MONDAY 31 March 2008 Datamation to push IECCM suite — THE STAR ONLINE Alex Wee - MD of Datamation Group of Companies with Raghav Sahgal – CEO, Intense Technologies Limited

PETALING JAYA: Systems integrator The Datamation Group, has been appointed sole reseller of Hyderabad-based Intense Technologies' IECCM suite of communications solutions in Malaysia. Under the agreement, Datamation will also implement and support the solution.

IECCM (Intelligent Enterprise Customer Communication Management) is a service-oriented architecture-driven, scalable relationship-based communications solution for enterprises in the telecoms, banking and financial services sectors.
It can consolidate data gathered from many disparate legacy applications into common reports, provide a unified interface across different channels of communication, and find opportunities to cross-sell or up-sell products to customers, said Intense Technologies chief executive Raghav Sahgal.

Traditionally, these functions are carried out by "satellite" applications, developed around core systems, that attend to customer billing and other functions, he said.
But these satellite systems are developed in a piecemeal fashion, making them difficult to adapt to the needs and preferences of individual customers.
Sahgal said the customers wind up receiving generic additions to their statements that fail to catch their attention — making such systems an ineffective sales and marketing tool.

The information overload from all the generic statements and bills that a customer receives each month is what keeps him from noticing such promotional efforts. But IECCM enables enterprises to cut through all that clutter with personalised information. A bank could offer a customer the choice of receiving all the information regarding his various accounts — savings, current, mortgage and so on — in one statement, Sahgal said.

"And there's also a lot of white space on any printed statement or bill that can be used to promote products and services that might be relevant to the customer's needs according to his profile. This might include a retirement savings plan for older customers," he said.Alternatively, billing systems could also be configured to allow customers to receive their monthly statements and bills in electronic form, such as e-mail, a secure page on a web portal, or even in CD-ROM format.
This kind of individualisation makes for much more cost-effective and better targeted promotional activities for enterprises, according to Sahgal.

IECCM makes this kind of individualisation possible because unlike other software, it does not need to be re-coded for every such change, merely reconfigured by users. This eliminates the need for large teams of software engineers to maintain it.Datamation Group managing director Alex Wee said his company has appointed a sales team of six people, with two of them scheduled to travel to Hyderabad for further training on IECCM.

Wee and Sahgal said they are already negotiating with a Malaysian telecoms carrier that is thinking of deploying IECCM. In time, Datamation hopes to develop a reference site for IECCM.

According to Wee, the partnership with Intense Technologies is a potential stepping stone to help Intense Technologies reach markets in other Asian countries, particularly China and Taiwan, as part of its push for the global market.