Since the first customer and marketing databases in the 80s, to the fully-fledged CRM platforms of the 90s, to the cloud-based CRMs of the 00s and the Social CRM of the 2010s, CRM platforms have had the same goal and challenge – to successfully match customers with companies. With the proliferation of more channels, and changing customer expectations for effortless and real-time interaction, CMS vendors have moved to a platform-agnostic approach using clients’ legacy systems, third-party solutions and proprietary tools, and complementing the missing pieces with analytical engines, campaign management tools and automation scripts.

Minacs has recognized the need for a comprehensive CRM ecosystem and the company’s answer is ALT CRM. ALT CRM combines a Customer Experience Management framework and business operations console. It relies heavily on automation and analytics to deliver what the company calls ‘an intelligent engagement hub’ across multiple channels able to trigger enterprise functions like customer care and marketing, and including customer personalization. ALT CRM is a portfolio of three dozen in-house developments and third-party tools to replace, sit on top of, or integrate with, existing client systems.

Much of Minacs’ focus is on revenue generation, profitability optimization, and customer retention, with differentiated support services and improved responsiveness to customer feedback. ALT CRM aims to predict customer behavior and buying patterns and personalize the communication while the customer transitions between different channels.

Since ALT CRM was first conceptualized over 18 months ago, Minacs had developed and deployed its social module with two clients. The social module is an algorithmic, trigger-based engagement that provides real-time personalized messages on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. The tool monitors social media posts, comments and hashtags, segments users based on their social clout, and identifies the sentiment of the message. Then it automatically responds directly within the relevant social channel, without repeating the same messages to the same customer, and factoring the rules and compliance requirements of the channel. These responses are customized based on client business rules. For example, an influential customer posting a strongly negative comment, whose number is stored in the CRM, will receive an outbound call triggered by the platform on the dialer and assigned to an agent with the appropriate skills. In fulfilment cases, it can pull the status of an order by its unique reference number and respond, again via the social channel.

On the dashboard of a multi-skilled agent, the customer social comments and posts are displayed along with the queues of calls, emails and chat sessions, simultaneously creating a single view of the customer with multiple data points. The agent is then allowed to overrule the automatic library of responses and prepare a freeform response or modify a template answer.

With its current deployments, Minacs has witnessed positive client feedback on ALT CRM’s ability to remove the complexity of workforce demand planning for social channels and to provide immediate resolution. The latter problem, especially around escalating negative comments becoming viral, has been one of the main hindrances for social media to evolve into a structured complaints management channel.

Minacs is currently in the process of building templates, and adding languages and use cases for different industries, focusing initially on e-commerce clients. The first step is data aggregation and ALT CRM’s interoperability allows its social module to be plugged into legacy platforms like ERPs, Salesforce and Siebel (to name a few), and collect dashboard information. The company has also found other uses for the platform, running it on its internal HR touch points to predict agent attrition likelihood.

At a time when even end users can benefit from machine learning automation like Google’s Smart Reply, companies are pressured into looking for personalized marketing and customer care solutions which are also scalable. Minacs’ ALT CRM is primed to capture that demand.