Moxie Upgrades Social Customer Portal PersonalizationMoxie Upgrades Social Customer Portal Personalization

14 Leading Social CRM Applications

Moxie Software says it has significantly enhanced its Customer Spaces portal through better integration with customer data from other systems and broader monitoring of external social media.

With this release, Moxie is particularly emphasizing the way it can integrate customer data such as purchase history and past support interactions for "smart personalization" of what is presented to a customer. For example, a customer signing onto a mobile phone company's portal would see support articles and accessory promotions for the phone that customer uses, before ever entering a query.

Moxie also offers social software for internal corporate collaboration, Employee Spaces, as well as a Knowledge Spaces customer knowledgebase application, and promotes itself as offering a complete internal and external social software system. Moxie also announced a mobile Web version of Knowledge Spaces, which is optimized for iPhone and iPad as well as Android and Blackberry.

Although some customer relationship management (CRM) vendors treat the customer portal as a part of a CRM suite, Moxie sees a benefit of providing it as an independent function that can connect with multiple CRM systems, Nikhil Govindaraj, vice president of products, said in an interview. "By not having the CRM as part of the solution, we're able to integrate with whatever the company already has, as needed." Moxie sees its role as "optimizing interactions," even though some other product from a company like Oracle or Salesforce.com often will be "the system of record" where transactions are officially recorded, he said.

On the other hand, by keeping the customer profile used by Customer Spaces synchronized with the CRM system, the profile becomes "self maintaining" so that it need not be administered separately from the CRM system.

Moxie is also expanding the coverage of the social media listening and sentiment analysis tool in Customer Spaces to include public posts on Facebook, as well as Yelp, Flickr, and the Yahoo Firehose (YQL). Moxie already offered integration with Twitter, YouTube, Bing, Blogger, Digg, and others.

In addition, Moxie is adding support for the XMPP messaging standard, so that in addition to offering service and support chat directly through a company's website, Customer Spaces can now connect with customers using other instant messaging clients or even Facebook's integrated chat feature.

Govindaraj said customers increasingly accept chat as a channel for delivering service and support, and XMPP integration allows them to interact with a company through their preferred software.

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