London – October 23, 2013 – Teradata Corp. (NYSE: TDC), a global leader in analytic data platforms, applications and services, today announced, through its Teradata eCircle division, the general availability of Customer Interaction Manager (CIM) in the Cloud, a data-driven marketing solution that enables real-time, dialogue-based customer interaction across the full spectrum of digital and traditional communication channels, creating an extensible “customer interaction hub” for the entire global enterprise.
Whether deployed in the Cloud or on-premise, Customer Interaction Manager offers best-of-breed integrated inbound and outbound messaging which yields the ability to choreograph and execute multi-step customer “conversations” across multiple digital and traditional channels. These unique capabilities are helping businesses worldwide to truly engage with their customers and make marketing budgets go further, all by improving communications that drive retention and sales through timely and relevant communications and offers that drive unprecedented responses and click-through rates.
“By leveraging this technology and expertise, we are developing a better understanding of how our consumers want to engage with P&G;, so that we may make communications more relevant to foster meaningful and lasting consumer relationships,” said Andy Walter, Vice-President of Global Business Services (GBS), Procter & Gamble.
“Old school” marketing was focused on outbound campaigns, as opposed to true customer interaction. To be successful in today’s era of data-driven marketing, marketers need to interact with customers digitally, in real time and on the customer’s terms. And this calls for blending offline customer data with inbound real-time data – from call centres, web sites, social communities and more – to establish a relevant and meaningful dialogue that reinforces the company brand while allowing the customer to retain control.
Why is this important? According to VP Distinguished Analyst Ed Thompson of Gartner, Inc., an industry research firm, “Customers draw positive or negative conclusions from each interaction with an organisation. Without commitment to the intentional design of an engagement program, the resultant ‘experience gap’ will undermine satisfaction and loyalty.” (Understanding How Customer Engagement Drives a Positive Customer Experience, Gartner, Inc., Ed Thompson, 3 October 2013 ID:G00255779)
“Businesses everywhere run costly and sophisticated marketing campaigns to get the attention of their customers, yet much of that money and effort is wasted because it’s a one-way street – outbound only,” said Gonzalo Hidalgo, general manager, IMM/CIM for Teradata eCircle. “Teradata Customer Interaction Manager makes marketing the two-way street it should be, and helps drive revenue by combining insights from digital and offline campaigns alike to form a 360-degree view of all customer interactions.”
About Teradata Customer Interaction Manager in the Cloud
Customer Interaction Manager provides the comprehensive functionality to achieve these higher response rates, and is based on industry standard technologies. The product features an easy-to-use, intuitive interface (with an adaptable whiteboard design environment), supports data from any database, and runs on any database architecture. Teradata’s Customer Interaction Manager is the central application that marketers use to analyse customer data, segment very specific groups of customers, trigger customer “events,” and choreograph multi-channel communication plans based on the needs of those consumers and the business as a whole.
Customer Interaction Manager is available globally as a Cloud-based solution and as a key element in Teradata’s industry-leading Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) portfolio for data-driven marketing, which also includes Teradata’s Marketing Operations, Real-Time Interaction Manager and Digital Messaging application modules to deliver the most robust IMM offering in the global marketplace.
With Customer Interaction Manager in the Cloud, companies can choose whether to have their customer data on-premise or in the cloud, as the solution does not require an on-premise Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). Both the EDW and Customer Interaction Manager servers, as well as the customer’s data, can be hosted by Teradata in data centres around the world. This flexibility gives cloud users all the advantages of the proven Teradata Analytical Database without having to procure and install hardware in their own data centre, yet still affords them full confidence that their data is not co-mingled with customer data belonging to anyone else. In fact, in all implementations, the customer “owns” administrative operations of the application, as well as maintenance of the application environment and any data transfers between their marketing database and the Customer Interaction Manager application environment. Business benefits of this approach include faster time to market, reduced capital expenditure and lower cost of ownership, as well as reduced IT costs and staffing to support the application.
Key Features
Customer Interaction Manager in the Cloud is part of the Teradata IMM solution and customers can deploy it worldwide via the web. Key features include: dashboards and reports with visualisations for easy interpretation of system-discerned customer insights and campaign results; actionable analytics to spot behavioural trends and activity patterns to help shape and build more effective campaigns; and the capability to access data from Web services, social channels, third-party lists and other data bases.
Teradata eCircle also offers additional modules for integration with the entire Teradata eCircle Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) suite, including Marketing Operations, Real-Time Interaction Manager and eC-messenger. Subscription terms for either on-premises or Cloud-based implementations can be obtained by contacting the Company via www.teradata.com.
