While strolling down the narrow alleys under the
orange trees of the Santa Cruz section of Seville, I
came across a shop with a bright display of flamenco
dresses hanging on the wall outside the shop. When the
shopkeeper noticed my interest in the dresses, she
sauntered out to size up my interest. Now, while this
festive storefront display may work for the tiny shop,
for most businesses such a passive display is hardly
the way to get sales figures up.
Analogous to the shopkeeper noticing my interest in
the dresses, software from NewChannel,
Inc. allows agents to monitor the browsing of Web
prospects and step in at the proper time to help the
customer. As NewChannel president and CEO Alan
Weisleder said, "It is important to approach the
prospect at the right time." NewChannel puts a tag on
HTML pages so that when the customer hits a page where
he or she is most likely to need help or be most
susceptible to a cross-sell or upsell, the session
begins running on the NewChannel server. NewChannel
then notifies the agent about the prospect -- where
they are, how long they have been on the site and what
pages they have visited. So, like a sales clerk in a
shop, the agent can approach the online shopper armed
with a history of what they have seen and an idea of
what they want.
With NewChannel 3.0, NewChannel is providing
several new features. NewChannel eSales Evaluation is
an evaluation program for each new customer that
begins with a strategy session to discuss business and
sales practices. NewChannel then recommends a
customized eSales Solution, designed around specific
business needs and projected ROI.
The NewChannel application is made up of four
services that allow sales teams to analyze, qualify
and proactively interact with Web visitors. The
NewChannel application includes the Lead Qualification
Engine, which analyzes and qualifies Web site visitors
based on a company's sales criteria and alerts sales
reps when a visitor's behavior on the Web site
qualifies them as a "hot prospect"; NewChannel Rep,
which allows sales personnel to interact with Web
visitors through access to predefined scripts and
phrases, and also gives reps the ability to push
pages, forms and supplemental information to the
visitor's browser; NewChannel Manager, which gives
supervisors management-level controls over the
NewChannel Rep; and NewChannel eSales Tracker, which
synchronizes data from Web site visitors with
NewChannel's lead database to capture and attribute
sales and revenue opportunities.
NewChannel CRM Link integrates Web site visitor
data with a company's CRM system and offers
comprehensive XML support. NewChannel partnered with
Vignette to provide its customers with CRM Link.
NewChannel is offered as a hosted application that
includes implementation, training, maintenance,
upgrades and sales engagement strategies.
Alert And Respond
While NewChannel deals with customers already on your
Web site, getting the word out to customers as to what's
new with your company, software upgrades, special
offers, etc., is the milieu of PAR3
Communications, Inc. PAR3's Intelligence Response
Platform is an alert-and-response system, offered as a
managed ASP model, that is designed to actively
involve customers in the communications process by
providing a means for a company to provide its
customers with notifications via telephone, e-mail,
pager, Internet, fax or wireless device. It also lets
customers choose how, when and where they receive
information. This notification system addresses a
traditional bottleneck in business/customer
communication for, as Ken Pawlak, senior vice
president of Marketing and Sales at Par3 told me, "The
biggest slowdown in business is deciding how to notify
clients."
Through a Web interface, customers and contact
center agents can set and change personalized
preferences that drive how, when and where a business
communicates with its customers. For example,
customers can designate: which type of device to
deliver to (phone, e-mail, fax or hand-held Web
device); what day of the week to deliver alerts; the
time of day to deliver alerts; and what kind of alert
they want to receive.
The PAR3 platform is driven by the PAR3 XTAP
Gateway, an open, XML-based technology component that
integrates with enterprise data systems such as
relational database systems, CRM systems,
client/server systems, HTTP servers, mainframe systems
and legacy systems. As PAR3 is an extension of a
company's existing systems, it can mine detailed
customer information and send timely, relevant alerts
with detailed customer data from a company's existing
systems.
When pre-defined conditions are met (for example, a
flight is delayed, an account balance reaches a
certain level or an item is back-ordered), highly
detailed information is extracted from the data
sources, assembled into a personalized alert and
delivered to the customer how, when and where they
prefer. Businesses can also improve their customer
knowledge by analyzing customer responses so future
communications between the company and its customers
are related to the customers' needs and interests.
Using PAR3's XML technology, customers can connect
back to the business to purchase products or talk to a
contact center agent. The PAR3 platform also allows
users to forward alerts to friends, family and
colleagues with a personal endorsement. These
potential new customers also have the ability to
immediately connect back to the company's business
systems to complete a transaction or request more
information and be routed to such sales and service
channels as automated transaction systems, service
representatives and automated service systems.
Mining Business Intelligence
While I am on the subject of gathering information, I
recently was introduced to a new technology for
collecting competitive intelligence by Tom Pisello,
president and CEO of Connotate
Technologies, Inc.
Initially targeted for groups that live on business
intelligence, such as financial analysts and
marketers, Pisello said the Connotate product lets
users virtually tag content on Web sites, using what
Connotate calls vTag. To monitor and mine the content,
vTag intelligently extracts the personalized content
from any Web page, converts the content from HTML to
XML, identifies when the content changes, and filters
and formats the information to assure that only
relevant content is mined. The extracted and
personalized content is delivered proactively to a
database or directly to users via e-mail (push), or on
a demand basis to applications or wireless devices
(pull).
Connotate's XML-by-example technology allows a user
to define which content to monitor and mine on any Web
page, and automatically creates extraction code to
mine the dynamic content over time. The code is a
script that can be run against the future versions of
the Web site to extract the dynamic content, even if
the content is updated and moved. The extraction
script, when applied against a Web page, converts the
unstructured HTML into structured XML. Once in XML,
content can be exchanged between programs, imported
into databases and displayed on any device.
A user can apply the XML-by-example application to
build XML extraction scripts for any Web page and
content, and have such rules work for all future
instances of the underlying Web page -- provided that
the Web page does not radically change its structure.
The technology relies on identifying more than 30
families of visual and structural features to
automatically classify and mine content. The user
points and clicks at positive and negative examples of
the content they want to extract, and the technology
uses artificial intelligence to automatically build
efficient and stable extraction rules, saved as an XSL
script. When executed, the extraction script creates
structured XML from the unstructured HTML, organizing
the content with user-defined data labels, and
maintaining the hierarchical relationships amongst the
content's data elements. Because the data is
structured XML, the content can be imported into
databases and applications, as well as filtered and
personalized using complex rule sets.
Connotate's Personalized Dynamic Content Mining (PDCM)
is an automated process that: schedules the
application of the HTML to XML extraction script
against the Web page and content; extracts the
content; determines if the content has changed and
meets personalized filtering criteria; and formats and
delivers the content on a proactive push basis to
portals, databases and e-mail, or on a demand basis to
applications and wireless devices.
XML-by-example and Personalized Dynamic Content
Mining are API-enabled for integration into enterprise
applications, and form the core for Connotate's vTag
Business Intelligence software. An SDK kit is
available.
So if the shop in Seville had a Web site and I was
a competitor of theirs in the flamenco dress business,
with Connotate's technology I could tag their pages
(and those of any other flamenco dress outlets) and be
alerted every time they had a sale and adjust my
prices accordingly, dancing to their every move.
Lead Generation
Unlike the Spanish dress shop, where the proprietress
is dependent upon whomsoever happens to stop into the
shop, agents at LeadMasters
in Stamford, Connecticut go in search of leads.
Focusing on executive appointment setting for clients
in the technology, financial consulting and insurance
industries, the agents (or consultants as LeadMasters
refers to them) specialize in contacting high-level
executives for such well-known companies as Deloitte
& Touche and Barnes&Noble.com.
Scott Brown, vice president of Operations at
LeadMasters, explained that the average business
experience for their consultants is 15 years, and all
have sales and marketing backgrounds. This experience
allows them to work in an unscripted environment on
their calls. "When you hire people with business
experience, it is not hard to generate leads," said
Brown, adding, "but LeadMasters is striving for
quality, not quantity in our calls."
LeadMasters works closely with its clients, having
weekly contact with them. When developing a program,
LeadMasters consults with the clients to set up the
campaign, and then has the clients come in and train
the agents whenever possible. LeadMasters provides
clients with remote-monitoring capability so they can
judge for themselves the quality of the calls as well
as contribute suggestions as to how their campaign is
conducted.
Initial training for new LeadMasters consultants is
about three days, but they are provided with ongoing
training. Most of the training is one-on-one and based
on direct feedback. Agents are monitored and coached
from the monitoring sessions. High-level reps can
self-manage and also cross-train other reps, as
LeadMasters has a collaborative work environment and
tries to make competition between the agents
good-natured. As Brown said, "Our focus is on people
and the management of people."
According to Brown, as voice mail is their most
difficult challenge, the LeadMasters consultants spend
a lot of time and effort creating voice mail messages
that will inform and intrigue.
Another challenge in appointment setting is getting
through gatekeepers, which is why LeadMasters
consultants call on tools like Hoovers to provide them
with other contact names to ask for. Brown said the
lead rate can range from 5 to 25 percent, with the
quality of the list they are using playing a big
factor in that rate. The consultants also take
advantage of the call to gather more information about
the contacts and add them to their proprietary
database. LeadMasters takes security very seriously
and maintains every list in its own password-protected
database.
All LeadMasters consultants have a contact manager,
voice mail, e-mail and an Internet connection on their
desktop. According to Brown, e-mail has been one of
the big changes of the last few years in lead
generation, but now the consultants can send .pdf and
Word files to their contacts. Brown emphasized that
LeadMasters provides continuous training and
management, that they are continuously refining what
they do and are constantly evolving. As he said, "We
will always be looking to keep technology that will
produce results and increase efficiency."
So did I buy a dress from that shop in Seville? Not
being in a dancing mood and speaking no Spanish, all I
could manage was a clumsy, "no, gracias," and a
photograph of the dresses, each hanging there, waiting
for some seorita to try them on, take them home,
then go out in them, swirling and stomping the night
away to the rhythm of Spanish guitars.
The author may be contacted at elounsbury@tmcnet.com.
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