August 7, 2000

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Front-Office System Integrates CRM

Yellowbrick's Visitant has specialized adapters for collecting and reconciling customer info

By Jeff Sweat

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ome front-office vendors want to control all aspects of the customer relationship in one application. YellowBrick Solutions Inc. has a different goal: to be the platform that hooks together all of the other customer-facing apps. The year-old startup last week unveiled Visitant, an integration package intended to connect a number of front-office systems, including customer-relationship management packages, data warehouses, Web sites, and legacy applications.

Visitant's specialized adapters collect customer information, such as transaction history and contact information, from multiple touch points, including the Web, E-mail, and call centers. The system then reconciles that data into a customer profile so that information comes up whenever the customer contacts any part of the business. For example, if a Michael Smith surfs a Web site, the system lets customer-service reps know he's the same Michael Smith who called in or is in a marketing campaign database.

Visitant includes business rules that let companies provide consistent customer service.

YellowBrick isn't the only vendor taking this approach. It competes with companies such as Blaze Software Inc., as well as more generalized application integration vendors, says Aberdeen Group analyst Denis Pombriant.

PowerChannel Inc., a London company that's creating a free Internet television portal, says it selected YellowBrick after evaluating about 50 front-office vendors. YellowBrick offered the most comprehensive means of connecting front-office systems to let PowerChannel synchronize all customer touch points, says Gary Blau, senior VP of global information strategy. It was "70% to 80% complete. The others were only 40% to 50% complete," Blau says.

PowerChannel will use Visitant to connect its data warehouse to its Web site, as well as to future CRM packages. PowerChannel will use YellowBrick's PathWay Profiler tool to analyze information from the data warehouse and to serve up personalized customer surveys to its customers, who will get free equipment and television access in exchange for personal information.

YellowBrick's Visitant and Pathway packages will ship in September. Prices start at $300,000 for a server and two adapters, going higher for the add-on applications.

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