ATG's Platform Helps Build Smarter Customer Data

ATG offers a wide range of e-commerce solutions and other service products, and at the heart of most of them is the vendor's Relationship Management Platform.

In fact, all of ATG's commerce-driven solutions use the Relationship Management Platform as a personalization engine to store customer information and guide various executions of business scenarios. The scenarios are actions based on customer profiles and can formulate pricing or send information targeted to specific users.

MARIO MOREJON Technical Editor

The newest release of the Relationship Management Platform, version 6.2, uses Web services to allow applications outside corporate firewalls to access customer information for B2B data-sharing. This feature is especially useful for stores and other e-commerce operations that need to maintain consistency of data across separate systems. ATG also opened up its commerce product to allow integration with Web services.

In combination with the ATG Commerce server, Relationship Management Platform 6.2 can solve many of the typical integration problems that plague online stores. Many stores rely on systems that only cannibalize data from multiple suppliers without accurately maintaining any changes made by the suppliers. Online stores that have poorly designed integration architectures often work on order fulfillment by reprocessing an order to comply with a specific supplier's format. Orders made online sometimes are sent through faxes by the online store to a supplier and then manually input to the supplier's system. If a customer gets the wrong order, it usually takes weeks to resolve the dispute because the online store has to correlate the product information it maintains on its Web site with the data the supplier might have changed. Such a system would not be able to account for any changes made by a supplier to similar products that have multiple descriptions with slightly different attributes, such as color or shape. Even if a supplier immediately notifies the store of the changes, the information often ends up being updated manually because the reseller's application is not able to accept changes of product attributes from multiple suppliers.

ATG's Relationship Management Platform 6.2 simplifies the process by allowing online stores to pass orders in the exact form that a supplier would need to receive them. The Web services component can help customer service representatives see orders as they are being processed by the supplier and can easily identify mistakes because product information is maintained correctly at all times. What's more, by fully integrating every system, a brick-and-mortar store can offer a customer additional options such as sending a product home or making it available for pickup at a store. Such a consistent experience is important whether a customer shops online or at a store because price discounts or special offers should be reflected in every system. However, most major stores haven't yet achieved such a level of integration.

CRN Test Center Recommended

In addition to product suggestions, ATG's personalization software can suggest information that cannot be easily categorized by personalization applications that are product-centric, such as images or other binary files. This feature can store and retrieve any customer data that can be used throughout an application.

Customer preferences based on questionnaires can also be used to develop profiles. The product's cross-selling and upselling capabilities focus on previous sales. One of the best rules that users can create is a dynamic price range that changes with the buying habits of a customer. The product also includes other generic rules that allow for creativity when developing pricing scenarios.

Realistically, the target rules or scenarios that can be created work primarily with rules created by business users, which is essentially collected information based on buying habits. This does not mean that stores cannot be creative when designing target rules. By collecting specific attributes from one product, such as a shoe or belt size, for instance, rules can be created to target customers who literally fit into those attributes.

CHANNEL PROGRAM SNAPSHOTS
> ATG Relationship Management Platform 6.2
PRICE: $55,000 (includes AppServer)
MARGIN: 25-35 percent
DISTRIBUTORS: Accenture, EDS, Professional Access, SBI, Critical Mass
TECH RATING:
CHANNEL RATING:

CHANNEL OVERVIEW: Cambridge, Mass.-based ATG provides partners with full access to all members of every major department such as alliances, sales, support and finance/legal. The vendor provides its channel partners with sales support, training, access to sales tools and joint sales with its direct-sales team throughout the sales process. Partners also have access to technical support online and via phone and e-mail.

Note: Vendors can earn up to five stars for technical merit and five for their channel program. If the average of these two scores is four stars or greater, the product earns CRN Test Center Recommended status.

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