July 2018 Release Notes

Important changes made to Medallia Agent Connect in the July 2018 release:

Areas of Excellence

What is it?

Areas of Excellence enable customers who leave positive feedback to highlight the specific areas where the agent went above and beyond.

Why does it matter?

Areas of Excellence help you understand in more detail why customers leave positive ratings. By accessing this granular additional detail, you can create coaching opportunities from positive as well as negative feedback.

You might find, for example, that one of your agents who is a consistent top performer never receives an Area of Excellence for a specific key element of your service experience. Before this feature was introduced, you would have had no visibility into this gap in performance. With Areas of Excellence, you can spotlight this issue and have the opportunity to coach the agent and further improve their performance.

This feature is particularly important for service teams that typically receive a high percentage of positive feedback and struggle to unlock the full coaching benefits of Agent Connect.

How do you use it?

Areas of Excellence replace Rewards within your existing feedback requests. We made this decision to ensure that your feedback requests remain quick and easy for customers to complete.

Within your Settings page you now have a new screen for Rewards / Areas of Excellence. From this screen you can select whether you want Rewards or Areas of Excellence included as part of your feedback request.

When you enable Areas of Excellence you can select six Areas of Excellence. As well as choosing from standard Areas of Excellence, you can also create custom options specific to your service team. Your Client Success Manager will be able to help you with this process.

Tip: If you like the sound of Areas of Excellence, but you are not sure about stopping your rewards program, consider converting Areas of Excellence submissions into reward votes. Your Client Success Manager can help you understand how Areas of Excellence can be used to drive reward and incentive programs.

Monthly Leaderboards

Monthly selection for a Leaderboard

What is it?

The ability to switch the default view for your Leaderboards from weekly to monthly.

Why does it matter?

If you run incentive programs on a monthly basis, switching Leaderboards to a monthly view enables you to more closely align Agent Connect with your internal program.

Monthly Leaderboard views are also a great option for companies with lower volumes of customer inquiries, so you can ensure you are maximizing the value of this important feature.

How do you use it?

As an admin, a dropdown on Leaderboards enables you to change the view between weekly and monthly. Updates to this setting reflect for all users across your company. This ensures everyone in your service team is seeing the same view.

Survey expiration

What is it?

Your feedback requests expire after seven days. If consumers choose to complete their feedback request after more than seven days, they will select their star rating and immediately be directed to a thank you page rather than seeing the complete feedback request. Their rating is not captured within your platform.

Why does it matter?

Expiring surveys allow you to properly use Agent Connect data for performance management and incentive programs. Statistics that you use to coach and reward agents cannot change after seven days, so once a Team Member has reached a goal, there wil not be any change to that goal. Analysis of our data reveals that typically well under 1% of feedback requests are responded to after seven days, so this feature will have little to no impact on your usual response rates.

How do you use it?

Contact your Client Success Manager, who will activate this feature within your account.

Salesforce Data Return API

Service recovery in Salesforce

What is it?

The Agent Connect Salesforce integration has been enhanced to enable data to flow from Agent Connect into Salesforce.

Why does it matter?

By leveraging our Data Return API, Salesforce customers can not only enrich records within Salesforce with Agent Connect data, but can also enable end-to-end service recovery programs. Creating a service recovery workflow enables you to identify customers that need to be contacted after negative experiences to make things right. Follow up Agent Connect feedback requests can then be triggered after the service recovery process to measure changes in customer sentiment.

How do you use it?

Contact your Clients Success Manager, who will arrange a meeting with our integrations team. Our integration specialists will be able to guide you through the setup process and work with you to create the workflows needed to maximize the potential of the service recovery feature.

Custom channels

Channels, with a custom In-app channel

What is it?

Custom Channels enable you to more accurately separate feedback if you are delivering service across more than just phone, email and chat. With custom channels, you can create separate copy for feedback requests across channels and then report on each channel individually.

Why does it matter?

This new feature is all about accuracy of reporting and giving you the ability to deliver more customized coaching. Some Agent Connect customers, for example, offer support over social. These companies currently deliver feedback requests via email, but mark their social channel as chat which does not paint an accurate picture of performance. With this new release, these companies (and companies with similar use cases) can create separate feedback requests and measure feedback across their social channel.

Note: While this new feature provides more granular reporting, feedback requests are still sent via email. To discuss sending feedback requests via other channels, such as SMS, contact your Client Success Manager.

With this update, channel icons are removed, and are replaced with text. This does not impact functionality, but it is worth giving Team Members a heads up, particularly if you are sending Agent Connect feedback requests in manual mode.

How do you use it?

Contact your Client Success Manager to discuss the list of channels you would like added. Once channels are added, you can enable and disable them and customize your feedback requests via your Company Info page, just like you do with your existing channels today. Once new channels are in place, you can report on performance via your Stream, Trends and data exports.

Note: Remember that Custom Channels should be used only to measure different support channels that you offer, and not different types of interactions. Our Tags feature should continue to be used to measure different interaction types.

Profanity filters

Profanity filtered from a response

What is it?

You can now mute inflammatory or derogatory language from your team’s feedback Streams.

Why does it matter?

Agent Connect should provide an environment for positive reinforcement, motivation, and coaching opportunities. Profanity has no place in the product. With this new release you can specify terms that you want to block from your team’s feedback Streams.

Note: Team Members can still see the specific feedback if they choose to, and the star rating from feedback including blocked terms continue to count towards the Team Member’s overall rating.

How do you use it?

Simply provide the list of keywords you would like to set up filters for, and your Client Success Manager will implement them for you.

Team filters on Trends dashboards

Teams filter

What is it?

View team performance for any level in your existing hierarchy.

Why does it matter?

If you have several layers of hierarchy within your existing team structure, it was not possible to view aggregate reporting for any layers higher than the Team Member > Team Leader level. This update changes that and gives you more flexibility.

How do you use it?

By selecting the Team dropdown on your Company Trends dashboard you can now select the leader you want to review data against, regardless of their position in the hierarchy.

Tags Trends

See all tags link

What is it?

Get a more holistic view of your performance by individual tags.

Why does it matter?

With this update you can more easily identify gaps in service performance against specific tags that you’re passing into Agent Connect.

How do you use it?

On your Company Trends dashboard, you can now select See all tags. This functionality works in exactly the same way as the existing See all teams and See all team members features you are currently using.

Historic additional question reporting

Historic additional questions

What is it?

Easily toggle between reporting for your current and previous additional questions.

Why does it matter?

If you have changed your additional question in the past, it was difficult to quickly access the data from previous questions. This update addresses this issue. You can now select either your current or previous additional question to quickly get at the data and insights you need.

How do you use it?

On the Additional Question widget on your Company Trends Dashboard, you now have a dropdown that enables you to access historical performance data for that question.

Note: When you select a different additional question, the See all teams, See all team members, and See all tags links show data reflecting the additional question you have chosen. The Star Rating and % Negative tabs are not updated, and will still show overall data.

Star rating over time

What is it?

Get an aggregate view of star rating performance over time on your Company Trends dashboard.

Why does it matter?

This feature enables you to more easily see your overall star rating performance over time. You are already familiar with this aggregate view from the % Negative and Additional Question tabs.

How do you use it?

This new widget is automatically displayed on your Company Trends dashboard.

Additional updates

This release includes the following additional updates:

  • Offer different additional questions across teams.
  • Create flexible reward thresholds across teams.
  • Leverage enhanced SAML support for streamlined sign-on
  • Ensure comprehensive compliance with GDPR and WCAG 2.0 AA.