Published on the 31/03/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
An Australian software start-up has created a relationship management platform that puts the power back in the hands of the consumer as part of a bid to improve customer experience and cut churn…
While many enterprises have relied on CRM systems to support customer interactions, these can be deployed as glorified sales platforms where all the power is held by the vendor. In a bid to wrest back some control for the customer – and in the process improve results and customer-retention rates for vendors – Sydney based software start-up Flamingo has launched a vendor relationship management system that allows customers to work with their suppliers to personalise the goods or services they receive, and the way in which suppliers communicate with them.
Flamingo allows vendors to bring together in one location all the information they have about a particular customer, it can then support what’s described as an online co-creation lab where a customer can collaborate with a sales rep to design the sort of experience they want from the vendor.
The vendor can set up the co-creation lab so that users can pick and choose from a range of options and see on the screen what they are going to get and how much it will cost them.
The smarts behind the system come from Fifth Quadrant, a research business focused on call centres and customer experience, set up by Dr Catriona Wallace, who is also founder and CEO of Flamingo. She said that analysis had found that 75 percent of people would like to be able to customise the relationship they had with suppliers and were prepared to pay up to 14 percent for a better experience.
Analysis had also shown that; “Australian consumers buy on price and product but defect on experience,” she said.
Wallace said that Flamingo is in discussion with NBN Co, Department of Human Services, Department of Premier and Cabinet and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection about the tool. While coy about the pricing of the software, Wallace said that a small to medium enterprise would be looking at spending much less than $10,000 a year for the cloud-based platform where a large enterprise might spend $100,000.
The ultimate goal however is to charge enterprises a fee measured in “tens of dollars” per customer interaction which was much lower than the $600 some enterprises calculate to be the cost of finding a new customer.
