Boston-based start-up Apptegic formally launched its new offering at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC conference last month, officially joining the fray in the emerging customer engagement measurement market. Given the very high cost of customer churn on revenue and profitability, tools such as those offered by Apptegic allow cloud computing companies to proactively monitor and respond to customers in an effort to reduce or prevent churn.
Apptegic is similar to competitors JBara and Totango. Like them, Apptegic’s mission to help firms understand their customers in order to keep them, make them successful, and sell more to them. Each examines customer visit frequency and online behaviors, helping software engineers identify product changes and enhancements. Each enables Customer Success Managers to identify trends and personally respond to “at risk” customers, or identify those who may be receptive to up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.
But Apptegic does some things differently. The company offers greater depth of understanding by collecting more data and adding the ability to score interactions against essential Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). By analyzing more data than simply which product the customer purchased or how often they used it, the application allows better conclusions to be drawn about specific customer segments and behaviors, enabling more relevant, context-dependent decisions. Reporting capabilities are correspondingly more advanced, allowing analysis over different periods of time and with greater stratification (e.g. by user, account, and segment) which can better assist product and service improvement efforts. Apptegic then delivers more sophisticated filtering capabilities to generate responses in real-time, directly and automatically from the customer’s application. Online actions can include sending tailored customer support or marketing messages that automatically and intelligently guide customers to their next steps.
Apptegic’s product offers potentially greater advantages for many cloud computing companies by promoting better targeting, scalability, and predictive modeling. In circumstances where less information is collected or known about target customer segments during the sales process, Apptegic allows more ways to analyze and segment users according to common needs, value, and profitability after the fact. Through greater automation, customer service and success management can be less manually intensive and more productive, allowing companies to focus their more expensive human resources on market segments and accounts that truly justify them. Having more variables also enables more robust churn modeling. Companies can design and run statistical experiments, testing and optimizing customer “treatment” strategies even further, resulting in approaches that have the greatest impact on customer retention at the minimum cost.
Apptegic’s early clients include Constant Contact, Vela Systems and Dyn. Pricing varies from $200 to $4,000 per month according to account structure, number of unique users and events per month, and number of Apptegic users at the customer site. The company offers a free trial period for those who want to kick the tires. For more information, visit Apptegic.