Exalead CloudView
TM
&
The CRM (Re)volution
Unlocking the Potential of CRM to
Boost Sales and Improve Service
- In Just a Few Weeks
The Problem with Traditional CRM . . . .1
1. Customer Data is Everywhere . . . .1
2. Channels are Multiplying . . . .1
3 Efficiency is Dropping . . . .2
4. Expectations are Rising . . . .2
Why Workarounds Aren’t Working... . . .3
1. A Fundamental Technology Disconnect . . . .3
2. A Formidable Data Management Challenge . . . .3
3. A User Experience Mismatch . . . .3
The CloudView Search-Based Model . . . .4
1. A Unique, 360° Customer View . . . .4
2. Easy Syndication to All Channels . . . .5
3. Unprecedented Performance and a Low TCO . . . .8
Examples: CloudView in Action . . . .9
1. Capgemini 360° Multi-Channel CRM . . . .9
2. Exalead Salesminer Sales Information System . . . .11
3 Postal Agency Multi-Channel Customer Information System . . . .13
4 Akerys Customer Self-Service . . . .15
5 Lagardère Extended CRM . . . .16
The Problem with Traditional CRM
CRM vendors claim to deliver a 360° customer view, helping you to strengthen customer relationships, market and sell more effectively, and provide faster, better customer service. While most companies benefit from specific CRM tools in specific instances, overall satisfaction with CRM solutions remains low. Why?
Vendors argue unsatisfied customers have simply failed to take full advantage of their solutions’ capabilities. While it’s true few actually use all the functions available in their CRMs, the challenges are more fundamental than CRM vendors care to admit.
1. Customer Data is Everywhere
In most companies, customer information resides in more than 20 enterprise systems, with some organizations having more than 50 ERPs alone.2
If that weren’t daunting enough, the vast majority of customer data (IDC estimates up to 95% 3) actually lives outside these systems, in vast stores of ‘unstructured’ content like Web pages, email, Office documents, phone recordings and blogs.
2. Channels are Multiplying
At the same time, the IS ‘spaghetti’ has become further entangled due to an increase in the number of customer interaction channels (contact centers, sales offices, websites, branches and storefronts, customer self-service...), and an increase in the types of communication methods customers demand within each of these channels, including email, mail, chat, instant messaging, fixed and portables phones, PDAs, online video and interactive kiosks.
Who’s To Blame?
“Only a few [companies] have a fully integrated approach to CRM. Mainly, they put in a program on an ad hoc basis to address pain points as they emerge...They duplicate data collection and never fully exploit the CRM
capability of getting a complete customer profile because they don't integrate the customer data."
Chris Fletcher Research Director, AMR Research 1
3
Efficiency is Dropping
Against this backdrop, sales and support staff can’t respond efficiently or effectively to customer demands even with a CRM system. Service agents continue to have to open a dozen or more applications to answer a simple customer inquiry. Sales loses credibility on a call because they can’t get an accurate or complete view of their customer fast enough. Managers make less than optimal decisions because they are operating with incomplete information. And customers, frustrated with cumbersome, fragmented sales and service systems, throw up their hands and phone customer support
-by far the most expensive customer interaction for a company.
4. Expectations are Rising
Simultaneously, customers and employees ‘spoiled’ by the consumer Web are demanding more and more of CRM. Employees want software that’s as fast and easy to use as Amazon (Who would shop Amazon if you had to attend 30 days of training first? Or if you had to wait more than a minute for a page to load everytime you ran a query or clicked a link?). Customers similarly expect service that’s as speedy and personal as shopping on the Web (“Amazon remembers my last purchase, the items I browsed last month, and my nephew’s birthday. Why can’t you?”). What is a company to do?
Well, what many are doing is choosing to deploy CRM plus Exalead CloudViewTM:
• Akerys selected Oracle plusCloudView
• Lagardère Active Media chose Microsoft Dynamics plusCloudView
• Gefco selected Oracle plusCloudView
• A national postal agency opted for Oracle plusCloudView
• Exalead opted for Salesforce plusCloudView, etc...
Why? Because CRM vendor workarounds aren’t working, while CloudView search-based customer information systems are.
Page 2
Proliferating channels, contact methods and data silos create an environment that is frustrating for staff, management and customers alike
Why Workarounds Aren’t Working...
Recognizing their solutions are operating with incomplete data in diverse, fragmented IS environments, CRM vendors have been seeking to overcome performance barriers by expanding the channels they support (Mobile CRM, Social CRM, etc.) and the systems they connect to (SCM, Accounting, ERP, BI), in some cases even subsuming the functionalities of such external systems (like billing) right into their own platform.
Similarly, the makers of these external systems have been racing to incorporate CRM functionality into their own platforms, while companies with in-house solutions struggle to bridge data silos and scale database systems. And through each evolution, all continue to strive for the simplicity of use staff and customers expect.
1. A Fundamental Technology Disconnect
To date, these efforts have met with limited success because there is in fact a fundamental disconnect between the underlying IT model for CRM and the business needs CRM seeks to address: traditional CRM systems can’t function without a clean, centralized and well-controlled database of customer information—and trying to build and maintain such a monolithic resource today is a Sisyphean task.
2. A Formidable Data Management Challenge
As William Band, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, points out, the right approach to customer data management has to date remained elusive:
“Building data warehouses often fails to deliver ‘real time’ access, and end users compensate by deploying myriad purpose-built data marts. CRM applications themselves can leave enterprises with a fragmented view of the customer as a result of multiple instances, disparate ERP systems, and poor data integration. Business intelligence applications offer the promise of being the focal point for customer intelligence across multiple data sources. But BI efforts often highlight how poor customer data quality really is—leaving users scrambling to fight a losing battle to keep customer data clean and updated.” 4
3. A User Experience Mismatch
And even if one could construct a massive database housing a perpetually clean copy of all essential customer data, users still wouldn’t be satisfied interacting with an application built upon it. Relational databases were designed to record transactions (“write” operations) entered by a limited number of users against a limited volume of data. And traditional database programming (SQL, or Structured Query Language programming), demands that all possible queries, views and reports be anticipated and hard-coded (programmed) in advance, leaving users to struggle with long, complex forms and rigid operational boundaries when accessing information.
In short, the technology simply hasn’t existed to manage vast volumes of unstructured and structured customer data scattered across multiple silos, much less to deliver simple, real-time, unified access to it to a wide base of users for a broad range of purposes. At least until now.
The CloudView Search-Based Model
Now CloudView search-based technologies offer an alternative model for collecting, delivering and using customer information. Breaking with a 25-year tradition of relational database-centered application development, CloudView search-based applications (SBAs) remove the barriers to effective CRM by shifting primary information access from relational database systems to a search engine index, which is uniquely designed for fast information access (‘read’ operations) by vast numbers of users against massive data volumes. What does this fundamental shift mean? It means you can finally:
• Achieve a unique, 360° view of each customer (without painful data integration),
• Exploit a single information platform to serve all your customer information needs (sales, customer support, customer self-service, marketing, operational business intelligence), &
• Provide access that is as simple, fast and intuitive as the consumer Web,
...all in only a few weeks, with no impact on existing systems, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional technologies.
1. A Unique, 360° Customer View
A.
Universal Data Collection
First, the CloudView search engine can collect all your customer information wherever it lives: enterprise applications (CRM,ERP, SCM, etc.), email servers, support tickets, content management systems, SaaS applications, file servers, voice recordings, videos, the Web, website logs, etc.). There is no limit to the types or volume of data collected, and no impact on underlying production systems.
B
Unified Data Access
Second, CloudView’s advanced indexing engine automatically aggregates and structures this disparate data to deliver a unique, comprehensive view of each individual customer, and by extension, more accurate and complete aggregate views of customer segments. And this federated vision can be generated instantly, without painful data migration, cleansing or consolidation; Moreover, the entire system updates in real-time.
C
‘Mass Personalization’
Beyond aggregating data, CloudView’s advanced semantic processors can identify embedded meanings and relationships within your unified data layer to deliver sales guidance (upsell and cross-sell recommendations, qualification information, etc.) based on each unique customer profile— enabling your organization to achieve the kind of tremendously successful ‘mass personalization’ heretofore only realizable on the consumer Web.
360° View
Thanks to CloudView, the staff at a telecommunications contact center will no longer have to open a dozen applications to answer a single customer inquiry
“The next generation of information work will be search based."
2. Easy Syndication to All Channels
You can leverage the unified customer information and intelligence maintained by your CloudView engine across all your customer interaction channels, rapidly deploying iterations for:
• Sales
• Customer Support
• Customer Self-Service
• Management
You can deploy CloudView-powered applications for each of these channels in a matter of just weeks, not months or years, thanks to CloudView’s:
• Independent data layer,
• Flexible data model,
• Unified platform for information access, reporting and search,
• Service-oriented architecture (SOA), and
• Support for standard Web technologies (SOAP, REST, XML, RSS, RDF, OWL, etc.).
After CloudView
A.
Sales Information Systems
Use your CloudView platform to deploy a Sales Information System that fully exploits all the data in your existing CRM, plus:
• Business applications (Billing, Project Management, Provisioning, Shipping, ERP, SCM, etc.)
• Communication records (support tickets, email, chat logs, phone transcripts, etc.)
• Web data (website logs, customer websites, blogs, data from social networks, RSS feeds...)
The resulting 360° view of each customer enables more effective inbound communications, outbound calls, pipeline management and campaign planning, and customer profiles can be complemented with concrete action guidance, such as product and service recommendations and qualification data like purchasing capacity, relative match strength for proposed offerings, risk ratings, etc., based on an individual’s unique profile and interaction history (purchases, website visits, length of time since acquisition, frequency of contact, etc.).
B.
Contact Centers
Deployed in your Contact Center, a CloudView-powered customer information system boosts the efficiency of front-line agents, provides management with practical new reporting and analysis tools, and brings new agility to the infrastructure used to support both front- and back-end functions.
In the case of front-line agents, issue resolution is made more effective through unified data access, support for multi-modal communications (Web, email, chat, instant messaging, video, SMS), and rapidly constructed (and always up-to-date) knowledgebases and expert directories. CloudView also offers agents a simple tool for increasing revenue through upselling and cross-selling suggestions, thereby helping your contact center evolve from a cost center to a value-generating operation.
For management, a CloudView-powered system provides real-time operational business intelligence (reporting, monitoring and analysis) anyone can use, on their own, without IT support. Both operational and executive managers are using CloudView to more effectively allocate resources, manage at-home agents, direct remote or virtual contact centers, develop proactive outbound communications, communicate contact center value to external management, and in general, to gain a much deeper understanding of client needs and behaviors.
Contact Center ROI
Increase Revenue
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Reduce customer churn
• Increase upselling/cross-selling
Reduce Costs
• Less training, higher productivity
• Shorter calls
• Real-time resource allocation
• Lower IT/admin costs
Sales Info. System ROI
Increase Revenue
• Better/faster prospect qualification
• More successful up-/cross-selling
Reduce Costs
• Reduce CRM licensing & training
• Accelerate and automate qualification and planning
At the infrastructure level, CloudView helps IT better exploit existing assets like VoIP or SIP systems, opens up new resources such as call recordings for in-depth analysis, facilitates cost-saving decentralization (remote or outsourced centers, at-home workers), and supports improved integration with back-office processes (Computer Telephony Integration, CTI).
C.
Customer Self-Service
CloudView can also help organizations reduce costly contact center calls and boost customer satisfaction and loyalty through improved customer self-service. You can easily make relevant data from your CloudView customer information system and related knowledgebases accessible via your website, phone, PDA or kiosk.
Users instantly adopt CloudView search-based applications because, in spite of their power, they are as simple, fast and familiar to use as a consumer Web search engine, replacing long database forms with a single text box, natural language querying, and one-click menus built dynamically from the data itself.
D.
Customer Intelligence for All
Beyond service and support, CloudView delivers real-time operational and strategic decision intelligence across the breadth of all customer information resources.
With one-click simplicity, any user can generate charts, tables and graphs on-the-fly based on any criteria contained in unstructured or structured source data—with no training, and no calls to IT.
Intelligence ROI
Increase Revenue
• Better/faster decision making
• Real time change management
Reduce Costs
• Reduce BI licensing & training
• Accelerate & automate planning
• Reduce internal IT support costs
• Lower HW/SW costs
Self-Service ROI
Increase Revenue
• Boost customer satisfaction
• Incorporate up-/cross-selling
Reduce Costs
• Reduce Contact Center calls
• Cut deployment & maintenance costs
“Self-service transactions average approximately 15% of the cost of their assisted counterparts.”
3. Unprecedented Performance and a Low TCO
This flexible use across all channels is complemented by unprecedented performance, scalability and affordability.
A.
Astonishing Performance
Thanks to its unique Web heritage (CloudView is the only enterprise search engine developed simultaneously for the Web and the enterprise), CloudView delivers performance impossible to achieve with conventional database technologies. It can index petabytes of data in real-time while providing sub-second processing for 1000s of simultaneous users. Sample benchmarks include:
Indexing Performance
Query Processing Performance
B.
Easy, Unlimited Scaling
And, due to its unique engineering and fully distributed architecture, CloudView further scales instantly, painlessly and without limits, scaling to millions of users and billions of documents simply by adding inexpensive commodity hardware.
C.
Low Costs
Search-based applications in general use only a fraction of the resources of their database counterparts, and CloudView further uses on average only 1/5 of the resources of its search competitors, processing up to 100 million documents and 20 queries per second on a single low cost server.
Context Record Type Indexing Speed
Telco Logs Small 4000 records/second/server
Web Index Medium (Web Pages) 8 billion records/week
Email Upper Medium 200 records/second/server
Context Records Performance per Server
E Commerce 15 million 200 queries/second
Web Index 70 million 30 queries/second
Archiving 200 million 5 queries/second
CloudView scales easily and without limits in five directions: number of users, features, data volume, queries processed and data refresh rate.
Examples: CloudView in Action
1. Capgemini 360° Multi-Channel CRM
In just a few weeks, Capgemini developed a next-generation, multi-channel CRM application built upon CloudView search engine technology. Developed as a POC for a large multinational bank, the application delivers a 360° customer vision, incorporating CRM data, transaction data (accounting billing, etc.), Call Center data, email and website logs... all securely and unintrusively collected from source systems and updated in real-time. The solution also delivers intuitive, actionable business intelligence users can exploit without IT assistance. And as the system is search-based, it offers unprecedented performance and scalability using remarkably lean resources. Features include:
A True 360° Customer View
• Single access point for all sources & channels: CRM, Call Center, ERP, email, web logs...
• Simple usage in the style of the consumer Web
• Completely non-intrusive to source systems
Automated Sales Guidance
• Upsell and cross-sell recommendations
• Risk analysis calculation
• Campaign planning tools
• Completely automated and evolves in real time
‘Democratized’ Decision-Making Support
• Real-time reporting and unlimited multi-criteria analysis
• On-the-fly generation of dashboards, charts, graphs and tables
• Single text box search and natural language querying for zero-training use
A True 360° Customer View
The solution provides a true 360° view of each customer through unified access to all customer data. As shown in the screen at left, the system aggregates data from the CRM system, product portfolios, purchase and transaction records, customer support logs, website logs, phone transcripts, and email messages for a complete understanding of each individual client. The platform further generates upsell and cross-sell suggestions based on each customer’s unique profile. And all data is collected, aggregated and processed with no impact on source systems.Capgemini 360 ROI
Increase Revenue
• Improve campaign effectiveness
• Facilitate up-/cross-selling
• Boost customer satisfaction
Reduce Costs
• Reduce IT support requests
• Save on licensing
Easy, Versatile Business Intelligence
Any user can generate on-the-fly, real-time reporting and analysis simply by entering a search term in a single text box or clicking on a graph segment (screen at left). Unlike traditional database-centered BI, users can drill up or down on any criteria available in the system (derived from both unstructured and structured data) and they can do so entirely on their own, without having to call IT.
Simple, Web-Style Search & Unlimited Filtering
The solution pairs simple natural language search with user aids like spell checking, spelling correction, phonetic matching, suggested queries, and synonym matching to help users find customer information quickly and accurately. The solution also provides dynamic, multi-criteria filtering so sales and marketing staff can rapidly generate precisely targeted campaign lists.
Above:
1 Users can save their queries.
2 A simple natural language query in a text box yields deeply textured results
3 Users can export queries or generate charts and graphs with a single click
4 Users can refine their results using unlimited criteria (customer profession, income, purchase history, location, etc.)
2. Exalead Salesminer Sales Information System
CloudView-based Salesminer is Exalead’s own internal CRM application. As with the Capgemini POC, this application was built in just a few weeks. It comprises data from sources including:
• Salesforce®CRM
• Exalead’s Customer Support System
• Exalead’s Project Management Tools
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• The Web
Salesminer is noteworthy for its 1) easy navigation, 2) seamless, secure aggregation of unstructured and structured data from both internal and external sources, and 3) the high added-value it brings to a popular CRM system (Salesforce).
Easy Navigation
Salesminer features a compelling blend of query auto-completion and context-sensitive drop down menus to help users quickly identify and access resources. For example, if a user types “IBM” in the search box (screen at right), relevant records (customers, prospects, employees, companies, etc.) appear in a drop-down menu so the user can ‘jump-ahead’ to the resource desired.
Similarly, if a user is browsing Opportunities and types “stage” in the text box, a drop-down menu of Salesforce-defined Stages appears so the user can quickly narrow the results according to one these categories, for example, viewing only ‘Closed’ opportunities. Furthermore, search results are accompanied by a dynamic, one-click menu of filters for refining searches (at right, opportunity-based filters for refining the
search by opportunity name, stage, salesperson, country, amount, etc.).
Unified Information Access
Customers are also presented within a 360° view, aggregating account information from Salesforce and details from project management records, email communications, intranet files, customer support exchanges and the Web. For example, for the client below, the system automatically displays:
• Contact information from Salesforce, with a direct link to the company record in Salesforce
• Email-based support tickets (‘Cases’)
• A list of company contacts drawn from multiple systems (‘Contacts’)
• Opportunity information from Salesforce
• Tasks from Salesforce and the project management system
• The latest customer news from Web sources
Other views offer email communications and related information from the company intranet. All of this data is updated in real-time with no impact on source systems.
Exceptional Value on Top of Salesforce
Salesforce and other CRM applications provide valuable support for activities such as prospecting, opportunity tracking, and pipeline management. They have well proven their utility. However, the reality is most customer data resides outside these systems, in channels that have been difficult to integrate (Web, email, Office documents, etc.), for both technical and workflow reasons. Using CloudView to extend existing CRM applications is a fast, inexpensive and highly effective way to bring exceptional new value to these solutions, extending both their use and usefulness to a degree never before possible. And certainly today, extracting more value from one’s existing investments makes far more sense than disruptive (and costly) rip and replace strategies.
Salesminer ROI
Increase Revenue
• Boost campaign effectiveness
• Augment up-/cross-selling
• Increase customer satisfaction
Reduce Costs
• Reduce IT support requests
• Increase staff productivity
• Save on licensing
3
Postal Agency Multi-Channel Customer
Information System
A national postal agency established a strategic plan for 2008-2012 that included aggressive new customer service objectives stressing responsiveness, promptness and reliability. To meet these objectives, the agency needed a new Customer Service Information System (CSIS) that could replace multiple siloed support systems with a comprehensive solution for rapidly analyzing and responding to all customer inquiries and requests, whether received by mail, Internet or telephone.
An Innovative Strategy
The agency chose an innovative strategy for its new CSIS, opting for a CloudView search-based application (SBA) developed by Exalead partner Capgemini instead of a traditional database application. The CloudView search engine serves as the main information access layer within a framework encompassing:
• An open source LAMP infrastructure (Linux, MySQL, PHP)
• Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for call centers
• Web-based access for all users
• Standard Web technologies (REST, Atom RSS)
The Results
The agency achieved the results they had hoped for: a robust yet simple to use platform giving agents in seven call centers instant, real-time access to all customer data. Solution benefits include:
• Rapid Time to Market
Operational version deployed in 3 months, followed by 4 iterative releases over 6 months
• Unified Information Access - Delivered Instantly
A single point of access to real-time data collected from 10 source databases, with a 500 millisecond processing rate for queries
• Web-Style Simplicity and Familiarity
A single text-box for queries, plus aids like approximate matching and spelling suggestions
• Non-Intrusive Deployment and Easy Modification
Deployed and modifiable with no impact on underlying production systems
• Top Performance at a Low Cost
Remarkably lean resources, and the ability to scale linearly by adding low-cost servers
• Preservation of Existing Investments
No modifications required to existing databases, and updates made through the portal
The CloudView SBA model enabled the agency to deploy a robust, easy-to-use solution in only 90 days, with no impact on existing systems
Postal CSIS ROI
Increase Revenue
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Reduce customer churn
• Increase upselling/cross-selling
Reduce Costs
• Boost staff efficiency and retention
• Reduce training requirements
• Shorten call duration
• Allocate resources in real-time
Enhanced Tracking & Reporting
In addition to boosting the efficiency of call center staff, the new CSIS system further provides incident tracking and management tools for Back Office staff (25,000 agents in 3,300 mail facilities) and do-it-yourself reporting on key indicators for Management.
New Possibilities: Self-Service & Telemarketing
The same features that have made the CSIS platform beneficial to internal staff also make it a natural fit for Web-based customer service, namely:
• Unified, real-time information access
• Web-style simplicity and sub-second responsiveness
• User navigational aids and support for approximate as well as exact matches
The agency is therefore considering extending CSIS services to the public at large via its website, helping the organization to control costs and enhance customer satisfaction. More immediately, the agency has decided to deploy the same model (CloudView + REST/Atom + LAMP) for a Sales Information System for Telemarketing.
Postal Agency Customer Service Information System: An agile framework for meeting the needs of Front Office agents, Back Office staff and Management. Architecture & schema by Exalead partner ARMOSC; systems integration by Exalead partner Capgemini
4 Akerys Customer Self-Service
Akerys is a real estate services company offering new home construction, property sales and leasing, real estate-based financial services, and property management. Though many clients utilize the full spectrum of Akerys’s services, the company’s customer information has to-date been siloed within each division. Akerys therefore decided to deploy CloudView to provide unified customer information across all divisions to both internal sales and support staff and to customers through a customer self-service extranet.
As a first step, Akerys deployed CloudView for a customer self-service extranet for its property management clients, for whom Akerys manages over 100,000 properties. To date, all information regarding these properties has been recorded in internal property management applications (Oracle database) and various isolated file systems, with key documents (utility payments, fiscal records, etc.) generated as PDFs and mailed to customers.
In only 4 months, Exalead and SI partner Homsys worked with Akerys to develop and deploy a secure self-service extranet that aggregates all relevant Oracle and file server data, and makes all PDF documents available online. The new system gives property management clients a unified view of all their interactions with Akerys, and instant access to all documents concerning their properties, representing a tremendous cost-savings for Akerys. Work has now begun on extending this extranet platform across Akerys’s other divisions, and adapting it for internal sales and customer support staff. And, thanks to CloudView’s independent data layer, information access can be scaled without having to scale underlying systems.
Akerys Self-Service ROI
Increase Revenue
• Boost client satisfaction & retention
• More effectively close prospects
Reduce Costs
• Reduce staff labor costs
• Cut materials costs (supplies, postage)
• Lower Oracle HW/SW costs
The CloudView-powered extranet enables instant client access to property details, service contracts, correspondence & financial records.
5
Lagardère Extended CRM
Extending Access to MS Dynamics CRM
Pleased with the performance of their Microsoft Dynamics CRM system, Lagardère Active decided to extend platform access to their telemarketing staff. However, initial tests revealed that this mainly non-technical group found the application difficult to use.The tests indicated that successful use of the platform demanded a certain level of familiarity with the organizational schema used by the Dynamics database, as did the search function, which also required a high
degree of query precision. And as search results are returned in a flat list with limited sorting and filtering options, users have to resort to complex Boolean formulas in the Advanced Find tool to meet their filtering needs. With prospects on the line and a high volume of calls to make, telemarketing needed a more efficient solution.
Pleased with the way CloudView had enhanced the usability of 20+ Lagardère media web sites, Exalead partner Business & Decision suggested Lagardère deploy CloudView in conjunction with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to solve this usability challenge as well.
Lagardère CRM ROI
Increase Revenue
• Better targeting of prospects
• Higher contact volume
Reduce Costs
• Improved productivity
• Less training
• Fewer IT support requests
Before CloudView
Top Left: Filtering requires manipulating multiple criteria in tandem with complex boolean operators Bottom Left: Successful navigation often depends on understanding the Dynamics database hierarchy Bottom Right: Search resutls are delivered in a flat list with limited sorting and filtering options
‘Democratized’ Access
Using CloudView to liberate Microsoft Dynamics CRM from its database-bound search and navigation functions successfully transformed the CRM platform into a familiar, Web-style tool telemarketing agents could navigate quickly and intuitively. In particular, executing searches against the CloudView index rather than directly against the CRM database enables:
• User aids like natural language querying,
full text search, type-ahead query suggestions and fuzzy matching (phonetic and approximate spelling matches, spelling correction, and synonym matching)
• Faceted navigation of content using categories extracted from the CRM database and presented in context sensitive menus
• Sub-second responsiveness, regardless of any increase in data volume or number of users
Improved Data Quality
As an added benefit, Lagardère has found that CloudView’s fuzzy matching and type-ahead query suggestion tool reduce the introduction of anomalous data into the system, for example, preventing a user from creating a duplicate record for a ‘new’ client who in fact already exists in the database.
An Agile, Adaptable Platform
Enhancing MS Dynamics with CloudView also gives Lagardère an agile infrastructure it can rapidly adapt to meet evolving needs. For example, with CloudView in place, Lagardère can quickly and inexpensively extend Dynamics CRM content with data from external systems to meet the needs of a specific business unit, or to provide a more comprehensive client view for all.
After CloudView
For Lagardère, CloudView’s auto-suggestion tool offers a list of matching entries from the CRM database, greatly increasing search efficiency
CloudView + CRM:
The Start of a Beautiful Relationship
These clients and others are using CloudView to (re)volutionize their customer information systems because they know CloudView combines the multi-faceted richness of a traditional database-centered CRM application with the simplicity, speed, and scalability of the Web—and that it can deliver the unified data access and on-the-fly business intelligence neither
conventional search engines nor relational database technologies can provide.
And with remarkably lean resource requirements, non-disruptive deployment, and a time to market measured in just weeks, CloudView has proven its ability to help companies rapidly increase revenue, reduce costs and gain new business agility.
We invite you to call us today at one of the locations on the following page to learn more. We will be happy to work with you to examine your existing applications and infrastructure, review your planned initiatives, and provide you with detailed options for using CloudView search technologies to derive extraordinary new value from your customer information resources.
ENDNOTES
1. CRM Buyer, “The Retail Industry's CRM Implementation Problem,” John K. Higgins, January 4, 2010
2. "Leveraging Search to Improve Contact Center Performance," Richard Snow, VP & Research Director, Customer & Contact Center Management, March, 2009
3. IDC, “The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010, March, 2007
4. SearchCRM.com, “Expert CRM predictions for 2010,” December 28, 2009
5. IDC, “The Information Advantage: Information Access in Tomorrow's Enterprise,” October, 2009
6. Forrester Research, Inc., “2008 Contact Center Technology Trends,” August 13, 2008 7. IDC, “Worldwide Search and Discovery Software 2008–2012 Forecast Update and 2007
Vendor Shares: Bloom Amid Economic Gloom,” October, 2008
CloudView’s Triple Edge Over Traditional Technologies
Search: A Better
Way...
“Pulling data together from diverse silos is not easy. It can be accomplished through major shuffling and restructuring of repositories, or by using the ad hoc and fuzzy matching
capabilities of the latest search applications that perform joins between multiple databases and content repositories on the fly.”
Founded in 2000 by search engine pioneers, Exalead is a global software provider in the information access and enterprise and Web search markets. More than 250 companies worldwide and 100 million unique users a month rely on Exalead's information access platform to search, discover, and manage their information assets for faster, smarter decision-making, real-time unified data access, and improved productivity.
Exalead’s team includes industry-leading experts in information search, non-structured data analysis, and natural language processing. This team has concentrated its R&D efforts on meeting its clients’ need to collect, transform, index, and search arbitrarily complex data from heterogeneous sources.
As a result, the Exalead CloudView product has emerged as a uniquely successful platform for automatically structuring very high volumes of nonstructured data, such as email messages, Office documents, presentations, Web pages, blogs, forums, and RSS feeds, and meaningfully synthesizing this data with structured content.
CloudView is currently being deployed for Enterprise Search, Embedded Search for OEMs/ISVs, and Search-Based Applications including:
• Extended Business Applications (harnessing unstructured data to enhance enterprise applications like BI, SCM, CRM, ERP and Compliance)
• Innovative Web Applications (search and intelligent mash-ups for high traffic websites) • Improved Database Applications (database offloading and agile development for
information access, operational reporting, and comprehensive business applications) For more information, please visit http://www.exalead.com/software. The company’s public WWW search engine is accessible at http://www.exalead.com/search.
Exalead UK 33 Cavendish Square London W1G 0PW Tel: +44 (0)207 182 4003 Fax: +44 (0)207 182 4181 Exalead Germany Niederlassung Deutschland Robert-Bosch-Strasse 7 64293 Darmstadt Tel: +49 6151 35 99 690-0 Fax: +49 6151 35 99 690-35 Exalead Italy
Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi, 86 20121 - Milano Tel: +39 02 62 71 10 10 Fax: +39 02 62 71 10 11 Exalead Benelux Dodeweg 6c 3832 RC LEUSDEN The Netherlands Tel: +31 85 201 59 82 Fax: +31 85 201 61 80 Exalead Spain
Pza. Pablo Ruiz Picasso 1, Torre Picasso 28020 Madrid Tel: +34 902 10 43 51 Exalead France 10 place de la Madeleine 75008 Paris Tel: +33 (0) 1 55 35 26 26 Fax: +33 (0) 1 55 35 26 27 Exalead USA
221 Main Street, Suite 750 San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: +1 (415) 230 3800 Fax: +1 (415) 230 3850
