In a recent piece for Destination CRM on the benefits of personalization within marketing, Marshall Lager wrote that “personalization provides marketing communications with the means to deliver real value to customers”. Lager cites recent research suggesting that although CMOs understand this potential value of personalized marketing a majority are having troubles putting it into practice.
As the CMO for a CRM software company, this article seemed especially relevant to discuss. At Concursive, it has always been a focus of ours to make software that will help maximize the value of relationships - starting from the beginning of a sales cycle. For our software, personalization is a goal in every stage, especially when marketing to new leads.
This is the approach we had with ConcourseSuite 5.0: to increase value in the sales cycle, our tool aids in capturing information from multiple sources, including websites/contact forms, and drop it right into the Leads Management module. Then using the integrated Marketing module, we can create groups based on granular filtering of various criteria and message in a variety of formats.
We’ve also worked to make it easy to build complex email campaigns that generate specific messages based on certain responses, timelines or behavior patterns - i.e. using intelligence and rules to automate the personalization.
The tool also provides for the delivery of surveys to ensure feedback is being captured and used to refine messaging, etc. the next time around - closing the loop and ensuring each cycle is better than the last.
To put it simply: ConcourseSuite helps take out the difficult organization and cumbersome time required to personalize each lead and deliver real value to every potential customer. The more personal interactions you have with customers, the more customers will feel actively involved in the message you are communicating and the greater connection they will feel with your organization. Once you can make that valuable connection with your customers, your customers will become more valuable to you by being more loyal, buying more products and spreading word of mouth.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Concursive joins the ZipTie Open Network Alliance (ZONA)
Today Concursive is proud to announce that it has become a part of the ZipTie Open Network Alliance (ZONA). ZONA is an alliance committed to several key areas which we have been continually dedicated to, including interoperability, standardization, best practices and the creation of value-added tools. In November 2006, many of these same reasons fueled our drive to become a founding member of the Open Solutions Alliance, a group dedicated to those very ideals in open source software.
ZONA is an alliance for the network monitoring and management community. How does Concursive, best known as a CRM vendor fit in? In addition to traditional CRM capabilities, our software, ConcourseSuite, also provides enterprise class help desk capabilities. (In fact, companies like The Weather Channel use our system to manage their internal IT help desk operations.) When something goes wrong in a network, in addition to setting off alarms and people's pagers and providing diagnostic information, and so forth, it is often helpful to open a trouble-ticket, for example. ConcourseSuite provides a method for creating such tickets automatically, and creating a workflow for resolving the issue. We also provide asset inventory tracking so that information about particular devices in a network--routers, switches, servers, etc.--can be maintained within the same system that is used for troubleshooting those assets.
The ZipTie open source project’s goal is to simplify network inventory and configuration management, and ZipForge is a collaborative effort where users can download and develop innovations in network management. In any area where we can participate in increasing interoperability, developing standards, and producing disruptive technologies, we look to do so. We are excited to be on the cutting-edge in this field through ZONA, and look forward to collaborating with the other members that joined this week, as well as the existing community.
Michael
ZONA is an alliance for the network monitoring and management community. How does Concursive, best known as a CRM vendor fit in? In addition to traditional CRM capabilities, our software, ConcourseSuite, also provides enterprise class help desk capabilities. (In fact, companies like The Weather Channel use our system to manage their internal IT help desk operations.) When something goes wrong in a network, in addition to setting off alarms and people's pagers and providing diagnostic information, and so forth, it is often helpful to open a trouble-ticket, for example. ConcourseSuite provides a method for creating such tickets automatically, and creating a workflow for resolving the issue. We also provide asset inventory tracking so that information about particular devices in a network--routers, switches, servers, etc.--can be maintained within the same system that is used for troubleshooting those assets.
The ZipTie open source project’s goal is to simplify network inventory and configuration management, and ZipForge is a collaborative effort where users can download and develop innovations in network management. In any area where we can participate in increasing interoperability, developing standards, and producing disruptive technologies, we look to do so. We are excited to be on the cutting-edge in this field through ZONA, and look forward to collaborating with the other members that joined this week, as well as the existing community.
Michael
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Social networking and CRM: Are you engaging with your customers correctly?
As social networking becomes more commonplace, it is steadily creeping into the business environment. Companies have their own Facebook networks, MySpace groups, and use LinkedIn and Plaxo for recruiting and business networking. However, linking together social networks and managing business relationships is still a work in progress.
Previously, we talked about how to better serve customers in our blog by segmenting them better, and building relationships. Today I wanted to explore how to handle this in a new environment created by current technology trends. In a recent article, the O’Reilly Radar called “Release 2.0,” by Jimmy Guterman (here’s a link to his blog post on it) he describes the increasing need for a “universal inbox” to bring together all of a person’s separate lives, including aspects like email, contacts and personal and professional social networking profiles.
The future of CRM is in bringing together all of these seemingly disparate areas and giving users tools to separate and control their data as much or as little as they would like to. Concursive recognizes this trend and its importance to the customer. Web 2.0 and social media features such as blogs, wikis and RSS make CRM more collaborative and more in tune with business growth. The end goal would be to simplify users lives professionally, to make it easier for a company to get and grow customers by building closer relationships with customers and interested parties and to fuel as many one-to-one relationships as possible; in other words, to both turn friends into sales and sales into friends.
Other recent articles in support of using social media and Web 2.0 tools in business are Paul Greenberg’s piece “Everything is Social” in destinationCRM, as well as “Web 2.0: Just say yes” by Sandra Gittlen in Computerworld Australia.
Jeff Hershey
Previously, we talked about how to better serve customers in our blog by segmenting them better, and building relationships. Today I wanted to explore how to handle this in a new environment created by current technology trends. In a recent article, the O’Reilly Radar called “Release 2.0,” by Jimmy Guterman (here’s a link to his blog post on it) he describes the increasing need for a “universal inbox” to bring together all of a person’s separate lives, including aspects like email, contacts and personal and professional social networking profiles.
The future of CRM is in bringing together all of these seemingly disparate areas and giving users tools to separate and control their data as much or as little as they would like to. Concursive recognizes this trend and its importance to the customer. Web 2.0 and social media features such as blogs, wikis and RSS make CRM more collaborative and more in tune with business growth. The end goal would be to simplify users lives professionally, to make it easier for a company to get and grow customers by building closer relationships with customers and interested parties and to fuel as many one-to-one relationships as possible; in other words, to both turn friends into sales and sales into friends.
Other recent articles in support of using social media and Web 2.0 tools in business are Paul Greenberg’s piece “Everything is Social” in destinationCRM, as well as “Web 2.0: Just say yes” by Sandra Gittlen in Computerworld Australia.
Jeff Hershey
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