July 1, 2005

IN THE NEWS The Direct Marketing Association presented its Marketer of the Year award to David Neeleman, chairman and CEO of JetBlue Airways, at DM Days, in New York this week. Neeleman's airline industry career began in 1984 when he cofounded Morris Air, a low-fare carrier. He implemented an electronic ticketing system at that carrier, and pioneered a home-based reservation system that is now the foundation of JetBlue's call center, in which all calls to the company's reservation number are handled by representatives working from home. Neeleman said in his speech after the award that JetBlue sees itself as more of a marketing company than an airline: It tries to understand its customers instead of focusing on ad campaigns, which is about brand awareness. "We wanted to be a customer service, direct marketing company that connects directly with its customers and just happens to have an airline. Airlines refer to people who fly [with them] as passengers. That's an offensive word. We call them customers. If you have that connection with people who pay your way, you'll be successful. Repeat customers is what it's all about, and you can't have that connection without direct marketing." Bigfoot Interactive has forged an agreement with Amazon Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, to offer its DREAM email technology platform, marketing automation tools, and professional services as part of the outsourced e-commerce solution Amazon Services develops for enterprise retail clients. DREAM is designed to integrate and automate a wide range of communication and commerce dialogues based on a customer's profile, preference, or purchase behavior. Turnkey modules within the toolkit include welcome messages, order and shipping confirmations, cross- and upsell triggers, product alerts, and shopping cart abandonment triggers. NEW PRODUCTS Siebel Systems unveiled advanced claims capabilities in Siebel Insurance 7.8, a fraud prediction solution that combines predictive analytics, real-time claims detection, claims altering, task execution, and management with insight-driven reporting capabilities meant to assist insurers in addressing, detecting, and preventing fraud. Siebel 7.8 allows insurance organizations to:

detect fraud consistently throughout the life of a claim;

discover new fraud patterns to combat evolving and increasingly sophisticated fraudulent claims;

move claims to closure quickly;

embed proactive fraud detection with the normal claim-adjusting processes; and

understand and measure key baseline and progress metrics in combating claims fraud. Acxiom has announced the general commercial availability of Ranking Invitation to Apply Approvals (RITAA), its newest BI solution. RITAA helps financial service providers, particularly credit card issuers, find and target consumers who are most likely to respond to invitation-to-apply offers and meet the issuer's credit approval standards. It is a model built on Acxiom's InfoBase data, not on credit data. It does not determine credit worthiness, but instead employs marketing data to improve targeting for increased approval likelihood. The company has partnered with nine other organizations, including seven large financial institutions, to implement more than 20 campaigns. ATG has enhanced its commerce and marketing engine, ATG Commerce, with integrated catalog search. With this new capability, any changes companies make in their ATG Commerce catalog will automatically update their ATG Search function with no manual catalog/search integration required. Updates to commerce search can be made in near-real time (rather than in a batch process), shortening the create-to-publish cycle, according to ATG. It will be part of ATG Commerce 7.1 and requires the purchase of the ATG Search engine. CUSTOMER WINS Fifth Third Bancorp has selected Quaero to help the bank measure marketing effectiveness and create an improved customer experience. Quaero customized and implemented Fifth Third's marketing campaign management system, Unica Affinium Campaign. It also helped the bank design key tables to effectively execute and measure marketing programs. FIDUCIA IT AG, an IT service provider for Germany's Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken banking cooperatives, has chosen Siemens' HiPath 8000 Real-Time IP system as its telecommunications platform. The SIP-based solution will become the central softswitch in FIDUCIA IT's network. Most IP telephones can be supported by the solution, as can third-party gateways with standard interfaces, according to the company. Related articles JetBlue Soars Again in Service Rankings OnDemand 8: Siebel's Sophisticated Save? A new, core marketing functionality feature could help the company compete in the SMB space.