The Black Biz Initiative

The pandemic has not been kind to black entrepreneurs. 41% say their personal finances got worse during the pandemic. 41% are currently in financial debt due to health care costs. 24% have no health insurance, compared to 13% of other entrepreneurs.

For this hackathon, the challenge we sought to seek out was to promote the service of Salesforce to help empower black business owners worldwide. Most potential clients are not aware of the powerful tools that Salesforce provides, and as such are unable to leverage it to improve their business and outreach. As a result, we developed a two-component project called the “Black Biz Initiative” to show what Salesforce and Slalom can do for black business owners.

The first is to generate a chrome extension that can search for products provided by black owned business that are equivalent/relevant to what you have searched. This extension gives a description of the business and tells the story of how Salesforce assisted them, thus promoting not only the work of the owner but also Salesforce’s work. Should a business owner find interest in Salesforce services they can click the link at the bottom to be brought to Salesforce’s website to learn more. Additionally, they will also be prompted to join a Slack channel where they can connect with likeminded business owners, and potential customers if they are entrepreneurs themselves. If the individual clicking the clink is not an entrepreneur, they will be added to a channel for customers where they can ask questions, and make posts about products they have enjoyed.

The next part is to increase engagement in the slack channels for Salesforce. For business owners, upon entering the channel, users are greeted by a bot wishing them a warm welcome, and they are given tasks to complete in the channel that center around using Salesforce services, such as commenting in the discussion board, reacting to posts, or reaching out to Salesforce employees to promote interaction in the general discussion board. These tasks will grant points which will be revealed on a scoreboard via chat command. Users who have shown the most engagement will rank higher, and the scoreboard leader will have their business promoted on the slack channel for customers that was mentioned earlier. This initiative benefits all parties because Salesforce and Slalom can increase engagement with clients, entrepreneurs can learn about products to improve their business, and customers are happy knowing that they are able to support local initiatives and individuals to better empower the black community for the future. Additionally, cohere was used to implement some text classification - namely, we used it to classify the kind of messages that were made by the customers, in order to help the business owners answer them better, and sort through messages.