply when building a good bot. Here are some tips to keep in mind.

• Plan your conversations on a whiteboard first: I've seen so many teams make the mistake of jumping straight into the builder. Before you touch anything, map out your top 5-10 customer issues. Decide exactly how the bot should handle each one and, most importantly, when it should give up and find a human.

• Don't hide the "escape hatch": Nothing makes a customer angrier than getting trapped in a bot loop. Your bot must have a clear, easy-to-find option to "talk to an agent" at every single step. This isn't a sign of failure; it's a critical part of a good user experience.

• Training is an ongoing job: If you want your bot to understand what people are typing using Natural Language Processing (NLP), you have to feed it a lot of examples. It needs hundreds of different ways a customer might ask for something (these are called "utterances"). Collecting and updating this data is a big, continuous effort. This is one of the main problems tools like eesel AI solve by automatically learning from your past support tickets, so it already knows how your customers talk.

This video provides a great step-by-step guide to implementing your own Salesforce Einstein Bot.

Your first bot is just the beginning

And there you have it! You now have a full roadmap for creating a Salesforce Einstein Bot. You know what you need to get started, how to build it step-by-step, and what common mistakes to look out for. Remember, building a bot is never a "set it and forget it" project. It's a constant cycle of testing, looking at the data, and making it smarter over time.

While the native Salesforce tools give you a powerful way to get into automation, the time and complexity can be a real hurdle for busy teams. The whole process requires a mix of admin skills, developer know-how, and conversation design, which can be tough to line up all at once.

If you’re ready to dive into the native setup, this guide should be your starting point.

But if you’d rather have a smart AI agent that works with Salesforce and all your other knowledge sources in a fraction of the time, feel free to give eesel AI a try. You can set it up for free and run a simulation to see exactly how it would have handled your past customer conversations, giving you instant insight.