Business Needs WebTrends, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, provides enterprise-class Web analytics and deep intelligence to help organizations deliver unique marketing to unique visitors. Established in 1995 and now a veteran in the Web analytics industry, WebTrends sees tremendous opportunity ahead for enterprise marketing technology.
One of the most valuable opportunities for improved enterprise marketing is the integration of online and offline customer data, or the tying together of Web analytics with customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning systems.
“Even though customer online activity is relevant and valuable to sales, service, and executive management, Web analytics has traditionally been a marketing-only operation,” says Greg Drew, President and CEO of WebTrends. “We wanted to build a comprehensive marketing system that maintains best-of-breed functionality.”
Solution To extend the value of its Web analytics solution, WebTrends worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partners ExactTarget and Customer Effective on tie-ins for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers ISVs (independent software vendors), VARs (value added resellers), and business analysts a business application platform upon which they can build a wide range of applications. WebTrends and its partners are also working with a pre-release version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, code named “Titan,” to ensure their integrations will work with the upcoming version.
The WebTrends integration takes Web analytics data from the WebTrends Marketing Warehouse, based on Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and makes relevant customer online activity available from within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Using the new solution, people in marketing, sales, service, and executive management see Web analytics data associated with an individual customer, an account, an industry, or geography. The new data also feeds into an “Interactions” view in Microsoft Dynamics CRM-built by Customer Effective and shown in Figure 1-that incorporates all points of customer contact, including Web interactions, telephone calls, e-mails, and Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 meetings and notes.
Using Windows Workflow Foundation, part of the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, the WebTrends integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM also automates the routing of customer leads and requests for information to appropriate salespeople or service representatives. For example, when a visitor to a company’s Web site requests information about a product, that request is automatically routed to a salesperson in the appropriate geographic region or product group.
