Customer experience management brings savings with SandSiv

Begone customer relationship management, hello customer experience management or CXM for short. That's the short form answer to how companies can make more from customers and represents an order of magnitude difference in the way commodity services like telco and media can impact the bottom line.

SandSiv is one of many small emerging companies that's paving the way, using Hadoop, MongoDB and a slew of new technologies that bring insight to the many customer interactions that occur during the lifetime of a customer.

We spoke with Asif Hanafi who heads strategic partnerships with the company. He told us - unsurprisingly -that companies struggle to capture information that explains the 'why' of customer experience.

His company mashes up data captured in multiple channels including social media but also in the customer record systems and then presents these in a variety of formats for customer experience experts who in turn learn how their service is performing.

Although SandSiv only has a small number of customers, each of these save millions of euros each year. Examples given include Liberty Global, Sky Germany, Movistar Belgium and Telecom Italia.

Off mic, I asked Hanafi how this works in practice given that his company's systems are accessing many different customer record types. He said that they often need the blessing of IT departments to gain access but since they are often working on meta data, governance issues are rarely a problem.

One interesting aside to the discussion centered around the number of CXM personnel that even large companies need. According to Hanafi, these are typically teams of three or four people and not the swathes of data scientists so often popularised in the media.

Listen to the recording I made at a very noisy WebSummit in Dublin to learn what SandSiv is doing.