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Solving the ‘Customer Engagement’ and Fragmented Media Problem

Interactive Softworks builds software meant to solve a problem that costs global organizations literally tens of billions of dollars each year: How can end-users be kept fully engaged in a time of massive media fragmentation? And further: What technologies can help us overcome that fragmentation by integrating in real-time the bewildering masses of data collected from “live” call centers, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, the Web, email, text messaging, PDF, video, smartphones, social-networking services (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), and all the other new media that link customers, employees, partners, suppliers, and data bases in modern business systems?

To answer these questions, Interactive Softworks has developed IP embedded in the first software ever released (Metaphor) that lets private and governmental bodies build collaborative projects and customer campaigns capable of synchronizing on-the-fly any data transmitted through any number of media channels.

The speed with which new media have emerged in the last decade has allowed massive economies of scale in growing global organizations; but, paradoxically, the diversity of those media has also fragmented communications with end-users and has far surpassed the integrative powers of past generations of business-integration software — Business Process Management (BPM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Content Management (CM), Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) systems, and so on — that were designed long before anyone imagined how profoundly smartphones, Facebook, and similar media would change the ways people interact with large organizations.

Older integrative software like BPM and web service platforms evolved out of still earlier enterprise software, whose main aim was not to link customers to businesses but facilitate computer-to-computer interactions. One result of this old computer-centric focus is that media interfaces in business work flows are still largely viewed as afterthoughts that have to be tediously hand-coded to deeper IT architecture. Hand-coding like this is obviously inefficient when media channels are evolving at the rates they are today. But the media explosion was not foreseen by early BPM and CRM designers, and such coding is still routinely performed by in-house IT staff or large IT consultancies using so-called BPM, CRM or CM “suites” – which are essentially any miscellaneous sets of utility programs used in that integration.

This patchwork approach has paid off handsomely for IT consultancies, but the approach is slow and expensive, and must be repeated each time media are modified. The end result is that even if synchronization of media is briefly achieved it rarely lasts for long; the result is what is now widely decried in the IT world as the BPM “people” or “human-facing” or “customer engagement” problem, which has undercut much of the value of the information revolution to large organizations,.

You don’t need to be an industry expert to recognize the seriousness of that problem. Anyone who has ever been asked repeatedly for the same data when shunted from one call center or department or IVR system to another when communicating with banks, government agencies, HMOs, or telecommunications giants has experienced that problem first hand. Related problems arise when customers accept repeated invitations to pay bills online only to find that payments aren’t “posted” to accounts for days, which can ironically lead to inappropriate service breaks, customer hostility, and “churn.” Given the fact that the same media also makes it easier than ever to switch service providers, the failure to solve the customer engagement problem can have dire economic consequences in commoditized industries in which churn rates are markers of success or failure.

Metaphor is the first of a new type of integration software that confronts the customer engagement problem head on. Metaphor’s design arose out of many years of experience by the company’s founders in designing state-of-the-art software used to automate global call-centers, which has helped identify the most efficient approach needed to synchronize data gathered simultaneously over virtually any number of media channels.

Metaphor solves these problems by transmitting all business-process data and relationship rules in ways that eliminates the need to hand-code each element to underlying IT architecture. For example, all rules in Metaphor required to build media interfaces are defined in the system (in “metadata”) in ways that are independent of any one media channel. During runtime the Metaphor server uses those instructions along with custom channel-specific rendering engines to generate rich interfaces populated by the appropriate data in a business process’s presentation layers. The result is the creation on-the-fly of sophisticated human-facing interfaces that automatically synchronize all data displayed on any Web page, IVR/voice, text messaging, smartphone, or other media in any collaborate project or campaign. Exploiting Metaphor’s novel work-flow architecture, new media can be plugged into the system simply by adding new channel-specific interface renderers – without requiring the tedious hand-coding required in all old-style integrative software.

There are other critical if less obvious advantages of Metaphor over older generations of business-integration software. One is that as a totally unified platform and not a software “suite,” Metaphor is capable of being run not partly (like a few BPM systems) but wholly in the “Cloud” – eliminating the need to install any software locally. Cloud implementation Metaphor (if opted for) allows the collaborative development of customer campaigns and other projects anywhere globally solely through use of Internet or private Intranets. The unified nature of the Metaphor platform also drastically cuts back on staff time and costs required in training to master the system.

Part of that system includes a novel icon-driven design surface that lets business users generate the high-level rules needed to implement business campaigns on their own, freeing in-house IT for other mission-critical work and eliminating the need for outside consultants to modify routine projects. Some older systems include similar-looking icon utilities in their BMP “suites,” but none has the ability to create the kinds of rich multi-channel projects that can be generated using Metaphor’s integrated design surface.

Finally, it can be noted that Metaphor is the only platform that allows the operation in real-time of virtually any number of integrated business projects. Metaphor’s massive scalability is dramatically illustrated by the dozens of major business projects currently run using it by the world’s leading outsourcer of customer-acquisition and business-processing services to Fortune 500 companies. Metaphor currently handles hundreds of millions of data hits daily in multichannel projects designed, implemented, and run by business staff on behalf of the world’s largest satellite TV system, the most influential newspaper in the U.S., major international banks, and the country’s best-known telecommunications giants. Metaphor’s flexibility in these cases is enhanced by multi-channel business intelligence dashboards, which allow rapid modification of customer campaigns using feedback involving customer behavior across all channels and campaign phases. Unlike the analytic software in all other systems, Metaphor allows integration of business intelligence running over multiple media channels simultaneously.

Metaphor’s massive scalability, unique abilities to build rich interfaces on-the-fly, and numerous other production advantages were the main reasons why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) recently selected Metaphor over all other systems to create a new national Web-based system to track adverse drug reactions — involving thousands of drugs and hundreds of specialized interfaces.

Besides Metaphor, Interactive Softworks has also used its exclusive IP to perfect state-of-the-art software (VoiceNet) used in integrated agent-assisted call centers in the United States, Canada, South America, India, and elsewhere around the world. The combination of Metaphor and VoiceNet provides extra benefits in customer-engagement programs by allowing the full integration of multi-channel marketing and acquisition programs with parallel customer retention initiatives.

Given the many tens of billions of dollars at stake in solving the customer engagement problem, Interactive Softworks expects that all major business-integration software will be forced by competitive pressures in the near future to adopt something similar to Metaphor’s advanced system architecture, which for the first time eliminates entirely fragmented business-customer communications.