Thunderhead NOW heralds the next stage in the evolution of the company's XML based communications platform, which, until this time, has been known as Thunderhead.

With the NOW release, Thunderhead's one-platform-for-all-communications paradigm becomes even more pervasive across the enterprise, integrating communications with customer facing business processes. NOW will provide new functionality for marketing and campaign management and enhanced management visibility with enterprise-wide dashboards and reporting capability.

"Both customer service expectations, and the variety of different communication methods they choose to use, continues to increase," says Glen Manchester, CEO of Thunderhead.

"Relationships for organisations, such as insurance companies and banks, depend on a series of interactions with a customer, each stage potentially involving a different communication channel. Maintaining context and consistency in communications at each step is critical for successful customer engagement. Our technology provides this by exposing role-based interfaces that allow the integration of all types of communications with key applications and business processes."

The Thunderhead NOW platform improves customer retention and time-to-value by ensuring front-line business users can manage the design and control of customer facing communications. At the same time, Thunderhead NOW provides centralised control of enterprise issues such as regulated content, brand protection, compliance, security and management visibility.

"In the past organisations have focused on the necessity of producing customer output, especially print. However, forward-thinking organisations understand that communications must be delivered in the context of business processes, driven by customer value and delivering outcomes that enhance customer retention and acquisition."

Today, providers are missing the opportunity to maximise the revenue potential of the customer relationships they already have. This is a concern, as it costs four times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain one."

Manchester said that Thunderhead customers will benefit from the growing presence of Thunderhead's global integration partners, who are developing practices around the platform that leverage their industry expertise in areas such as insurance and banking. This is possible because of the platform's open architecture and process layer, allowing partners to build on their existing expertise in BPM, ECM, Portal and enterprise system deployments.