For every CX organization, the ability to effortlessly collect, organize, and analyze customer data is foundational to success. As a customer service CRM, Kustomer has always understood the importance of data. Whether it’s easily ingesting information into a customer timeline, delivering instant resolution through self-service, or helping an agent understand a recent customer conversation, Kustomer uses data to make magic happen and save your business countless hours.
That is why our product team is always working on new ways to leverage data to support your needs. Today, I’m excited to introduce three new features — conditionally required attributes, customer picker and user picker — that, when combined, help you not only streamline data but also get more value from the Kustomer platform. After all, no feature is an island; the real power of the platform is unlocked when features are used together.
Let’s begin by exploring each feature and how they can work together to paint a more complete picture of your customers.
Customer and User Pickers
Put simply, user picker and customer picker attributes track relationships. They help you ensure that agents have the full range of information needed to best service customers and identify the right team member for additional support.
For instance, let’s say you want to track which customers refer new accounts to your business. To do so, you could create a customer picker attribute for Referral Customer on the Company object.
Similarly, if you want to track which person on your team is the Purchasing Manager for a particular type of order, you could create a user picker attribute for Purchasing Manager on the Order object. Or, if you want to track the main point of contact for clients, you could create a user picker attribute for Customer Success Manager on the Customer object. As you can imagine, the range of relationships you can track using customer and user pickers are endless.
Conditionally Required Attributes
While customer and user pickers let you capture more data within the Kustomer platform, conditionally required attributes let you simplify the agent view and display certain attributes only when they’re needed. A typical example is only displaying a State attribute if a Country attribute is set to United States.
By requiring that the attribute value be set before a conversation closes, Conditionally Required Attributes promote data consistency. For instance, let’s say that for any product issue that is reported, you want to know which stock-keeping unit (SKU) had that issue. You could display the Product SKU value and require its value to be set before a conversation closes only if a Product Issue attribute value is set. As a result, agents will have greater insight into the customer’s product issue, so agents can tailor support accordingly. You’ll also be able to identify trends across product issues and escalate matters to other departments more efficiently.
How These Features Work Together
When used together, the customer and user picker attributes and conditionally required attributes can help you streamline your agent workflow and uncover new insights. For instance, let’s say you run an e-commerce website that sells computer parts and you want to assign a specialized agent to any customer who is reaching out with a technical issue.
First, you will need a Contact Reason attribute to track why a customer is reaching out. Multi-level list attributes are great for these:
Next, you’ll need to create a Technical Agent attribute with a user picker:
Once these attributes are created and added to the Insights Panel Details, you can configure your conditionally required attributes! For this use case, you’ll want to conditionally display Technical Agent when Contact Reason is set as Technical Issue. You’ll also want to make Technical Agent required, ensuring that every conversation with a technical issue has been given a technical agent before it is closed.
These simple changes help you optimize your workflow and promote good data hygiene among agents. But there are so many more opportunities for insights and automations that lay ahead.
Leverage the Rest of the Kustomer Platform to Amplify Benefits
Since each conversation with a technical issue has been given a technical agent, you can easily report on, or create automations based on, these attributes. For instance, you can create a Custom Report comparing conversations with a technical agent assigned and those without. Or, you can create a Business Rule that automatically assigns conversations that require a technical agent to a different queue.
The important thing to understand is that data-driven features like attribute types or conditionally required attributes are at the foundation of the Kustomer platform, with additional features built on top of this foundation. Being thoughtful and thorough in your configuration of Klasses and Kviews and combining platform features such as the ones we covered today are some of the best ways to get the most out of the Kustomer platform.
