By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA—Call centers often have better luck up-selling or cross-selling to a customer than online sites, primarily because company reps have a customer’s history in front of them. VueLogic, an Atlanta-based software startup, has received two National Science Foundation grants totaling $650,000 so far to develop predictive modeling technology that identifies expected consumer behavior during online transactions based on the same sort of prior customer behavior.
Founded in 2007, VueLogic has been funded by its founders, board, and two NSF grants, a Phase I grant of $150,000 and the first tranche of the recent two-part Phase II grant of $500,000 each.
The grants are helping the company develop its predictive software, which will help its clients understand the three things its customer is likely to buy and the terms likely to be most attractive to them, says CEO Ron Garmon.
“The NSF believes this is transformational technology for the Internet space,” he says.
VueLogic’s PowerVUE Customer Intelligence suite consists of a set of solutions that can help a company understand customers and optimize their engagement to achieve new levels of customer intimacy and company profitability.
The suite is flexible and modular. It allows tailoring the solution to meet business requirements.
The platform integrates data from multiple sources and touch points in a company. This includes online, mobile, offline and social media as well as CRM, and call centers.
Garmon and his VueLogic team came out of the credit reporting industry and the company crafted its business model on that of the credit reporting model. “That is, we take a wholistic look at an individual’s behavior across multiple domains,” explains Garmon.
In the financial industry, a credit score acts as a surrogate for an underwriter, he notes. “It determines if the customer gets the loan, what interest rates he’ll pay and terms associated with it.
“We brought that technology across to Internet consumption behavior,” says Garmon, the intent being to give VueLogic clients a score that acts as a surrogate for a customer service rep.
Although VueLogic is using personally identifiable information to do this, “Everything we do has privacy protection wrapped around it,” says Garmon. The company uses consumer information only in ways they have specified it can be used, he notes.
Data shows that the average ticket in a call center is 40 to 60 percent higher than an Internet ticket, largely because the customer service reps can look at a customer’s account. VueLogic’s technology brings that same capability to the Internet.
Currently, says Garmon, “From a scoring perspective, most organizations don’t understand who their best and worst customers are and who are mid-level. How valuable a customer is dictates what sort of offer you make,” says Garmon, “whether to cross sell or up-sell and what sort of offer to make.”
For a high performing customer, a company can invest more time to retain them and reward them for loyalty to keep them in that top quadrant. A company might want to do something for a lower value customer to stimulate another transaction, such as offering a 10 or 20 percent discount on their next purchase within 20 days.
But to make those decisions, the company needs the customer’s transaction history and a way to determine how valuable they are to the company.
VueLogic has three parts of its software suite in production, its PowerVue Analytics dashboard, PowerVue Screen, and PowerVue Score. It is targeting three primary market segments, online retail, social media and premium online content with plans to include membership organizations.
It sells the products as software as a service (SaaS) on a month to month license for the Analytics and Screen components. It sells other parts on a fee based on the number of consumers under management. A company with both Screen and Analytics with 100,000 customers under management would pay $250 a month, Garmon says.
Although the seven-employee company does not need cash at the moment, Garmon says it may seek venture funding for expansion at some time in the future.
Online: www.vuelogic.com
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