Rethinking the case for CRM
Published: 09 May 2002 10:55 BST
How is Epiphany different?
The reason why Epiphany was formed was to address the relationship. We take vast amounts of information about customers the companies have that they don't use and put it front and centre. We are trying to change the playing field of CRM technology to be much more about creating a knowledgeable, continuous, consistent customer experience across all customer touch points.
When customers talk to someone at a call centre or go to a store or go online, it's all part of a continuous experience. It needs to move from a series of isolated point interactions to a long-term customer interaction. CRM should be more about the customer interaction and less about the process. It's a very important transition.
The assumption is that CRM helps companies increase customer satisfaction and therefore increase revenue. Is that actually the case? Or is it, as you say, more about cutting costs?
Yes, it's the case. We've seen increases in revenues and customer retention -- or reductions in churn -- among our customers. Companies want to get to the right customers, keep them for a long time, and sell to them continuously. One of our technologies, for example, puts very focused intelligence in the hands of the customer service reps. It lets them see the customer's past actions so the agent has much more context when addressing a customer service problem.
The next thing is we have algorithms in our software that correlate the history of the customer, the current problem they are calling about, and the thousand products we're trying to sell to our customers, and they present a script the agent can use to talk to that customer about buying additional products. That's transforming (the call centre) from what has traditionally been a cost centre to a revenue centre. We've seen customers increase sales generated by marketing campaigns by 15 percent to 20 percent by engaging the call centre this way.
You have some pretty big, deep-pocketed competition including Siebel, SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft. Some of these companies are sending the message that smaller companies like Epiphany won't make it through the downturn. How are these scare tactics affecting your business and your dialogue with customers?
When you don't have good technology, that's what you resort to. Fortunately for Epiphany, we have $300 million in cash. We work with over 35 percent of the Fortune 100. If you look at our cash position and our formidable customer list, and the aggressively open architecture we have, that issue more times than not goes away. There are times that customers are led into buying an inferior product because of fear tactics. Those products are very rigid and process-oriented, hard to install, and hard to configure. Epiphany is the reverse. It is a war out there. I guess the other side of it is we feel fortunate we're able to hold our own.
With the somewhat dismal first-quarter earnings season winding down, some analysts are questioning whether the business software market will bounce back later this year, as anticipated. What do you think?
Ever since the third quarter of last year, I have thought it would be a tough market for the balance of 2002. Technology, especially the kind related to productivity, always lags behind a recovery. It's common sense that companies have to recover and then have to get momentum before they resume their focus on productivity. So technology spending tends to be a lagging indicator, not a leading one, and as a lagging indicator I would say it won't pick up until the early part of next year. We have the cash and customers to ride the storm out.
You released a new version of your product in March. How is it being received by the market?
It's going quite well. Ten percent of our customers have downloaded it and started upgrades. Most are flagship customers.
Where does CRM go from here?
There are two big trends that I see. First is the whole transformation from interactions occurring in silos to a continuous intelligent conversation with customers through analytics and flexible systems that bridge different environments.
What's the distinction from a customer's perspective?
Imagine a salesperson calling on a customer. That person doesn't know if the customer has been calling the service centre complaining about a product. He doesn't know if they've been the target of a marketing campaign for certain products. It's breaking down these silos that act independently with customers.
And the second trend?
The second big trend is we're going to see a whole new universe of interaction points get looped into CRM, including automated teller machines, intelligent call centres, store clerks with handheld devices, in-store kiosks, and loyalty cards. In general, unifying all the channels and embedding them with intelligence is one big trend, and expanding to a broader scope of customer interaction points is the other.
When will this happen?
It's beginning to happen, but we won't see ubiquity for three or four years.
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