Conga kicks off their annual customer event in Orlando with a broad refresh of their solution set.
Mason White, Conga’s Vice President of Product Management
Business process automation vendor Conga is kicking off its annual Conga Connect today in Orlando with the announcement of a series of enhancements to the components of its Digital Document Transformation Suite.
“We have had a consistent vision around this next generation of Digital Transformation,” said Mason White, Conga’s Vice President of Product Management. “It has led our acquisition strategy and execution, and our product development activities”
White stressed that Conga sees a differentiation in how it approaches the market compared with how competitors address digital transformation needs.
“We focus on document-based digital transformation, which looks at documents as vessels of data,” he said. “Our suite takes data out of customers’ systems of records – which is almost always Salesforce. As that data shifts, our applications capture that set of changes. We look at clauses in that data, using AI to analyze blocks of text, so that we have more specific treatment of clauses and clause identification in contracts. Our data-based rather than document-based approach means that as after a contract is negotiated, with new products added, with new delivery dates and sites, we capture all of that and put it back into the original system of record, so the customer will see the changes.”
White emphasized that the enhancements to the Digital Document Transformation Suite extend these themes.
“They facilitate AI analysis in bulk to help organizations move into and out of documents and data,” he said.
Conga Composer, the company’s flagship documentation generation offering, has been enhanced with AI capabilities from the technology that came from the 2018 acquisition of Octiv.
“The updates provide sales reps with insights and document notifications around their customers,” White said. “The sales rep sends out a proposal or a quote, and when their customer opens it, the sales rep will be notified. It lets them know the right time to reach out and follow up.”
White said that while the Octiv product, which Conga named Collaborate, does this, the capability is an important new addition for Composer.
“This brings the technology over to the much large Composer customer base,” he stated. “It also future-proofs our Composer line. Collaborate still has additional capabilities, so it still has value as a separate product, but this brings one thing over that market intelligence indicates customers will find very valuable.”
Another 2018 acquisition, Conga Orchestrate, a digital process automation tool built for the Salesforce platform, which kept its old name after being acquired, also is getting an AI enhancement.
“This has been a great acquisition for us, which allows for management of long running processes with multiple departments,” White indicated. “Since then, we have strengthened it so it can integrate with robotic process automation bots. The first of these is from UiPath, but this is our first partner in the area and you should expect more later.”
Conga Sign, their electronic signature product, also gets multiple upgrades.
“It adds SMS as a core capability to further define who opened a contract for review and signed it.” White said. “In addition, we have moved from being an English-only application to supporting additional languages. That’s essential. As we expand, we get more customers with interesting use cases, such as when they use Sign to go out into bars and nightclubs with liquor sale reps. These reps sell to very small businesses, to local people who are often not fluent in English. The language support will let them take advantage of in-person signing capabilities.’ The addition languages are Continental and Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, German, French, Greek and Spanish.
Conga Grid, which lets Saleforce customers visualize and manage data more effectively, has received an update, which gives client-facing employees better access to the information they need to anticipate client needs.
“It has been a big year at Conga,” White concluded. “In addition to these enhancements, we have grown in many other ways, including moving into a new HQ building in Broomfield [Colorado]. We also have more than 500 people registered at Conga Connect this year.”
