FIVE-MINUTE SALES PITCH
Chordiant Sticks with Financial-Services Vertical

The company has had strong success in the financial-services market, and that is where it continues to focus. "If you're not in retail banking, insurance, or credit, you're not our prime customer," Straus told CRM Buyer Magazine.

"If you think about a retail outlet like Best Buy," Straus said, "you see that people typically don't go there for service." Thus, Chordiant's primary goal is to provide exceptional service at the lowest cost to the customers they already have. Another is to use every servicing opportunity to accomplish marketing, cross-selling and up-selling.

Taking the Industry Pulse

Through its Industry Pulse program, Straus said, Chordiant visits bank branches and calls contact centers to understand the challenges facing the enterprises it serves. Customers working with bank tellers who have no idea that same customer has been calling a phone representative get frustrated easily and frequently, he said.

For example, Straus tells of one time when a bank employee had no idea what marketing offer had been sent to a customer via direct mail and seemed to have no way to find out. "That person actually said to the customer, 'I suggest you wait for the next mailer and bring it in to us,'" he recounted. These are the types of situations that Straus said Chordiant software's "single view of the customer" can help avoid.

Universal Desktop

Like many CRM vendors, Chordiant emphasizes the fact that users of its software interact with a single, universal desktop that incorporates role-based security. "We implemented at one customer site that had 17 different systems that wealth advisors had to toggle through," Straus noted. "And unlike a company like Siebel, for which you have to implement all Siebel applications, we use the desktop to integrate applications and data from other systems."

Banks and other financial services institutions have, in many cases, over 30 years of computing experience under their belts. Straus pointed out. As large enterprises with many layers of legacy, mainframe-based systems, they cannot afford wholesale conversions to accomplish CRM project goals.

Process Runs the Show

The selling point Straus emphasizes most to business-side executives at prospective customer companies is that Chordiant software is process-driven rather than data-driven. "This goes back to the founder of the company, who believe that applications should be built around processes, profiles and policies," he said. "We've seen the huge cost of taking out-of-the-box, data-driven applications and trying to break them to fit business needs -- that's what has caused the CRM industry to have a bit of a black eye right now."

To executives on the IT side, Straus emphasizes that Chordiant Selling and Servicing is built on "Web services, inside and outside." He likes to remind people that Chordiant went with a distributed computing platform, Java , and Web services early in the CRM game -- taking a risk on what was then a unique technical direction.

"We could have been wrong," he mused. "The whole world could have moved in a different direction. But now, that Java-based Web-services technology is becoming very meaningful."