NextPrinciples Looks to Simplify Social Customer Interactions

Perspective

NextPrinciples Looks to Simplify Social Customer Interactions

By Rich Tehrani, CEO, Group Editor-in-Chief, TMC  |  June 24, 2013

Love it or hate it, social media has to be embraced by companies that are interested in communicating with their customers where they spend an increasing amount of their time. Yet scaling social media interactions is truly challenging. A company called NextPrinciples is looking to simplify the complexity of integrating social into your company with its Insight-To-Action Platform.

When I asked Ted Sapountzis, head of marketing and product management with the company, what pains the company eliminates for customers, he told me his company provides them with a unique platform which integrates analytics, listening, monitoring and engagement. Moreover he explained that customers can learn the system in one hour. He then walked me through how it works, and it is certainly a powerful solution with lots of functionality. Let’s just say I’d allocate a bit more than 60 minutes for training to be safe.

The company was founded in 2010 and has eight employees – many of whom worked at SAP. Its platform integrates with Salesforce, SugarCRM (News - Alert), and Microsoft in the CRM space. The goal of the offering is to allow companies to provide their customers a consistent cross-channel experience.

One area of differentiation is that the product can tell you how many leads from social networks are actually converting into sales. One wonders in amazement at organizations that spend large amounts of money to generate Facebook (News - Alert) likes. Do they have software that shows them that likes turn into sales? Perhaps they are using Insight-To-Action.

An interesting feature on the company's road map is predictive analytics that can be used to determine a product's success in the market based on the social love it receives. This seems like a fantastic way to test-market new product launches without actually even having to manufacture a product or develop a service.

Such testing is done at car shows when Ford, GM or others launch a concept vehicle and gauge reaction. At some point every company can do the same thing.

NextPrinciples is focusing on socially mature companies and has a focus on the following scenarios: crisis management, anagement of large numbers of accounts through a simple interface, and marketing events.

Ted took me through a demo of how a company can track keywords and conversations relating to an event like a conference and then delve into what is being said and by whom. The system can further add the new contacts into your CRM system. From there you can create CRM service tickets and assign tasks to teams and monitor workflow.As social interactions, and scaling to meet the needs of large numbers of customers, become more important, solutions like the Insight-To-Action Platform from NextPrinciples seem to make a lot of sense. The company tells me the platform offers user-based pricing determined by features and data volume.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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