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
Related Works
