The power of the Backstory platform lies in its customizability, which enables it to fit your business needs at nearly every level. After all, no two businesses are the same. It’s with this spirit in mind that we’ve introduced an upgrade to one of Backstory’s most popular features, Contact Creation.
With our latest release, Backstory can now completely customize how contacts’ titles are classified based on your industry, ensuring a one-size-fits-all approach.
This is a game-changer for businesses in specialized verticals where the titles of contacts your teams work with can vary significantly.
How it Works
The custom title classification process begins with your Backstory CSM. A discovery session is held to understand your business needs and the types of titles your team works with. Some specific questions might be:
Would you like custom classification for Department, Seniority, or both?
Would you like to reclassify titles into existing departments or seniorities, or create new Departments or Classifications?
What roles are you looking to reclassify, and do these roles already have an existing mapping?
Why are you looking to make these updates?
This information is used to create a list of rules that Backstory will use to classify contacts that it automatically creates and updates.
Titles are not directly mapped to the custom classifications; instead, we build dynamic rules that match at the keyword level. This allows for title variations (e.g., Solutions Engineer, Sr. Solutions Engineer) to be accounted for using a single rule.
For example, your list of classification rules might look something like this:
Title | Classification |
Information Systems | IT |
Chief Information Officer | IT |
Consultant | Customer Service |
Marketing | Marketing |
Technical Consultant | Customer Service |
Technical Project Manager | Operations |
Technical | Engineering |
Finance | Finance |
Upon finalizing the list of titles and their classifications, your CSM will work with Backstory’s Data Science team to validate that the curated classifications are yielding expected results. This allows the team to spot potential errors and false classifications.
Once all checks are complete, that list will be plugged into Backstory’s contact creation engine for your organization. Going forward, any and all contacts that Backstory either creates or updates will be run against this list to ensure they’re correctly classified based on your specifications.
Things to Consider
For best results, automatic contact attribute updates should be enabled for your organization.
If an unclassified title is encountered, it’ll be returned as NULL. These null classifications can be resolved by working with your CSM.
No recalculation is required to capture these classifications historically.
Titles of any language can be supported.
The "Executive Engaged" flag in Backstory only counts contacts as "Executive" if they have the seniority level of "Vice President" or "Executive". All personas that should count towards that flag must be configured for one of these two seniorities.
Need clarification on any of the above? Drop us a line at support@backstory.ai.