Omer Geva, e-Glue General Manager Americas
1. Please provide us with a brief overview of your software solutions and the problems they’re designed to solve.
e-Glue is a leading provider of real-time customer interaction management solutions, which represent an essential and growing segment of the CRM market. Founded in 2001, e-Glue has established an impressive customer base, and proven success with many Tier 1 customers in telecom, finance, insurance, entertainment and other industries.
For many years, companies and their customers have typically been driven by different motivations. Companies wish to establish meaningful, long-term relationships with their customers, while consumers tend to simply require that every interaction be as efficient and valuable as possible.
Successful, customer-driven companies have figured out that customer relationships can only be built one interaction at a time, and are realigning objectives around just that: customer interaction.
By definition, interactions with customers are complex and unpredictable. Complex, because managing them to successful conclusion for both customer and organization requires that companies integrate and act on enormous amounts of information. And unpredictable, because no matter how well you try to plan for an interaction, circumstances always change – either due to your organization’s varying objectives at different points in time or at the moment of interaction itself.
e-Glue makes it possible for companies to achieve any desired outcome at the moment of customer interaction by seamlessly adapting to both changing business objectives and customer needs. e-Glue interprets interactions from start to finish within your existing environment, adapting activities and advising on decisions as needed with simple, user-friendly callouts. This is all made possible through our patent-pending technology, which selectively pulls data from both the interaction itself and from any historical data source – with no need for dedicated integration (!) – and combines this data with an interaction rules engine that can easily and rapidly be modified by business users.
2. Please explain the business case for your software solutions. How do you differentiate your interaction solutions from others?
Customers are naturally a company’s primary, if not its only source of income, making successful customer interaction a crucial revenue generator. Optimization of every interaction is the only way to guarantee customer satisfaction, ensure long-term customer loyalty and secure increased revenue streams generated though well-established, long-lasting relationships with customers, and effective cross- and up-sale promotions.
As soon as we realized that, in order to properly manage interaction with a customer, we needed to take into account the precise situation that prompted the interaction, we developed technology to support and enrich customer calls with new inputs derived directly from the interaction in progress. It is this very technology that grants us clear competitive advantage. No other interaction management solution does this. Most existing solutions, such as quality monitoring systems, actually rely on information gathered after the interaction, and therefore largely apply to subsequent interactions only. e-Glue, on the other hand, infuses the interaction with new data – information gathered in real time during the interaction itself – that can help drive the interaction to a win-win situation, which equally benefits both customer and organization.
In the call center environment, we offer a unique solution to manage the interaction based on customer needs, agent set of skills and the company objectives. The solution provides targeted and optimized support, aligning all agents’ capabilities with the highest standards
We are also capable of simultaneously managing multiple business objectives. While most existing systems are focused on addressing a single need (such as increased revenue or efficiency), e-Glue presents a holistic approach, which links interactions to multiple business objectives, and is aimed at balancing and prioritizing up sell opportunities, retention calls, efficiency needs and quality of service improvements.
3. What do you regard as your major challenges as a company in the near future?
I perceive great challenge in sharing and clearly communicating our philosophy of real-time interaction to the market. I have no doubt whatsoever that our solution is on the wish-list of most customer-facing organizations. After all, a great many companies have already deployed CRM systems and have linked them to back office applications. In today’s world of increased customer mobility, customers can switch vendors with a single phone call.
Customer retention is therefore becoming many organizations’ number 1 challenge, and customer-facing organizations already realize that deploying CRM systems may not be enough to reduce churn and assure customer loyalty. Many understand the need to add a ”best-of-breed” solution to manage customer interactions, but are unaware of the fact that they can easily connect to all data sources (both current and historical), analyze them it in real time and leverage them during an interaction that’s already in progress, rather than having to wait to apply insights gained in subsequent interactions.
e-Glue offers just that – a truly unique end-to-end solution that effectively minimizes churn and increases customer retention. e-Glue’s is, in fact, the only solution that covers all customer touch points within a single, highly synchronized real-time customer interaction environment.
I feel should also mention another challenge, which lies in our ability to duplicate current successes with existing customers in the telecom, finance, insurance and utility industries, and to leverage agreements we have recently signed with leading system integrators to evolve into the market standard for enhanced real-time interaction.
4. Does e-Glue plan to expand its applications suite? If so, what additional offerings can we expect from e-Glue in the near future?
During the past year, we realized that we could enrich our solutions with accumulated knowledge already in our possession. We have therefore developed numerous dedicated business applications on top of our interaction rules engine, to address a variety of organizational KPI: one such solution is designed to increase revenue through up- and cross-sale tools. Our advantage lies in our ability to combine real-time information with analytics based on historical data, so as to provide the best possible options for any specific customer circumstance. There is also great benefit in our unique approach of optimizing and adapting sales tactics to the skills of individual customer agents. Customers benefit from the enhanced interaction efficiency made possible through rapid retrieval of accurate information, and their satisfaction is bound to increase through e-Glue’s ability to provide agents with actionable knowledge that is precisely tailored to their scoring record and past performance.
In addition, e-Glue’s core interaction rules engine can support all points of integration, be they call centers, Web-based self-service sites, point of sale kiosks or even e-mail messages sent to customers. For example, our unique callouts can be utilized as dynamic tooltips within PDF bills or invoices.
5. Where do you expect e-Glue to be about a year from now, from a market share perspective?
As a pioneers in its field, it is relatively safe to assume that e-Glue is bound to achieve a visionary and leading position in the customer interaction management market. We believe that a year from now, we will have managed to leverage our success with leading customers, our partnerships with leading system integrators and the even more advanced platform we are about to introduce, and translate them to a market leadership position.
6. To achieve wide-spread adoption of certain software solutions in the call center market, there typically needs to be an education process, then readiness to select the appropriate product. Has e-Glue encountered a similar situation? How has market acceptance been for your solutions?
I wouldn’t want to over-extend myself here, but we have so far encountered amazingly positive reaction with new prospects. Our solutions are more crucial to our customers today than they were a year ago, and will likely prove even more critical next year. Customer experience is a significant success factor. We believe that the internal positioning and value of customer care is bound to ‘climb’ up the organizational ladder. In our sales and marketing activities, we have increasingly been encountering not only the VP of Customer Care, but also the Chief Customer Care officer. We are confident in our offering’s unique appeal to these people. e-Glue can help organizations deploy an abstraction layer between growing volumes of information that need be analyzed during each interaction, and the friendly, caring image presented to their customers, so as to consistently improve their customers’ experience.
7. What recent trends do you believe have impacted our industry? What trends do you foresee for our industry over the next twelve months?
We believe the customer interaction management market has been affected by the following major trends:
Consolidation within and between lines of business forcing renewed penetration of the service provider as a source of multiple services offered through seemingly endless combinations of segmented and even personalized bundles
Ease and freedom of mobility between service providers
The need to rapidly address demanding, knowledgeable customers and adapt to ongoing changes in their circumstances and requirements
The struggle to satisfy and retain customers
We all know that companies no longer sell just products. As services become a commodity, it’s ultimately customer service that matters most. Consumer experience will be the key influencing factor in our industry. Our vision is to offer our customers a tool that not only enhances their customers’ experience and helps increase revenues, but also enables them to continuously measure, analyze and improve the quality and effectiveness of their interactions with customers.
8. A much discussed “hot” trend has been the growing interest in Unified Communications/Unified Call Centers, particularly in the area of first call resolution. How do your solutions fit into this unified approach?
Though we offer a cross-channel solution, we are in perfect alignment with this trend.
Our solution combines non-disruptive, risk-free access to any source of customer knowledge and intelligence, with real-time contextual data from “in flight” customer interaction.
e-Glue applies the organization’s strategy and objectives to determine the best course of action and to maximize the value of each and every interaction.
9. A company’s financial strength is a significant consideration for many users in today’s competitive marketplace. Could you provide any details on e-Glue’s financial position?
e-Glue is a privately-held company. Therefore, I cannot disclose specific numbers, but I can tell you that the company has been presenting consistently strong growth on a year-to-year basis. We have powerful backing from our investors and solid revenue streams from both new and existing customers who have chosen to expand initial deployments into additional areas. We started 2007 with great momentum, leveraging new partnerships to close large-scale deals with numerous Tier 1 companies, so that we feel it’s safe to expect our growth rate this year to even exceed that of previous years.