Q and A with Sudhir Kulkarni, President of Digital at Persistent Systems

Attivio joined forces with our partner Persistent Systems to build an app that provides a 360° view of the customer on the Salesforce Service Cloud. Engage 360 unifies information from across distributed data sources, such as similar cases, prior solutions, and internal knowledge bases. With a complete view of their customer information, service organizations realize faster turnaround on customer cases. This video, featuring Sudhir Kulkarni, President of Digital at Persistent Systems, and Lou Jordano, CMO at Attivio, explains the partnership and the new Engage 360 app. 

On the occasion of the Engage 360 launch, we had the opportunity to interview Sudhir.

Attivio: Good afternoon, Sudhir. Could you start by telling me about your role at Persistent Systems?

SK: I think I have the best job around! As president of Digital at Persistent, I’m leading a team of incredibly bright people working with some of the most innovative partners AND customers to bring them digital, at speed. Every single day we meet with customers who know why they need to be digital – after all the evidence is all around them – what they don’t know is the “how,” and that is where we come in. What we’re doing with Attivio and Salesforce is a great example of this. It’s about being right there with our customers as they undertake their exciting digital transformation journey.

Attivio: Persistent has a close partnership with Salesforce, and you recently achieved Platinum Partner status. Can you talk to me about your Salesforce partnership?

SK: Salesforce is key to our digital transformation strategy and offerings. We’ve been a Salesforce partner since 2008 and the Platinum status is a result of our continued investment and innovation for Salesforce customers in delivering high visibility business applications on Force.com, Salesforce Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud and Fullforce.

Attivio: I understand you developed the Engage 360 solution in response to conversations with customers across a wide array of industries. Can you talk to me about those use cases?

SK: We’ve had multiple customers from a variety of sectors – insurance, hi-tech, healthcare and banking – ask us for solutions that can help them quickly find business information across diverse data sources without leaving the Salesforce console. For example, customer service agents need immediate and seamless access to their troubleshooting manuals, product brochures, past transactions with the customer, and in many cases, even their ERP, to be able to respond quickly to requests from impatient customers. Engage 360 provides exactly such a transformative application that is relevant for knowledge workers to deliver hyper-personalized service to their customers.

I would say the two primary things that are driving customers are 1) speed and 2) understanding the “how” of becoming digital. Everything is really tied back to those two things, and Salesforce (with Service Cloud) is the leading platform for delivering customer success implementations at speed.

Attivio: How does the Engage 360 solution fit in with Persistent’s overall digital transformation strategy?

SK: As I mentioned above, today it’s all about speed, and the ability to securely access, consolidate, process and visualize huge amounts of data from disparate sources to deliver hyper-personalized digital experiences to different business stakeholders. You either execute with speed or you get left behind.  Engage 360 epitomizes the very essence of our Enterprise Digital Transformation (EDT) strategy, leveraging Attivio (for data-driven cognitive search and insights) and Salesforce, two of our top EDT partner platforms.

Attivio: How do you see the Engage 360 solution making a strategic impact to your customer business line?

SK: Engage 360 fundamentally transforms agent productivity, shortening resolution times, enhancing the certainty & capacity of service response and positively influencing innovation, collaboration and decision making within the customer service and engagement teams. As a result of all of this, we really see our customers “living” the born-in-the-cloud model of nimble, creative and unencumbered by legacy, to achieve increased customer satisfaction, decreased mean-time-to-resolution, and faster agent onboarding.

Attivio: So, how do your customers get started on Engage 360?

SK: This solution is available as a managed service package certified by Salesforce and available on the AppExchange. For customers, that means the highest security standards and a wide range of back-end and front-end configurability options, providing a fully personalized and customized experience for their enterprise users, without leaving the Service Cloud experience.

Attivio: I’ve heard you mention the Healthcare industry. Do you see Engage 360 moving into the healthcare space too?

SK: Absolutely! We’re having tremendous success with Salesforce Service Cloud in bringing speed to Digital Transformation for healthcare, in large organizations such as Hackensack University Medical Center to smaller ones like Father Martin’s Ashley – an innovative treatment center for alcoholism and chemical dependency.  This year we were featured by Salesforce as a preferred development partner with their launch of Health Cloud. 

We are working on taking Engage 360 to the Health Cloud too and Patient 360 should be available later in 2017! We believe it will be the next step in making affordable, seamless digital experiences available to caregivers and patients alike.