June 27th, 2008

Coveo G2B for CRM provides search-based single customer view from disparate content sources

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 6:56 am

Categories: Software Infrastructure, Software Development, database, search, business intelligence, management, Enterprise 2.0

Tags: Coveo Solutions Inc., CRM, Customer Data, Advertising & Promotion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software, Dana Gardner

As companies search for the holy grail of a “single view” of the customer, Coveo Solutions, Inc., which provides search-powered enterprise information access, has unveiled its Coveo G2B for CRM, a way to provide a view of all relevant customer data from a wide variety of sources.

G2B for CRM brings together data from such sources as salesforce.com, Siebel Systems, corporate intranets, tech support emails, customer support databases, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

It also provides advanced content analytics, giving workers the ability to present customer data graphically. Presenting customer data as a spreadsheet or a pie chart allows management or workers in planning, forecasting, and resource management. This can eliminate the need for time-consuming database queries and reporting, even when sifting through millions of documents.

Coveo’s approach shows the productivity benefits of enterprise search continue to be explored. Google (appliances), Microsoft (with FAST Search technology) and Autonomy certainly think so.

Newton, Mass.- and Quebec-based Coveo G2B for CRM, built on the Coveo Enterprise Search-platform technology, is part of the company’s G2B Information Access Suite, which allows knowledge workers to obtain a unified view of enterprise information.

I’m interested in seeing more mashups of search from across many enterprise and web-based providers (including social networks) to give even more complete and vetted views of customers, suppliers, partners, employees and any others that relate to business activities or ecologies. The information is out there, just waiting to be harvested and managed.

And when are we going to get a single view of IT assets in association with business processes? Increasingly searching IT devices and resources is playing a role in enterprise search too. How about not only getting a single view of the customer but also instant views to the right systems to reach out to them through, or the right integration avenues?

Let’s search people and systems and gather insights to the systems context of business along with the social aspects. People, process, systems and search. That’s the ticket.

Link to BriefingsDirect podcast. Subscribe to the podcast Feed. Subscribe with iTunes. Dana Gardner is principal analyst of Interarbor Solutions. For disclosures on Dana's industry affiliations, click here.

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