If you read the marketing material for CME then you'll see quotes like:
"We help you build a better relationship with your customers...."
"We have an amazing marketing automation platform..."
"We deliver smart, data-driven marketing...".
The thing is that if you read the marketing material of our competitors, they all say much the same thing. We are different not in what we do, but in how far we take it. Take audience selection, as you write a message we automatically analyse its tone and content in order to suggest the best audience. After your message has been deployed, we monitor who is engaging with it in order to continously tune who your message is sent to in the future. Our competitors require you to target your message by specifying rules such as "target women under 35" and they support A/B testing where you trial two versions and eventually one version will be picked.
Well, to be fair, we support that too. But when you specify rules on who you want your message to go to, we automatically build up a customer persona so you can improve the copy and after campaign results come back we automatically suggest how to improve those rules. We also support running multiple versions of a message in competition, but we don't believe in selecting an overall winner. Instead we work out which message is best for each person, so you'll naturally end up with your message variations aligning to your customer segments.
Perhaps the must sophisticated aspect of the CME system is its tight integration with customer sentiment. As customers engage with your brand we continously monitor their behaviour and adjust our understanding about their attitudes, beliefs and where they are in thei customer lifecycle. If the customer writes a nasty letter to your sales team or gets short on the phone with the support team then we automatically adjust the messages for that customer to match. Sound complicated? It was complicated to build, but using it requires no more than asking yourself questions like "how should I communicate with a frustrated customer." The field we work in is often called communications and listening is the must important part of communications, but so often marketing systems are about getting your message out to customers instead of listening to what they are trying to tell you.While the sentiment engine delivers a lot of value by helping re-engage dissatisfied customers and encouraging brand loyalists to spread the word, we get even more value by building the system around the customer's journey instead of around specific campaigns. We monitor the behaviour of every single customer in order to work out what that customer wants to hear. We build a communications plan for each customer based on how frequently we think that customer likes to receive communication and we select messages not because the customer looks like a prime candidate for a product but because we think that message is the best choice for the customer right now
Reporting is another area where we take a different approach. We view reporting as the system's way of telling you what is working, and what needs work. We define reports into three categories: hygene reports that tick the boxes, reports that tell a segment manager how well different parts of the customer base are engaging with the brand, and reports that tell content writers where new messages are needed. One way of thinking of this is that we've automated market research, and we have integrated the voice of the customer with our marketing system so you can see what's working and where the gaps are.