In response to the growing desire in the marketing industry to provide a unified, data-driven customer experience, IBM today announced the release of a new tool designed to integrate several offerings in the IBM portfolio into a single holistic portfolio solution.
ExperienceOne—powered by a combination of WebSphere Commerce and IBM’s enterprise marketing and customer service softwares—sets its sights on creating what Robert LeBlanc, SVP of IBM’s software and cloud solutions group called “a new system of engagement.”
“One of the most powerful things a company can do is collaborate across their organization,” said LeBlanc as he unveiled the new platform at the 2014 IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Tampa. “This is about both quality and quantity of analytics that helps identify the moments and customers that matter most to your business.”
The goal is to maximize customer lifetime value and loyalty by serving personalized content in real time. IBM’s new tool builds on three new cloud-based “engagement solutions:” digital, behavioral, mobile, social, and predictive customer analytics; omnichannel merchandising capabilities to enable automated price optimization and targeted real-time offers; and enhanced digital experience software designed to enable marketers to leverage these insights at scale.
IBM has been investing heavily in digital marketing as of late in an effort to, as IBM ExperienceOne Solutions VP Kevin Bishop put it, “extend the notion of marketing beyond marketing into full lifecycle customer engagement.”
For example, IBM’s recent acquisition of email software provider Silverpop, officially completed late last week, will be baked in to enable lead management and automation functionality, especially in the SMB environment. The Tealeaf integration will enable marketers to examine real-time clickstream data and make on-the-fly tweaks to improve an experience that might have gone awry. Overall, ExperienceOne combines more than 60 integrations with IBM tools, including existing solutions and new acquisitions.
Designed to create a connection between marketing, sales, and technology, ExperienceOne is the result of about three years of digging into the behavior patterns of IBM client data to better understand consumer preferences and behavior patterns.
“We’re at an inflection point in our industry; change is happening all at once and it’s driving pretty incredible IT demand,” LeBlanc said. “In the digital economy, companies can lose clients with a tap or a swipe. Businesses that succeed will be the ones that reinvent themselves digitally by leveraging data.”
