E.piphany Gets Vertical

"Time, permission, and attention is what you have when customers come to you," says Charles Watson, product line marketing manager of E.piphany. "You have a millisecond to decide what is the best offer at this time for this person." Recognizing this, E.piphany has introduced two vertical versions of its Interaction Advisor (formerly called E.piphany Real Time): Interaction Advisor for Retail Finance and Interaction Advisor for Telecommunications. The focus of the products is on retention and cross-selling, the goal being "to turn every inbound interaction into a business opportunity," Watson says. Interaction Advisor features self-learning analytics, rules, and analytics that work together in real time to create offers, multichannel offer execution capabilities, and closed-loop monitoring and analysis of campaigns. It also is designed to give users the ability to coordinate inbound marketing across offers, channels, and divisions. And it can attach to any data source. Halifax Bank is one E.piphany customer that has already implemented elements of Interaction Advisor for Retail Finance. Halifax first integrated it into its homegrown call center application, then deployed it into its IVR, as well as into 750 retail branches, where it is used as a lead generation mechanism. As tellers conduct customer transactions, the system serves up information offers on relevant products. The teller then presents the offer to the customer, if appropriate (e.g., if the customer isn't in an obvious rush). If the customer accepts the offer for information, the teller marks it in the system and the bank follows up. Halifax has experienced a 55 percent increase in the offer acceptance rate among its top-selling contact center agents, as well as increase of about 15 percent among teller--with a 50 percent close rate among that 15 percent. And the bank achieved payback within six months of the initial phase of the implementation. According to Ruth Southern, head of CRM development, marketing and customer relations at Halifax, the bank's customers benefit from a more relevant experience, and its employees have more confidence when cross-selling, because Interaction Advisor presents the most appropriate offer for each customer. Another early user, Bell Mobility, is having success with Interaction Advisor for Telecommunications. The company has deployed the tool to 550 agents in the United States and 2,300 in Canada. As a result, Bell Mobility has seen an 18 percent lift in the number of sales per hour, and a 16 percent increase in inbound marketing revenue.