|
This white paper describes Online Insight Corporation's software solution suite that provides the next generation in Guided Selling and Market Intelligence, driven not by guesstimates about a customer based on ancient demographics and historical purchases, but by up-to-the-second needs and preferences measured real-time in a first-hand "Collaborative Customer Conversation". Our best of breed Sales and Marketing Effectiveness (SME) solutions make this vision real and usher in a new era of unparalleled customer loyalty and understanding. We begin this section with a few definitions followed by a brief examination of the business problems we solve, how our solutions fit into the relationship management software application space, and the advantages offered over other relationship management options by our breakthrough applications.
Secrets prevent win-win business everyday
The fundamentals of business are fairly simple. Customers have needs to satisfy and preferences about the products or services that will fill those needs. Businesses, on the other hand, have products or services with features that offer value. Win-win business transactions provide products or services with the right features/value to best satisfy customer needs/ preferences. This builds lasting relationships that truly drive the long-term success of companies.
Surprisingly, these four basic elements for conducting win-win business and growing long-term customer relationships are frequently held secret in day-to-day business interactions. The collaborative customer conversation that would discover customer preferences and relate them to product or service features is inadequately undertaken, if at all. Bad deals are made to the detriment of customer relationships simply because buyers and sellers keep secrets from each other; not because it is in their best interest, but because they are not equipped to share these secrets at the scale, complexity, and velocity required in today's globally wired business environment.
This type of software is also commonly referred to simply as "Customer Relationship Management (CRM)" solutions taking advantage of the broad definition of "Customer" presented above.
The burden of solving this problem clearly falls on the shoulders of the sellers, and the technology that makes this possible is the core competency of Online Insight. Our solutions explicitly capture the needs/preferences of a customer in real-time and, through powerful proprietary algorithms, match them with the features/value of even the most complex products and services to arrive at the win-win of maximal customer satisfaction and enterprise sales. Additionally, our solutions store these preference models for market research against a virtual focus group as large as your customer-base that is available 24x7x365.
Customer and partner relationship management
Relationship management effectiveness is fundamental to every enterprise's success in terms of both revenue and profitability and can be measured as Return on Relationship (ROR), a metric composed of the number of customer relationships held and the profitability of those relationships. There are many types of software solutions in this space, which we can put into context by organizing them along two important dimensions:
1 How close they are to the customer's secrets as opposed to being closer to back-office systems and data.
2 How close they are to being available in real-time during a customer/partner interaction as opposed to being historical-trend and/or data-mining types of solutions.
In this context we can see that Online Insight's technology is "right there" in the thinking process of customers, "real-time" as they weigh feature tradeoffs and make buying decisions.
Our solutions bring the next generation in sales and marketing effectiveness tools. On the sales side they uncover the secret needs and preferences of the customer to sell feature/value benefits right into them. On the marketing side, the preferences and needs can be leveraged to understand critical concepts, such as: impacts of product changes, value of product features, reception for new products, and relationships between purchase drivers (e.g. cost sensitivity but with a strong brand preference).
|
