How to Use Kaia Custom Topics

Objective

Use Kaia custom topics in calls and meetings. Kaia Custom Topics enables tracking topics and reactions in calls and meetings, beyond Outreach’s 14 pre-built categories. For example, uncover whether reps are leveraging the right messaging, adhering to your sales methodology or to track new competitor mentions within a broader category to ultimately de-risk your team’s deals. 

Applies To

• Outreach Admins
• Kaia

Before You Begin: Best Practices

Consider these best practices as you create, train, and manage your custom topics.

General Setup

Consider what you want to track.

• Are there certain topics that you have trained your teams to talk about?
• Are there specific competitors that you want to monitor?

Create topics that are specific and focused.

Create topics that are focused rather than broad. For example:

• Instead of a broad MEDDPICC topic, create topics for Economic Buyer or Identify Pain.
• Instead of a broad Objection topic, create topics for solution objection or pricing objection.

Try not to create too many overlapping topics.

Outreach will detect all published topics, which means more than one topic may be detected on a given utterance. Consider what is most important to track and how you’ll use the data to improve team performance. For example, you may want to create different topics for each of your main competitors so that you know where to focus team trainings on compete talk tracks.

Writing Example Sentences

• Use real-world example sentences. You can review past Kaia recordings to find real sentences.
• Provide a varied breadth of examples, with as many different words and sentence structures as possible.
  • Use a mix of words and phrases that cover your topic. For example:
    • This call is being recorded.
    • I’m recording this call for quality assurance purposes.
    • This line is being monitored.
  • Use different example sentence structures, such as statements and questions. For example:
    • How does that compare to [competitor]?
    • We currently use [competitor] for forecasting.
• Keep example sentences short and focused.
• Provide as many examples as possible to improve the topic model.

Procedure

Define a topic, tune the topic model, and then publish to begin detecting the topic in Kaia recordings.

Create custom topics

1. Access the Outreach Platform as an Admin.
2. In the left nav, click Administration.
3. From the Administration menu, click Tools > Custom topics.
4. To create a new custom topic, click Add topic.
5. Enter a Topic name and Description. (See below for best practices on creating useful custom topics for your organization.)
   • For a CI Competitors topic, you might use a sentence example of “We’re currently using Gong to record calls."
   • For an Announce recording topic, you might use sentence examples like “This is Elizabeth on a recorded line” or “This call is being recorded.”In the fields under Sentence or phrase examples, enter 5 or more example sentences of how your topic may be discussed in a call or meeting.
   • Review recommended example sentence best practices above.

Annotate examples

This process helps to tune the topic model. 

1. Once you have defined the topic, continue by clicking Topic training at the bottom of the screen. 
   
2. In the resulting Topic training page, review the potential examples of the topic and optionally adjust the highlight to specific portions of text that most accurately reflect the topic.
   
3. Provide feedback on the highlighted text.
   • Click Yes if the highlighted text is a correct example of your topic.
   • Click No if the highlighted text is not an example of your topic.
   • Click Next to proceed to another example.
   • Click Skip to skip an example you don't wish to provide feedback on at this time. (You may see this example again.)
   • Click Back to review and optionally train on previous examples.
4. Continue annotating examples.
   Note: We recommend annotating 100 examples in order to provide sufficient tuning to the topic model.
5. Once you have finished providing feedback on examples, click Publish to finish the topic setup and begin detecting the topic in Kaia recordings.

Note: You can return to annotate additional examples or make other changes at any time.

Track custom topics

Once you have set up custom topics, you can begin tracking topics that are coming up in calls and meetings.

1. In the Outreach Platform navigation sidebar, click Kaia.
2. On the default Recordings tab, to the right of the search bar, click Add filter.
3. From the dropdown, select Topic.
4. To track a specific topic(s), ensure the operator is set is is, then select one or more topics that you would like to track from the dropdown.
5. Click Done to complete the filter and apply it to the recording/search results list.
   
6. Once the topic filter is applied, track count of calls and meetings where the topic has come up by using the trend graph at the top of search results. Below the graph, you can also click into specific moments where the topic came up in the search results.

Adjust topic training

To update your custom topic annotations:

1. Return to the Custom topics page in Outreach.
2. In the list, locate the topic you wish to edit.
3. To the far right, click the three dots menu (...) > Edit.
4. On the Edit custom topic page, make any required changes, including updating example sentences.
5. To update topic training, click Continue training.
6. When finished, click Review & publish.
7. Review the samples in the list. (Optionally make any further adjustments from here.)
8. If you are satisfied, click Publish.

FAQ

Who can set up custom topics?

Users that can access Administration can author custom topics.

Who can track custom topics?

Anyone with an Outreach account can access Kaia > Recordings and use the topics filter to track custom topics.

Which languages are supported by custom topics?

Currently, English is the only supported language for custom topics.

Do custom topics also work with email content?

Currently, custom topics are only detected in calls and meetings.