Revving up e-business with CRM

In an announcement unveiling a marketing and product development partnership, Vignette will integrate Synchrony customer interaction management suite with the Vignette V/5 E-Business Application Platform. The union is designed to enhance companies’ customer service capabilities by providing a unified view of the customer across all applications. The software module is expected to be available this fall.

The Vignette V/5 e-Business Application Platform provides a scalable platform for delivering content, profiling and managing interactions across multiple communication channels such as the Web, pagers, mobile phones and e-mail. Vignette is said to be the only firm that equips businesses with a unified view across multiple customers, partners, suppliers, products and interactions.

Synchrony’s software suite integrates and queues all points of customer interaction (phone, fax, e-mail and chat) and provides contact center agents with a single view of the customer. Its remote-hosted solution is delivered as an ASP subscription service via the Internet. The Synchrony suite is architected completely with Sun Microsystems’ Java technology from end to end, providing better integration and scalability.

Says Mark Richey, Synchrony’s founder and CEO, "Vignette recognizes that all businesses are e-businesses, and no company can afford to handle touch-points such as e-mail and phone separately.” He adds that the integration provides a unified view of a customer that can be used to build and enhance customer and partner relationships.

“Our joint customers will have accurate customer insights that will let them create precise marketing campaigns and execute inbound and outbound sales and service programs,” Richey says.