CRM gets more personal

A new generation of customer relationship management (CRM) systems is presenting businesses with fresh opportunities to strengthen customer loyalty and generate demand for their products and services, according to experts.

Traditionally, CRM strategies have focused on giving firms more insight into how customers behave, but recently a number of large IT vendors have announced technologies that take CRM further. This next step involves improving the communication channels the business uses to correspond with its customer, through personalisation features.

The past couple of years have seen significant consolidation in the document personalisation market, with a number of specialists in this field being snapped up by larger IT vendors. For example, earlier this year HP announced an agreement to buy enterprise document automation specialist Exstream.

HP’s Liz Cannon said Exstream will continue to develop and support its Dialogue technology as a separate division within HP’s Web Services and Software Global Business Unit. Cannon said Dialogue enables users to design, create and distribute highly customised documents using rich media that are intended for “an audience of one”.

The Exstream deal has handed HP an impressive array of customers in the financial services, government, telecoms and utility sectors, including HSBC, The Co-operative Bank, AT&T and National Grid.

Gartner analyst Pete Basiliere said HP was responding to a growing trend among such enterprises to use CRM and ERP systems to pull together compelling content for customers and prospects, and then communicate with them in the media of their choice, whether print, audio, video, mobile phone, PDA and so on.

Another enterprise IT vendor looking to tap into this trend is EMC. In early 2006, EMC completed the £140m purchase of input management software vendor Captiva, a specialist in tools for converting paper-based information into archivable digital content. EMC plans to integrate Captiva’s technology with that of document personalisation specialist Document Sciences, which it bought late last year. This should culminate in the launch later this year of a range of new “transactional content management” solutions, according to Mark Lewis, EMC content management and archiving division president.

Chris Blaik, European marketing director for EMC’s content management and archiving division, said the aim was to offer enterprises a “customer communications management platform that can deliver communications in a mass-personalised manner for high-volume applications such as bank statements and application forms, as well as on-demand and real-time interactions for such things as boarding cards, special offers and correspondence”.

Ovum analyst Mike Davies said EMC’s Document Sciences deal was likely to be emulated by other vendors in the enterprise content management space. “They will either develop their own solutions or are likely to make purchases in the near future,” he said. Davies added that developments in social media meant there would be no let-up in the trend towards more targeted business communications. “The market for personalisation is growing because Web 2.0 is all about individuality,” he said.