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Kick-starting engagement processes

MM: Yes. One last thing I’d like you to comment on. In my conversations and interviews with other technology providers—and more specifically innovation leaders in their field… has emerged the notion of multichannel marketing analytics.

Multichannel marketing analytics has—like your lifecycle model—distinct phases. The first phase entails a monitoring function. Think of it as raw, censored data in the web space. And more specifically, in the social networking space.

If I call in to a call center, the software would enable the teleservice representative to say, “Oh. Here’s his LinkedIn profile. Here’s his FaceBook profile. Here’s his Zing profile. Here’s his blog.”

It federates in or syndicates in, and it reconditions a published, public 2.0 kind of stuff into the customer interaction. So even though you don’t know me from Adam, as a function of being able to link me to my published digital persona or footprint, you’re able to enrich not only the interaction, but immediately transfer or syndicate in from that all kinds of demographic and psychographic information. That then starts the whole engagement process.

ES: What we do probably isn’t as exciting as that. Nor what we’re envisioning. But if you consider our competitors—our all-on-premise competitors—their limitation is that they don’t have the ability to aggregate this data, and make intelligent alerts or choices about this data.

We’re working on this intelligence back-end, where we can not only give our clients very meaningful data to what they do and what their businesses are, but… Imagine if you are a new Web 2.0 service and through us, you can do a sort of figure exchange and see. Here are 10 other or 100 other or 1,000 other Web 2.0 service providers, and what their first 60 days of transactions look like. What their churn looks like. And what the probability is that somebody’s going to go off or churn off your system if they elicit misbehavior.

So maybe it’s not as exciting as that, but that—I think—is where the real opportunity is. As all of these features—all of the software moves through the Internet. Where you’re going from hundreds of point solutions installed to a single instance of this priceless data that you can aggregate, anonymize, aggregate and offer to the customers.

MM: Great. Ed, it’s come about that point in time when we need to roll up our interview. Are there any last comments? Any last ideas you’d like to summarize with?

ES: Just reiterating—we really think that there’s a big gap in the market. Especially when you look at things that don’t really think of the entire customer lifecycle. Managing these interactions are just as important as managing the financial transactions.

Software companies—especially companies that come from technologists—tend not to think about all of this lifecycle management, which is the way that we thought about our core product.

MM: Again, I want to thank you very much.

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