There are three inevitabilities in the world: death, taxes, and information silos. Teradata’s marketing automation subsidiary Aprimo, however, is attempting to drive customer engagement by bringing information together with its Aprimo Service to Sales solution. The cloud-based inbound marketing tool is designed to provide a “direct link between marketing and call center operations,” says David Perona, the company’s director of inbound marketing.
Aprimo Service to Sales, available via Salesforce’s business app marketplace AppExchange, draws on real-time interaction data from a business’s online site, its contact center, and its in-store point-of-sales kiosks to offer more targeted cross-sell and upsell offers to customers.
Cross-sells and upsells each have unique benefits to an enterprise, besides driving revenue, Perona says. “Cross-selling tends to generate more loyalty as the customer has more products,” he explains, “while upselling typically has higher response rates while bringing in less overall revenue.”
As customers interact with each promotion, Aprimo’s software is designed to analyze which customized promotions generate the best outcomes. This learning capability enables Service to Sales learn about customers and target offers more precisely.
“Aprimo Service to Sales bridges the gap between [back-office] marketing and the live customer interaction in the call center,” Perona says. “We enable marketers to deploy their offers into this environment, but still respect the context of the customer conversation.”
Perona predicts that the solution will increase customer response rates, making contact center agents more successful in their cross-sell and upsell promotions, which will inspire them to extend even more offers.
Ultimately, the contact center is a channel that marketers commonly overlook—a missed opportunity, according to Perona. “Aprimo Service to Sales will put another marketing channel in place for those companies with call center operations,” Perona says. “Inbound marketing in the call center provides very high response rates as compared to traditional outbound marketing.”
The Aprimo Service to Sales stack includes an offer repository, a business rules engine, a contact history database, and self-learning predictive analytics.
Aprimo’s solution seems to arrive in good time. According to a report issued by Salesforce after the August release of its Q2 earnings report, businesses are beginning to refresh their marketing, sales, and customer service solutions.
