Portrait Software, a leader in Customer Interaction Management and Predictive Customer Analytics software today announces the latest addition to its pioneering Customer Interaction Management Suite.
The new offering, called Interaction Optimizer, integrates with any existing CRM (Customer Relationship Management) infrastructure to bring the power of real-time analytics to the point of customer interaction. It allows B2C companies with large customer bases to leverage everything they know about each customer, including information learned during the interaction itself, to help them take the most profitable action and provide the best customer experience.
Interaction Optimizer is the first new offering emerging from Portrait Software's acquisition of Quadstone, the leading customer analytics player, in December last year.
"Quadstone brought to the table the most powerful predictive analytics on the market," said Sarah Haskell, Group Marketing Director for Portrait Software. "With Interaction Optimizer, we're using this power to drive real-time insight to the places it can do the most good: whenever and wherever the customer touches the organisation."
Real-time scoring 'turbo charges' customer facing applications and CRM infrastructures
Interaction Optimizer brings a new capability to any existing CRM environment: Real-Time Scoring. With real-time scoring, automated customer behaviour models (for churn risk or propensity to buy) are used to recommend the best next action to take in each interaction – including cross-selling, special offers or service initiatives. Unlike other real-time scoring engines Portrait Interaction Optimizer uses customer propensity models and leverages business rules that determine how, when and where each offer is delivered. Unlike batch-mode scoring that updates customer scores weekly or monthly, real-time scoring updates scores on demand. For the first time, comprehensive, up-to-the-second insight can be delivered to the front line, whether it's an assisted or unassisted channel. This translates directly into more relevant offers, more sensitive service delivery and dramatically increased profitability and loyalty.
Profiting from inbound contacts
One of the most powerful applications of Interaction Optimizer is the ability to turn inbound customer contacts into new revenues.
"Inbound interactions are notoriously difficult to manage because you don't know who's going to call, when or why," explained Haskell. "With Interaction Optimizer, inbound enquiries become fertile ground for appropriate cross-selling and targeting offers that customers appreciate and respond to."
"Inbound interactions are increasingly being recognised as the new competitive battleground for companies," comments Leslie Ament, Director of Customer Intelligence Research at Aberdeen Group. "Our research confirms that for companies with greater than $27b in revenues, a 40% reduction in customer churn rates often translates into up to $1b in operating income. In their efforts to improve customer retention rates, providers of financial services, telecommunications, and online retailers, are turning to inbound interaction channels for new sales and loyalty leverage." Ament continues, "A company's ability to deliver real-time analytic intelligence and scoring at the point of interaction is often the difference between success and failure."
Growing market interest
Interaction Optimizer has already been demonstrated to leading financial services companies and contact centres on both sides of the Atlantic.
One Portrait user, Simon Baines, Head of Customer Insight of Nationwide Building Society, was impressed: "We already use Portrait to deliver intelligent prompts to customer-facing employees in call centres and branches. Portrait's multi-channel customer contact history provides data to drive event-based prompts that can be either sales or service focused. Typically we find that basing prompts around events rather than just customer profiles leads to significant uplift," said Baines. "Adding a greater real-time dimension to prompts with analytics - especially for inbound contacts - makes a lot of sense."
Ament of Aberdeen Group adds, "Our recent survey-based primary research on 'Customer Intelligence' has shown that companies who exemplify best in class customer intelligence practices report greater than 20% year-over-year improvement in annual revenues, customer acquisition, and customer retention rates."
Interaction Optimizer extends and empowers any analytics, campaign management and CRM front-end, or it can be packaged with the Portrait Customer Interaction Management suite. A low risk implementation methodology is available to ensure that returns are measurable and attributable to customer lifetime value.