Previewing Custom Objects

We are excited to give a sneak preview of Regal Custom Objects, releasing later this quarter. If you have a use case for Custom Objects, please join the waitlist for Early Access.

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Regal Custom Objects will enable brands to extend the base Regal data model beyond “Contacts” and “Events” to build a fuller picture of your customers and business operations in Regal – so that you can sell, serve and retain customers better. With Custom Objects, you no longer have to worry about agents having incomplete customer information on a call or wasting time switching back and forth between Regal and your CRM. 

Before we jump into the feature set, a bit of history…

Traditionally, in sales and customer support, “systems of record” (CRM Software) and “systems of engagement” (Contact Center Software) have been kept separate. Originally, in a pre-internet world, that made sense. While a CRM was essentially a thin UI on top of a dimensional database of customer records, contact center software was less “software” and more “hardware” + “networking.” Companies had hard phones on every desk and internally operated what’s called a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) which is a private phone network consisting of various hardware components in a back closet of an office, used to relay calls to and from the outside world.

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But even as CRMs and contact center software began to move to the cloud, the two tools have remained separate despite their converging “jobs to be done” – building and maintaining relationships with customers. This has led to fragmented customer experiences, low agent productivity and worse business results. Why? Because agents waste time on every conversation flipping back and forth between two systems, prospects receive calls that are irrelevant to them based on where they are in their customer journey, inbound callers are forced to navigate complicated IVRs rather than leverage customer data to route them to the right team immediately… and the list goes on.

Sure, companies can embed a “dialer widget” from contact center software into the CRM, so that when agents click a phone number on a customer record in the CRM, the dialer starts calling, but that’s a far cry from leveraging customer data to personalize each customer’s conversations and experience.

Regal was built to solve this fragmented customer experience by using customers’ online behavior data and past conversations to create Unified Profiles for every customer that are then leveraged by the Regal Journey Builder, REGAL AI, and agents themselves to personalize all of a customer’s sales and support interactions: 

• who to reach out to when on what channel for outbound uses cases, 
• how to route their inbound calls to the right team, 
• what to say to them once in a conversation, 
• and what follow ups to take after a conversation.

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Today, we’re previewing an upcoming feature that will bring that one step further by allowing brands to customize their customer data model in Regal to extend beyond just Contacts and Events.

Defining Custom Objects

Regal Custom Objects empower you to break free from the constraints of predefined data structures by defining your own objects in Regal based on your unique business needs, and then link those to your contacts.

• Example 1: A lending company may provide different types of loan products (e.g., private loan, car loan, mortgage, etc.). And in addition to the data they store about the product, it’s important to store information about the asset the loan is collateralized by, such as the house or vehicle – which is distinct from data about the contact themselves (e.g., name, phone number, income).
• Example 2: A home services company might provide service quotes for different projects (e.g, Bathroom remodel, Light fixture installation) and their contacts may have multiple properties where these projects are being done. 

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Each business – even within the same industry – has its own unique product concepts or way of modeling their business, and Regal Custom Objects will allow you to represent that in Regal by defining each of those objects, the relevant events Regal should leverage to build up those objects, and the relationship between those objects and your contacts. While you could shove all of this data into contact attributes, that approach breaks down quickly as soon as the contact has more than one of each policy, project vehicle, etc. It's difficult to support a variable number of object instances within contact attributes, while also keeping your objects organized and actionable.

The best part is that to take advantage of Regal Custom Objects, your engineers don’t need to make changes to the custom event payloads you send to Regal. The Regal Custom Objects admin will allow you to select, from among the events you’re sending to Regal, which events relate to your newly defined object, which property of those events contain the unique identifier for each instance of that object, and which other properties of those events should be mapped to the object attributes. 

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Relationships Between Objects

In addition to defining Custom Objects, you're also modeling the relationship between objects and contacts. Objects may have 1:1, 1:many or many:many relationships. For example, a mortgage application may involve co-borrowers who are each contacts in Regal. Or even contact A might be a co-borrower on one mortgage with contact B, and a co-borrower on a different mortgage with contact C. A project may have multiple sub-projects, and a whole host of project coordinators. Being able to define how objects relate to other objects and to contacts is critical in giving both agents and managers a holistic view of the customer situation.

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‍Working with Custom Objects – The Agent Experience

With Custom Objects, agents will have a more complete view of contacts and all their related objects right from the Regal Agent Desktop – leading to higher agent efficiency and more personalized interactions. They’ll be able to view up-to-date data for all objects of a contact and edit object attributes directly, while on conversations with customers. Those changes will be automatically sent to Journeys and available through Reporting Webhooks to keep your external systems in sync. 

Without further ado, watch this quick demo video of Regal Custom Objects.

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Ready to Elevate Your Agent Efficiency and Business Outcomes?

See why Legacy CCaaS is Dead, and find out why brands are switching to customer-centric, event-based tools like Regal. Contact us for a demo and experience the power of Regal Custom Objects firsthand.

Learn about these products and services at Regal.io, read more posts at regal.io/blog or email us at hello@regal.io.

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