Alterian Alchemy Offers A Cross Channel Experience for Managing Customer Engagement

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Nov 18, 2010

Alterian (news, site) officially launches its new customer engagement management framework Alchemy today. CMSWire had the opportunity to peek inside the new framework. Here`s a look at what we found.

Alterian`s Ultimate Goals for Alchemy

Yesterday, we spoke with Brian Sprik, Product Marketing Manager for Engagement and Analytic Products at Alterian. He spoke about Alchemy as a framework, not a platform. As a framework it does include a couple of native applications/modules (like the new Engagement Analytics and Engagement Manager), but has been designed to integrate other applications and modules from outside, such as Web CMS, Social Media, Email and traditional print channels.

So while it's a new framework, Alterian hasn't gone away and re-invented the marketing wheel, they have leveraged existing systems, bringing them into a single environment from which a marketer can management the complete customer experience. Note that complete experience includes both online and offline channels.

Alchemy is designed to provide a user experience for marketers that is intuitive, no matter what level of interaction they are at. So there are interfaces for the power user right up to management who only want simple dashboards and reports. The framework is built on Silverlight, which provides a really nice experience on almost every browser and OS. The look and feel is very familiar to Windows users, including the now well known ribbon toolbar.

Engagement Analytics

At the heart of Alchemy is analytics, something Sprik said Alterian wanted to continue to focus on. That makes senses, because without analytics, how do you know who your customers and prospects are and what they are doing/want to do?

Alchemy Central

Alchemy enables you to bring all your data together under one roof, in real-time, including data from analytics, campaigns and other business systems. Having it all in one location allows you to explore the data in many ways, creating queries, running reports and in the future doing predictive modeling.

Engagement Analytics - Segments

Query Forms

One new feature included with Engagement Analytics is the ability to create Query Forms for casual users. These forms are set up like questionnaires, allowing users to select the criteria to run analysis and segmentation against. The forms can also be included at the top of dashboards, enabling the dashboard to adjust based on selections in the form.

Engagement Analytics - Query Form

Engagement Manager

The Engagement Manager provides a one-stop location to set up and manage an end-to-end cross channel engagement. This includes activities that can span the website, social media sites, email and print marketing.

Typically a marketer finds themselves going back and forth between applications and systems setting up cross-channel engagement activities. With Alchemy, All activities can be managed directly within the Engagement Manager, including making changes to the content management system, changing creative and creating emails or surveys.