February 5, 2013
By Judith Aquino,

Causata Boosts Customer Experience Platform

The days when a company was unsure who had visited its Web site and other properties are quickly disappearing. Causata, a company that offers software that helps brands enhance their interactions with customers, today rolled out an updated version of its Customer Experience Management (CXM) platform, which enables marketers to deliver more personalized offers using predictive models that pull together and analyze a comprehensive set of customer touch points.

Aimed at B2C companies, the CXM platform's new features include a set of machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics dashboards to enable users to make more informed marketing decisions.

What differentiates Causata from other data mining and analytics vendors, according to the company's president, Kevin Nix, is its ability to stitch together customer data from a wide range of channels including the Web, email, social media, mobile, CRM systems, etc., to uncover patterns and predicted behavior.

"Many companies are still partitioning their interactions with customers where they have digital marketing data over here...and transactional data over here and are using many siloed technologies that are disconnected," Nix maintains.

In contrast, Causata uses cookies to link a consumer's digital interactions with a company (including their anonymous actions), with the known information about the consumer, such as his or her email address, phone number, etc., to create an "identity graph." From there, Causata applies a set of algorithms to the data to provide the client with recommended actions on how to best interact with the customer. In response to privacy regulations, Causata enables users to turn on the tracking capability only after a consumer opts in for targeted offers.

The recommendations, Nix adds, are based on a propensity scoring system instead of the more traditional rules-based approach. "Instead of using a static rule like ‘when a consumer lingers on this page for 30 seconds, offer this message' we look at the probability of a customer being interested in a particular car, for example, versus another one," Nix explains. "We adjust the probabilities in real time based on the customer's history and the last three to four clicks that they've made to create a more accurate picture."

Later this quarter, Causata will also introduce what it refers to as "reinforcement learning techniques" or machine learning capabilities that will enable marketers to automate their offer campaigns consistently across various channels.

The CXM platform is available through a subscription model as an on-premise or cloud-based solution.