Epiphany Blends CRM Apps To Solidify Customer View

The quest for CRM's holy grail, the 360-degree view of the customer, continues.

This week, Epiphany will unveil an updated CRM suite that will blend heretofore standalone marketing, sales, and service modules.

The goal is to offer sales or service agents a full view of customer history and the ability to quickly formulate offers to appeal to that customer.

"Event-driven marketing ... will identify interesting events in customer lifecycle and trigger appropriate actions," said Mike Trigg, vice president of product marketing for E.piphany, San Mateo, Calif. "A complaint might be associated with a churn risk so maybe the agent would offer a make-good."

The blending of what had been "stove-piped" or separate applications is a major trend throughout CRM as vendors seek to offer complete, near-real-time information on a customer's activity, product inventory, order status etc.

The reason CRM as a category has been slammed is that it has, to date, been unable to deliver this "elusive single view of the customer," said Cindy Howton, managing director of BearingPoint's CRM practice.

While Howton has not experimented with the new Epiphany 6.5 yet, she thinks the company's strategy is on the mark. The company's J2EE-based architecture will combine data modeling infrastructure "that can define virtual customer data across multiple back-end systems," Trigg told CRN.

"We let you define the customer data model independently of where the physical data resides," Trigg noted.

The full customer view is by no means easy to provide, integrators said. "One reason the 360-degree view is so elusive is that organizations have years and years of legacy data, you can't throw that away. Our view is that these component-based architectures will help solve this issue and make it easier to integrate with that legacy data so it can be presented to the agent," Howton noted.

Epiphany 6.5, in beta since August, is expected to ship in mid-November. Pricing varies, but a typical implementation starts at $200,000 to $250,000, Trigg said.

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