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Customer transaction lifecycle

MM: This gets into basically a transaction-management capability. Specifically, you’ve framed the notion of a customer lifecycle. Could you take us through the stages of a customer lifecycle?

ES: We basically break customer lifecycle into several buckets.

The first one is customer acquisition. When a customer comes in, most registration software or homegrown shopping carts allow you to take the basic demographic information, the credit card information and apply a charge to it.

Our system at that point is a little bit different. We have the ability to integrate with marketing software. For instance, Salesforce.com. Where did that lead come from? What sales person is it associated with? So at the other end of the lifecycle, you can feed the information back into sales force, resellers, partners or affiliates are

That’s a big part of customer acquisition that’s often ignored. How are they getting to you? What partners? What direct sales efforts? What things did you do to get that customer in?

The next thing that that Aria does is it allows you to offer plans or rates and services based on the product that you’re offering. We have a lot of customers in the software-as-a-service that sell based on the seat or based on a flat-rate subscription. But they might have a tiered offering, where they’re trying to maximize their revenue, yet also address several layers of the market segment, where they can get the small businesses and move their way up.

Our system also has the ability to allow our clients to differentiate on those flat-rate services. But also, to maximize monetization by enabling things like usage-based types of transactions. Our system has a pretty cool usage-based engine, which is like the second or third part of this 6-part thing. Usage tracking.

Under acquisitions, picking the plans, if you want to monetize on these micro transactions and micro payments, how do you want to do that? You need a metering and rating infrastructure there that’s flexible, definable, and not constrained by the telco paradigm of, “How much time are you connected to a service?” Or, “How many bytes of data are you using?”

We’re billing for things in digital entertainment. We’re in the gaming industry, where we’re billing for virtual items that are transacted real-time. We’re also, in software, billing for how many seats or how many transactions occur in a software. That’s the monetization. Through customer acquisition.

The next piece is after you acquire the customer, you need to be able to turn them off or provide the service to them. Shopping cart software, a lot of times, is built around managing an inventory, fulfilling and shipping things. In the digital rights, it’s basically your inventory is digital. You have to maintain entitlement and track entitlement to either one service or multiple services, appropriately—and enforce your business logic.

An example would be a popular hybrid model. Somebody might download a client for a software, but then also go to a server out on the Internet to update that data, refresh that data, or have access to data. There’s like a client server aspect of it—even if the client is just a web browser.

We need to maintain entitlement to that, through some kind of authentication. When the customer signs up, we would go out and turn that service on or turn multiple layers of services on, or even potentially mash-up of services from different providers, and bundle them together for our client. Then they could charge either on a flat rate, subscription-based or usage elements from each of those providers.

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