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From Commodity Infrastructure to High-Value Customer Engagement Analytics

Series C late-stage startup funded by Accel Partners , APAX and Storm Ventures in the cloud contact center infrastructure market repositioning itself for acquisition.

Domains

  • Contact Center Infrastructure in the Cloud
  • Customer Interaction Applications
  • Customer Engagement Analytics
  • Big Data Analytics

Objectives

  • Revitalize and re-launch 10 year old brand around new analytics offering
  • Differentiate from commodity players and the large legacy players which dragged company into a “me-too” positioning pursuing deals they could not win or make profitable
  • Make company more attractive for acquisition and increase valuation with new company and product messaging and positioning

Challenges

  • Despite excellent contact center infrastructure in the cloud technology with unique capabilities that more advance contact centers like Guthy-Renker, Office Depot, Aon Insurance and Tivo saw value in, the larger market was being lost to up-and-coming commodity players and large legacy players
  • Market factors were dragging company into a “me-too” positioning and pursuing deals they could not win or make profitable
  • Contact centers are slow to change their existing infrastructure
  • Contact Centers largely seen as cost centers with priority being cost reduction over the past 10 years
  • Company had never had a full marketing function, resulting in little name recognition, me-too messaging and content, and a marketing database full of irrelevant names

Process

  • Dove deep into the technology with founding CEO and product management
  • Interviewed sales to understand how and what they “sold”
  • Investigated customers to understand why and what they “bought”
  • Ran day-long messaging workshop with executive team and key engineers

Findings

  • Customers bought to improve the business performance of their sales or service contact centers around key business KPIs such as revenue, conversions, or customer retention
  • Technology’s architecture, which separated media and application logic, was a unique differentiator that allowed its behavior to be data-driven at run time
  • Best customers had multiple contact center technologies, sites, and outsourcers
  • Sales cycles took years due to technology sophistication and laggard market

Solutions

  • Changed the conversation by repositioning Transera’s technology around its business value and competitive differentiators including customer engagement analytics and an architecture built for multi-site, multi-outsourcer and multi-technology contact centers
  • Repositioned company as the Contact Center Performance company
  • Elevated the data-driven behavior in messaging hierarchy and positioned as “Analytics-Driven Customer Engagement”
  • Created thought leadership content, campaigns and programs around the theme of the business value best-practice contact centers achieve through Customer Engagement Analytics
  • Created thought leadership content, campaigns and programs with the theme of moving your call center from cost center to strategic asset
  • Packaged analytics abilities as “Customer Engagement Analytics”
  • Targeted lead generation at multi-site, multi-outsourcer and multi-technology contact centers
  • Reoriented marketing automation towards market education to develop future prospects and nurture key accounts

Results

  • Doubled qualified prospect visits to website
  • Significantly exceeded Marketing Qualified Lead goals
  • Increased sales productivity, focusing on developing long-term deals they could win, instead of spinning wheels on deals they could not
  • Enhanced ability to communicate the value of their platform led to successful acquisition
  • Successfully acquired by BroadSoft and relaunched as BroadSoft CC-One
  • BroadSoft acquired by Cisco and relaunched as Cisco Customer Journey Platform

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