Interview with Thierry Téchy, Selligent: "the big challenge is to detect consumer intentions

Reconnect15, Selligent's customer and partner event, took place yesterday. Badsender was fortunate enough to take part in this event, and to mark the occasion we're publishing an interview with Thierry Téchy, Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Selligent, which we had the chance to conduct a few weeks ago. This interview will give you an insight into the solution and the company's vision of the market.

The interview

Could you tell us a little about the history of Selligent?

Selligent is basically a B2B CRM solution. In 2008, we acquired Optizen, publishers of Messagent, a CRM tool for the multi-channel campaign management. At the time, B2B accounted for 80% of our sales, and we wanted to equip our CRM platform with marketing tools.

But this acquisition did not go as planned. Optizen's solution was too advanced for the maturity of our B2B customers, so we chose to continue selling Optizen's solution to B2C customers, which was its historical target.

The tool, which was renamed SIM (for Selligent Interactive Marketing), quickly became Selligent's primary growth driver. However, we continued to sell both solutions.
Since then, it's interesting to note the evolution of marketing maturity in B2B. Today, we have more and more of these historical customers who are turning to our marketing solutions. However, today, B2C has still become our core target.

Since we acquired Optizen in 2008, the solution has always been multi-channel, including web, which is rare for a marketing campaign management tool. In recent years, we have evolved the platform into a solution we call "Omnichannel Audience Engagement". This ranges from tracking anonymous visitors to a website, through their identification, to push mobile notifications, which has become an extremely important channel.

Gone are the days of outbound strategies, the biggest challenge today is to detect consumer intent as the first element of a marketing program. Having a list and an outbound message is no longer relevant. We need to engage based on intentions, and these intentions can be detected via website navigation, geolocation techniques linked to the use of beacons, or by analyzing the interactions generated by the various communication channels.

Are marketers mature enough to use all the technologies you propose?

In 2014 we can say that the world has changed. The user experience has become a central data in marketing thinking.

My impression is that all marketers have become more mature. This is especially true in the retail world. We see it every day, our customers' use of the platform is getting richer and more complex.

If marketing managers have evolved, has their management?

Few brands and retailers have not yet experimented with the various techniques we have just mentioned. Often, people who come to us have already used other platforms and therefore take the step to go further. If they only need to send email and do personalization, even in the medium term, we are not the right solution, and we tell them.

Today, the management teams of companies have well integrated the need to mix the different channels. Silos are still present in companies, for example on mobile where engagement solutions have been developed quickly without contact with other channels, but this is changing. Mobile messaging, to stay with our example, will change hands and increasingly be managed directly by CRM-oriented teams.

At Selligent, our goal is to provide a fully integrated and simple solution without the need for technical integration.

Are there big differences in maturity between industries?

Retail is clearly the most advanced sector in its multi-channel approach, with mobile applications being highly developed. We could also mention the fields related to travel and tourism, even if some players lack the means to achieve this.

Another very advanced sector is finance. They have a lot of resources and are very good at using multi-channel approaches, both in B2C and B2B.

Finally, we can also mention the media, which is also undergoing a revolution. They have a great need for sophistication and a solution like Selligent is very effective for them.

The press was your historical sector at the time of Optizen...

Indeed, at that time we already had the majority of the Benelux press groups as clients, and we still sign quite a few in this sector. Today, we still have a strong focus on this sector, although the retail and financial sectors have also become extremely important to us over time.

Some time ago, you opened an office in the United States. How is your American adventure going?

First of all, we had a two-step approach, from mid-2013 to mid-2014, we put a lot of resources into marketing and sponsoring in order to be visible and this allowed us to sign some partnerships with local actors and acquire first customers.

Since October 2014, we have teams in Boston and New York. The US is our main focus regarding new markets we want to invest in. We waited until the end of 2014 before actually moving there because we wanted our version 6 to be completely finished. This allowed us to adjust the language and terminology of the tool to fit the US market.

Is it difficult to compete with American players?

We had already met most of the American players in the European market, so we had a good vision of the competition we were going to meet from the start. To give you an example, in the European market, a company like Exacttarget is in the middle of a very large acquisition strategy and sometimes they sell off their solution. In the US, they don't have that attitude at all, so it's easier there.

On the other hand, we have the advantage of freshness. We have an excellent reputation on the other side of the Atlantic, which is the case for most European publishers. The European market is more complex than the American market, so the solutions from the old continent have already integrated a level of sophistication that the American solutions do not have yet.

You recently deployed your version 6, how long have you been working on this project?

Behind this new version, there are about 18 months of work. Some modules of our solution were no longer aligned at the user interface level. These modules did not have a common history at the interface level. The biggest change in this version 6 is a complete unification of the interface and the appearance of a centralized dashboard. We have completely revolutionized the UX of Selligent. One of our latest modules, Target, was used as a model.

But that's not the only new feature of Selligent 6. We took the opportunity to improve the campaign creation process by transforming our Campaigner module into a brand new module called Journey Map.

Another project that we have completed is the unification of certain tools that were previously separate.

In terms of channels, version 6 sees the arrival of new modes of interaction with the mobile channel. We already manage bi-directional SMS and we have invested in push notifications and email previews in responsive design mode. But mobile integration doesn't stop there, since we also integrate the notion of geolocation, via, for example, the use of beacons (geolocation inside a building, a store for example). Mobile scripting has become extremely powerful!

To finish with this version 6, there is also everything that is invisible to the user. Numerous changes have been made to the databases in order to be able to handle the volumes of data that have been increasing steadily in recent years. This is materialized by the use of column store DB and by the implementation of connectors to the Big Data environments available on the market.

In recent years, the cloud has become more and more important. What is the proportion of your customers in Saas versus on-premise?

In 2008, when we bought Optizen, it was already 50/50. Today, in the new business, we have 90% in SaaS mode and 10% in renting mode, i.e. on site deployment. We remain open on the subject, but Saas is clearly preferred by most of our customers. However, in certain sectors, on-premise remains extremely important, and in future versions of the platform, we will continue to provide this formula.

To conclude this interview, could you tell us what we can expect from the future in terms of eCRM and campaign management?

On a functional level, the evolutions will mainly be around measurement, KPIs, attribution, etc. Now that multichannel is well established in our tool, we will focus on measuring and optimizing the results.

The second area of evolution is integration with the digital world in the broadest sense, whether it's DMP, DSP, SSP, RTB, ... we really want to connect with the digital acquisition world. Our goal is to reduce the integration work with this type of solution and make it as simple as possible. This will result in new developments in our platform, but also in partnerships with different players in this sector.

Focus on Selligent version 6

Since this is the new product of the moment from Selligent, I suggest you watch a video presenting the new features of the product: