It was a matter of time before I’d need to talk about Optimove at least a little. With CRM becoming the core of business in the wake of the SaaS revolution, and with an increasing desire to harness customer behaviors as usable metrics in new and creative ways, there’s no shortage of unique software out there boasting to be the best thing ever.
But, Force.com has held the throne of CRM for a long time, and it’s not out of birthright either. With a very flexible infrastructure and framework, it’s remarkably easy to shape Salesforce’s forms, reports, dashboards and databases to any shape needed.
Along with this, it has top notch integration capacity with a lot of third party software for other purposes. If that wasn’t enough, it also has a diverse app system that lifts feature limits entirely.
That’s a Lot to Give Up:
Yeah, going with Optimove is going to ask for a sacrifice from you at this point, and a fairly big one. While it has some brilliantly redeeming features I’ll get back to in a minute, it lacks some things that are sorely missed.
A big thing is the scale of community Salesforce has. Being new, this one just doesn’t have that behind it.
Coupled with this is the lack of a very impressive extension and integration system outside the ones to support the unique feature set this system was designed around. This may put strain on other services trying to play nice with it, and this can be a cumulative drain on resources down the line.
Nonetheless, they’re working quickly and fervently on this system, so improvements in these areas aren’t far off, most likely.
What’s the Fuss:
Well, this is the implementation of predictive analytics, something that variations thereof are widely popular in many fields. These sorts of heuristic systems are the early inklings of what will later be smart systems and AI able to dynamically process complex data and react wisely to it.
This sort of predictive system should be able to watch various constants and analytics, and spot patterns and take actions depending on them, or suggest actions based on incoming data.
This can be used to predict whether or not customers will react positively to and be incentivized by different marketing campaigns and offers, and spot conditions conducive different approaches, from which to make suggestions.
It’s basically automatic marketing and affinity analysis, to make the lives of marketers much easier.
Coupling this with standard CRM competence to harness and carry the data, and you have a clever new system that can possibly do some impressive and very helpful things that didn’t used to be possible.
In this push, it may even consume BI functionality.
But, for the moment, there is that sacrifice, and that commitment to this CRM. So, you better really be on board for this, because you’re sacrificing a lot, and I do mean a lot of other, old stand by features that the likes of Salesforce can provide.
Nonetheless, Optimove shows a tremendous amount of potential, but I think it needs to mature another generation or so, before it’s really ready for mass adoption.
