Infor Places Interaction Advisor on Salesforce.com

January 22, 2013 Alex Woodie

Infor last week announced that the customer interaction management component of its Epiphany CRM suite, a product called Interaction Advisor, will soon be available on the Salesforce.com platform as software as a service (SaaS) offering.

Interaction Advisor is an inbound marketing application that’s designed to allow businesses to predict customer behavior based on their real-time activity and past responses to interactions, while aiming to improve cross-sell opportunities, reduce churn, and bolster the bottom line.

The software helps to ensure there’s consistency in the offers and promotions that a company makes to its customers across a variety of IT touch points, such as websites, email, social media, mobile devices, call centers, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, point of sale (POS) systems, and ATMs. Infor says the software “learns” from customer interactions to discover the preferences of individual customers, and allows businesses to tailor more accurate outbound marketing.

Interaction Advisor has been available on Windows, Unix, and Linux operating systems for years. By January 31, the software will be available as a SaaS offering via Salesforce.com.

“Salesforce users now have an accelerated ability to manage the complexities that come hand-in-hand with synchronizing cross-sell and retention programs across numerous customer touch points and mobile platforms,” says MJ Crabbe-Barberis, Infor’s global CRM product marketing director, “saving valuable time, providing reliable consistency, and increasing offer acceptance and therefore revenue.”

Infor has done a lot of work with Salesforce.com over the last 18 months, including development of two native Force.com applications that integrate with Infor ERP systems via its ION middleware. In April 2012, the IBM i shop C.H. Briggs, was the first Infor customer to go live on Inforce Everywhere (now called just Inforce), a product that makes ERP-resident data available to the Salesforce.com CRM system. Infor followed that up last fall with the launch of Inforce Marketing, an outbound marketing solution that’s also built on Force.com.

Infor’s 2012 plans called for a third Inforce application, alternatively called Inforce Order Management or Quote and Order, to be made available in the first quarter of 2013. Infor Order Management, which has not yet been officially released, is designed to give Salesforce.com CRM users access to product information, such as pricing and availability, that’s stored in Infor ERP applications.