Twickenham, UK
June 9, 2011

Neolane Message Center Moves Service Messaging from IT to Marketing to Cut Costs, Lift Customer Engagement and Revenue

Single enterprise solution consolidates service message systems. Enables transactional and service messages to be co-ordinated with cross-channel marketing messages for more profitable relationships

Conversational marketing technology provider Neolane today announced Neolane Message Center™, a service messaging application allowing organisations to reduce costs by consolidating to a single platform, the service and transactional messages currently generated by their many IT and e-commerce systems. Service messages can then be assimilated into marketing, presenting powerful opportunities for improving customer engagement and winning new revenue.

Neolane Message Center is available within version 6 of Neolane's conversational marketing technology platform and can be used as a stand-alone application. It empowers marketers by giving them control over service messages and enabling typically plain-text content to be transformed into content-enriched, graphical and customer engaging communications. Content can be personalised to improve the customer's experience and appropriate branding incorporated. One-to-one marketing messages can be included in each service message to promote repeat and cross-sell opportunities, and now for the first time, marketers can coordinate these messages with their cross-channel customer conversations, including across email, mobile, social, direct mail and the call centre.

Transactional and service messages include, for example: password notifications, order and shipping confirmations, tickets, receipts, invoices, statements and product returns notes. These account for around 30 per cent of any brand's customer communications and receive very high opening rates. Yet most brands continue to send plain-text e-mail, letters and SMS alerts, with little in the way of branding and often without dynamic cross-sell offers.

"Adopting Neolane has enabled us to unify the marketing and service messages that we send out to 11 million customers in 15 countries," said François Le Lay, business intelligence manager at PhotoBox. "The Neolane platform allows us to reliably send thousands of personalised messages every day in real-time, anytime and provides us with dependable open and click-through metrics. The initiative has enabled us to positively influence customer satisfaction."

Benefiting IT by Reducing Complexity and Cost
Neolane Message Center allows IT departments to rid themselves of the complexities of managing disparate service message systems, so reducing maintenance and operational costs. A dedicated infrastructure helps to ensure high deliverability, whilst meeting the requirements of demanding production environments. Further value for IT teams includes:

• Backed by a Service Level Agreement: Robust, reliable and designed to perform – in terms of volume, response times and availability for both traditional channels (direct mail) and digital channels (email, mobile).
  
  
• High deliverability: Methods for supporting high deliverability include intelligent retry strategies in the event of bounce backs or network outages. Undeliverable messages can be escalated to be rerouted viaalternative channels.
  
  
• Reduced implementation costs: A flexible technical architecture allows scalability and both on premise and on demand licence models. Rapid deployment is enabled via industry standard APIs and the availability of out-of-box connectors.
  
  
• Real time message tracking and systems monitoring: Real-time reports on events and queues are offered throughout the whole message processing cycle.

"We send more than ten thousand service messages to our rail passengers every day, from booking confirmations to eTickets and train service announcements," said Béatrice Pâques, commercial and marketing director at Thalys, a high-speed train operator in Europe. "During 2011 we'll issue around three million eTickets via Neolane Message Center, each within seconds of purchase, containing specific journey information. We include individually tailored sales offers for every passenger and conversion rates have been excellent. Centralising customer messaging and eTicketing on Neolane, we expect to save tens of thousands of Euros per annum in IT costs." Empowering Marketing to Deliver New Revenue Neolane Message Center allows service messages to become part of a one-to-one dialogue, coordinated across channels. It enables marketing departments to combine the high opening rates of event-driven service messages with the attention winning nature of timely, personalised offers: all within attractively rendered and branded communications.

The benefits for marketers include:

• The opportunity to sell more, more often: In conjunction with Neolane Interaction™, service messages can incorporate personalised, cross-channel-consistent offers in real time. This enables increased up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
  
  
• Reduced costs through lower demand on the contact centre: The ability to dynamically insert one-to-one customer and event specific content, provides the customer with all they need to know.
  
  
• Cross-channel management: Messages are constructed to be consistent with cross-channel conversations. They can be presented using the most appropriate channel, based on targeting and customer preferences for email, mobile, direct mail or even social.
  
  
• Message re-routing: in case of non-response/action, messages can be re-sent via the same or other channels.
  
  
• Reporting: Delivery, opens and clicks are reported in real-time, allowing success rates to be monitored and campaigns to be adjusted if necessary.

"Companies typically treat service messages as simply a necessary cost and leave it to the IT department to ensure ecommerce, accounts, fulfilment and other back office systems generate and deliver them," said Stephane Dehoche, president and chief executive officer, Neolane. "Neolane Message Center aligns IT and marketing functions by providing a cost-effective process to send service messages and ensure high deliverability, whilst enriching content to show a continued and attentive customer relationship, drive loyalty and sales."

About Neolane

Neolane provides the only conversational marketing technology that empowers organizations to build and sustain one-to-one lifetime dialogues, dramatically increasing revenue and marketing efficiency. Born digital, with best-in-class email and inbound-outbound channel fusion capabilities architected into a single code-based platform, marketers achieve results in record time. Neolane is easy to use for both power and casual users, but powerful enough to drive the most sophisticated marketing strategies. Future proof, Neolane has a track record of enabling its customers to adapt to new customer engagement challenges and exploit opportunities more quickly than their competition. Neolane is used by more than 300 of the world's leading companies including Sony Music, Alcatel-Lucent, Orange, Sears Canada and Sephora. Visit www.neolane.com and read our blog The Cross-Channel Conversation.

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