Teradata Corp., a provider of analytic data platforms, applications and services, has announced through its Teradata Applications division the general availability of Customer Interaction Manager (CIM) in the Cloud, a data-driven marketing solution that enables real-time, dialogue-based customer interaction.
Whether deployed in the Cloud or on-premise, Customer Interaction Manager offers best-of-breed integrated inbound and outbound messaging which yields the ability to execute multi-step customer conversations across multiple digital and traditional channels. These capabilities are helping businesses worldwide to truly engage with their customers and make marketing budgets go further, all by improving communications that drive retention and sales through timely and relevant communications and offers that drive unprecedented responses and click-through rates.
"By leveraging this technology and expertise, we are developing a better understanding of how our consumers want to engage with P&G, so that we may make communications more relevant to foster meaningful and lasting consumer relationships," said Andy Walter, vice-president of Global Business Services (GBS), Procter & Gamble, in a statement.
Customer Interaction Manager provides the functionality to achieve higher response rates and is based on industry standard technologies. The product features an easy-to-use, intuitive interface (with an adaptable whiteboard design environment), supports data from any database, and runs on any database architecture. Teradata's Customer Interaction Manager is the central application that marketers use to analyze customer data, segment very specific groups of customers, trigger customer events, and choreographs multichannel communication plans based on the needs of those consumers and the business as a whole.
Customer Interaction Manager is available globally as a Cloud-based solution and as a key element in Teradata's Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) portfolio for data-driven marketing, which also includes Teradata's Marketing Operations, Real-Time Interaction Manager and Digital Messaging application modules to deliver the most robust IMM offering in the global marketplace.
With Customer Interaction Manager in the Cloud, companies can choose whether to have their customer data on-premise or in the cloud, as the solution does not require an on-premise Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). Both the EDW and Customer Interaction Manager servers, as well as the customer's data, can be hosted by Teradata in data centers globally. This flexibility gives cloud users the advantages of the Teradata Analytical Database without having to procure and install hardware in their own data center, yet still affords them full confidence that their data is not co-mingled with customer data belonging to anyone else.
In all implementations, the customer owns administrative operations of the application, as well as maintenance of the application environment and any data transfers between their marketing database and the Customer Interaction Manager application environment. Business benefits of this approach include faster time to market, reduced capital expenditure and lower cost of ownership, as well as reduced IT costs and staffing to support the application.
"Businesses everywhere run costly and sophisticated marketing campaigns to get the attention of their customers, yet much of that money and effort is wasted because it's a one-way street -- outbound only," said Gonzalo Hidalgo, general manager, IMM/CIM for Teradata Applications, in a statement. "Teradata Customer Interaction Manager makes marketing the two-way street it should be, and helps drive revenue by combining insights from digital and offline campaigns alike to form a 360-degree view of all customer interactions."