Ithena Inc., San Jose, CA, a data analysis software vendor, last week announced the availability of Ithena e-CI, a customer intelligence software application that allows business managers to identify, analyze and predict evolving customer behavior, enabling businesses to treat customers individually.
According to Ithena, the product can identify minute changes in individual customer behavior, allowing managers to predict changing customer needs on a daily basis.
Charles Nicholls, president of Ithena, an independent company wholly owned by Business Objects, said the program is important in today’s environment, as “companies have committed billions of dollars to acquire new customers and are now realizing that the real opportunity lies in increasing value of existing ones.”
Ithena e-CI provides advanced analytics against large customer databases containing transactional and clickstream data from all areas of the business.
The application provides:
• Mile-deep analytics. Ithena e-CI analyzes information to provide fine-grained detail about behavior over time, creating alerts and automating action based on consistent business rules.
• One-to-one customer management. By tracking the evolving behavior of individual customers, Ithena e-CI enables managers to tailor marketing communications to individuals, compared with marketing programs that target five to 10 segments of 1 million or more customers. These communications can be triggered automatically across all sales channels and a variety of customer facing systems, including call centers, campaign management and personalization engines.
• Marketing by exception. Ithena e-CI tracks existing patterns of customer behavior, then notifies marketing managers when customers change their behavior. As a result, the company can react quickly to exploit the changing behavior to retain the customer's loyalty.
• Scalability. Ithena e-CI can scale to accommodate large data volumes generated by companies with millions of customers.
Ithena e-CI is available at a base price of $350,000 per application.
Industry observers have noted that the benefits of Ithena's analysis are an effective way to increase customer retention.
“Aimed at the customer intelligence space, Ithena contains expertise that many enterprises lack — and will need — if they want to systematically understand, monitor and interact with their customers,” said Bob Moran, research vice president and managing director of decision support research at the Aberdeen Group, Boston.
Ithena's first customer is Amazon.com. Ithena partners, including the Braun Consulting Group, Delano Technology Corp., Recognition Systems, Sun Microsystems and Torrent Systems, are leveraging the analysis available through Ithena e-CI to offer superior customer relationship management and marketing solutions.
