With today's mix of media available to marketing departments, which
serve as both outlets and inlets of information, the challenge for
marketing is to measure ROI, collect more accurate data and incorporate
better touch point integration while maintaining a consistent corporate
marketing message and delivering the right message, no matter the channel
used to deliver it. Focusing on marketing and how it feeds into CRM, Unica
has developed its enterprise marketing management (EMM) suite, Affinium,
now in release 3.0.
New with version 3.0 is Affinium Campaign iX (Intranet Extension), a
Web-based campaign design and execution interface that enables
nontechnical marketers to develop cross-channel marketing campaigns, and
double-byte data support for Asian and other non-Latin-based languages. In
addition, Affinium 3 offers enhanced capabilities for sharing real-time
customer interaction information across customer touchpoints, new workflow
capabilities and tighter integration with other CRM applications via XML.
Intranet Extension (iX) is a Web-based tool for campaign design and
execution. 3.0 also includes a point-and-click query builder that guides
users through the steps of building complex queries, enhanced e-mail
marketing, the ability to capture behavior and activity and integrate this
with other channels so that agents can see where the customer was in the
other channels, collaborative filtering algorithms for the context of
business rules and improved measurement and tracking.
The Affinium software suite includes five modules, Model, Campign,
eMessage, Interact and Report. Affinium Model is data mining software that
consists of four components, valuator, profiler, response modeler and
cross seller, that are designed to help users to understand and anticipate
customer behaviors and preferences. Affinium Campaign can interact with
multiple data sources to extract data and design and implement
large-scale, personalized campaigns, deliver them through multiple
channels and analyze the results. Affinium eMessage is designed to be used
to create, preview, test, execute and measure personal, permission-based
e-mail campaigns that are delivered through the recipients' device of
choice, including PDAs, cell phones and pagers. Affinium Interact uses
both online and offline data, from current browsing activities to
historical profiles and predictive models, to create dynamic, personalized
customer interactions. It gathers information from all company databases
to build a view of the customer, including profiles and predictive models
created by Affinium Campaign and Affinium Model. Affinium Report enables
marketers to generate detailed reports based on information gathered from
other modules within the Affinium suite and related sources of business
intelligence. Report includes easy-to-use report templates, custom
reporting capabilities and a browser-based marketing 'dashboard' that
provides a repository for business-critical marketing information.
Delivering support, when boiled down to the basics, is a matter of
finding out exactly what the person needs to know and deliver-ing it to them
in a way that is easy for them to understand and implement. Kanisa has been
delivering online, self-service solutions for this task, and in its latest
release, Kanisa 3.0, Kanisa aims to provide support that is equal to (if not
better than) an interaction with a live agent.
According to David Kay, vice president of Solutions & Technology at
Kanisa, version 3.0 will: engage a customer in a dialog to find out what it
is they know, work across multiple silos of information including structured
and unstructured data, and maintain a data warehouse of customer
interactions to make the systems and site better. Based on what implementers
of Kanisa 3.0 know about a customer, they can ask the questions for them as
the information is bubbled up based on a profile or the company's
direction. Kay said that .net is helping them to present Kanisa as a
service, so the look and feel is customized to the client company. Version
3.0 provides usage-based ranking, i.e., the customer defines the question
and uses the information on how other people are working and what they
looked for; Business Webs that allow partners to create branded or
co-branded sites (which can also create a revenue opportunity for the
company by allowing them to offer it to their partners and distributors) and
knowledge maps, which are at the heart of the product and automate the
adding of content. Knowledge maps are a representation of what customers
might be interested in and directions on how to get to it.
Enhancements to Kanisa version 3.0 include support of personal Web portal
sites for users of Kanisa's customers. Kanisa's technology can now be
used to push targeted content to the users' personal start pages,
notifying them, for example, of important software upgrades and security
patches. Version 3.0 can now deliver the right content and services through
a dialog and retrieval process that takes advantage of both unstructured
concepts and structured attributes. Version 3.0 provides improved retrieval
capabilities through the implementation of insights gained from studying
customer behavior and thousands of query entries, enabling the new release
to better respond to the user's needs. Kanisa systems can now be deployed
in most European languages and Japanese. The entire customer experience and
content handling capabilities can operate in multiple languages
simultaneously. Enhanced reporting features through a data warehousing
environment now support not only distilled and actionable out-of-the-box
reports, but also an ad-hoc analytics environment. This allows support
organizations to effectively drill-down to learn about customers, their
issues, how they use products, how to improve the support experience and
where to invest in content.
You have installed the latest CRM technology, you have the systems in
place for Web chat, e-mail response, the ability to handle any type of
interaction your customers will come at you with, but customer satisfaction
is dropping. What's the problem? Perhaps it's the fact that your agents
and supervisors have no idea how to use the new technology effectively or
they are equally ignorant of the new product offerings just rolled out by
your company. In other words, they are lacking the prime ingredient of
business success: knowledge.
To fill the knowledge gap while allowing agents to learn at their own
pace, SmartForce developed its e-Learning platform, and to fill specific
needs for contact centers, its Contact Center SolutionSets. The e-Learning
application infrastructure provides users with an integrated student
environment, learning management system and customer content creation and
publication tools. The system is preconfigured so that companies can
customize the materials to include its specific, proprietary information.
Contact Center SolutionSets comes in three tracks, one each for agents,
supervisors and managers, and provides six learning modules: core contact
center skills; customer service skills; inside sales skills; technical
support/help desk skills; contact center systems and desktop training; and
client-specific content. To provide content for the modules, SmartForce
consulted with more than 35 contact centers and the courses were developed
under the guidance of experts Mikael Blaisdell and Patrick Bultema. With the
publishing tool, users can add pertinent information to the training
program. Through the Ask My Mentor program, agents can collaborate in
real-time with mentors. Using the system, agents can also attend seminars,
workshops and have role-play simulations. Supervisors are provided with
reports on agent progress.
The problem of multichannel interactions can often be analogous to that
of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, 'Data, data, every where, nor any source
to synch.' Valuable customer data can come in from and be stored in many
sources, the Web, e-mail, a CRM system, a sales force automation record, and
yet, as an agent on the front lines dealing with a customer or a salesperson
trying to update a contact, that means opening up several different, and
sometimes incompatible, programs to re-enter or utilize the same
information.
To provide an answer to real-time information integration difficulties,
LumaPath, Inc. developed its LumaPath Real-Time Relevance Server. Version
2.0 of the LumaPath Real-Time Relevance Server is designed to help
organizations to automatically provide end users, in real-time, with highly
relevant, comprehensive information from enterprise applications and
unstructured content repositories, such as e-mail, file systems and Web
sites.
When a user is working in an application, LumaPath analyzes the content
of the user's active window, sends a message to the Real-Time Relevance
Server and returns results within milliseconds. The LumanPath icon tool bar
that resides on the user's screen lights up, letting the user know that
relevant information has been found. LumaPath's Real-Time Information
Integration algorithms determine relevance by analyzing the content in the
user's active window, not by a search of a whole text index. As the user
switches windows, LumaPath automatically updates the LumaPath LensBar in
real-time.
Among LumaPath's capabilities are: it automatically delivers
information to users in real-time; it delivers information that is
immediately relevant to what the user is doing, based on a live analysis of
the user's active window; it combines enterprise application data, like
Siebel and Pivotal, with information in unstructured content sources, like
Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Office or Web sites; and it
immediately allows users to act on the information by enabling them to
transfer information between applications with a single mouse click.
LumaPath's extensible Real-Time Relevance Server can also help reduce
complex, point-to-point integration projects and take advantage of existing
IT infrastructure investments without changing the way end users work.
LumaPath integration modules are available for a variety of applications and
content platforms, including Siebel eBusiness 2000, Lotus Notes, Pivotal
eRelationship, Microsoft Exchange/ Outlook e-mail, NT file systems and
internal or external Web sites.
Communications service providers (CSPs) certainly faced tough times in 2001,
and are hard pressed to make their services attractive to users. To help
CSPs in their plight to reduce costs and improve services, TeleGea has
released its Emporium Enterprise self-service platform, which is designed to
give service providers a method by which they can give their clients
self-service applications to order and manage services over the Web.
Emporium Enterprise supports a range of communications products and
services (e.g., voice, data, wireless and IP) through multiple access media
that include HTML, WML, XML and vXML. Businesses can manage all aspects of
accounts via a single interface, including ordering new products and
services; adding, activating, changing or canceling services; as well as
reviewing orders, purchases and account activity.
Emporium Enterprise's scalable, open architecture is XML-based and J2EE
compliant, and features an adaptor framework that integrates with existing
back-office and middleware systems (e.g. order handling, customer
management, invoicing, problem resolution, service planning, etc.) to
improve processes and take advantage of existing systems. Emporium
Enterprise can extend its functionality to CSPs' agent and reseller
networks.
According to Kevin Martini, vice president of marketing at TeleGea, CSPs
can use Emporium Enterprise to test out new products and services before
launch, therefore helping to drive speed-to-market. And speaking of
speed-to-market, TeleGea also announced its JumpStart program, which
provides the Enterprise platform on a hosted model, which will provide CSPs
with faster deployment.
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