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How to Use Kaia Custom Topics

Aye
Updated

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 Users
  • Kaia

Procedure

Create custom topics

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

  1. Access the Outreach Platform.
  2. Go to Administration > Kaia > Topics. All existing custom topics are listed here.
  3. To create a new custom topic, click ‘add topic’.
  4. Enter a topic name and description. See ‘Best practices’ below for more information on creating useful custom topics for your organization.
  5. Next, enter 5 or more example sentences of how your topic may be discussed in a call or meeting. 
    1. For example, for ‘CI Competitors’ topic, you may use a sentence example of “We’re currently using Gong to record calls”.
    2. For example, for ‘Announce recording’ topic, you may use a sentence example of “This is Elizabeth on a recorded line” or “This call is being recorded”.

Best practices for writing example sentences

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

Annotating examples

This process helps to tune the topic model. 

  1. Once you have defined the topic, continue on by clicking ‘Topic training’. This will bring you into the topic training process where you will be presented with potential examples of the topic.
  2. Optionally, you can adjust the highlighted text to specific portions of text that most accurately reflect the topic.
  3. Then provide feedback on the highlighted text. Press ‘yes’ if the highlighted text is a correct example of your topic, or ‘no’ if the highlighted text is not an example of your topic.
    • Optionally, you can skip an example if you wish to not provide feedback on the example. You may see this example again.
  4. Continue annotating examples. 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 set-up and begin detecting the topic in Kaia recordings.

Note: You can return to annotate additional examples at any time. 

Best practices for setting up custom topics

  • Consider what you want to track: Are there certain topics that you have trained your teams to talk about? Or specific competitors that you want to monitor?
  • Create topics that are specific and focused: Create topics that are focused rather than broad. For example, create a topic for “Economic Buyer” or “Identify Pain” rather than a broad “MEDDPICC” topic. Or create a topic for “solution objection” or “pricing objection” rather than a broad “objection” topic.
  • Try not to create too many overlapping topics: we will detect all published topics which means we may detect more than one topic on an 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.

Track custom topics

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

  1. Access the Outreach Platform.
  2. Click the Kaia icon in navigation sidebar.
  3. Click Add Filter and add the ‘topic’ filter. Here you can select one or more topics that you would like to track.
  4. 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. You can also click into specific moments where the topic came up in the search results below.

FAQs

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 work with email content as well?

Currently, custom topics are only detected in calls and meetings. In the future, we may add emails to custom topic detection.

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