Wednesday, January 20, 2010





Analytics from HardMetrics Improves Business Performance for Telerx

HardMetrics Enables Leading Customer Care Outsourcer to Simplify the Process of Combining and Analyzing Data for Many Internal Data Sources and Data Elements

HardMetrics, innovators of on-demand and enterprise versions of analysis solutions for sales, service and operations optimization, today announced that Telerx, a leading customer care outsourcer to Fortune 500 and 1000 corporations, has achieved significant operational improvements since implementing HardMetrics Performance Manager (HPM).

HardMetrics' analytics enables companies to optimize business operations as well as drive more profit and improve customer satisfaction through their call centers. HPM makes transformational analytics and metrics readily available to all levels of corporate end users and consolidates data from the enterprise into a self-service, intuitive Web-based application.

According to Diana Helfinstine, senior vice president of operations at Telerx combining back office data with customer contact and call handling information presented a significant challenge because of the multiple, disparate data management and systems involved. However, since implementing the HardMetrics solution in less than 30-days, many previous issues and hurdles have been addressed and overcome.

"HardMetrics simplified the process of bringing many of our data sources and data elements together and allows us to easily add new ones with a drag and drop configuration process," said Helfinstine. "We can now compare and contrast business critical data elements in seconds - in a single view - using dashboards, scorecards, actionable reports and visualization objects. We have moved from reporting and its associated challenges and risks to sophisticated and trusted analytics in a very short period of time."

"We have also been able to reduce the number of people that have to be involved in report creation," continues Helfinstine. "In many cases this translates to an actual cost reduction. In other cases, it's an opportunity to leverage skills in more appropriate areas. We have built an ROI analysis around this implementation and are successfully meeting that return." Helfinstine also likes how the software has eliminated human errors. "The beauty of the HardMetrics product is that once HPM is mapped to the operational data sources, the opportunity for human error is almost non-existent because the data is coming directly from that data source."

The HardMetrics solution has also made the process of creating reports and analytic views significantly easier and quicker. "Using a manual process, we used to spend hours developing reports and graphs for all the things clients want to look at. With HardMetrics, we can simply click on the various elements we are looking for and create any number of views in a matter of seconds," said Helfinstine. "Once that's done, I can go in and refine the view associated with that data, I can export that information to my clients, and it's done within a very short period of time compared to the hours it used to take to manually pull everything together."

As the company spends more time with the HardMetrics software, new ways of using it are being uncovered. Recently both the company's payroll and financial reporting system information has been brought into the HardMetrics system. "More and more companies are finding the cost effectiveness, fast implementation and intuitive simplicity of our software compelling," said Rob Winner, president of HardMetrics. "Providing a multi-dimensional business perspective and the ability to drill down into operational analytics are key factors in our ability to deliver a fast return on investment to our customers."

About HardMetrics
HardMetrics, Inc. was founded in 2003 and provides on-demand and enterprise versions of analytics solutions for contact center driven businesses. Headquartered in the Philadelphia region, HardMetrics has succeeded in eliminating cost and technology barriers that prevent analytics technology from being widely deployed at every level of the enterprise. HardMetrics’ solutions take the wealth of transactional data from any source and convert it into an informational asset for the business user. The technology foundation is based on an end-user self-service approach that relieves the burden on IT and gives users the flexibility to define any analytic view of the business they desire to drive behavior, profitability and customer satisfaction. To learn more about HardMetrics and its solutions, call 215-297-9738 or click http://www.hardmetrics.com/.

About Telerx
Headquartered in Horsham, PA, Telerx is a leading provider of customer care solutions.
From its contact centers in Pennsylvania, Texas, North Carolina, Canada, the Philippines, Europe and Latin America, Telerx focuses on innovation and insight to drive business results and help companies maximize their customer relationships and build brand loyalty. For more information about Telerx and how the company can help you deliver world-class service to your customers, please visit the company's website at http://www.telerx.com/ or call 1.800.2TELERX.

Monday, January 18, 2010

HardMetrics Unveils Marketing Performance Manager (MPM)




New Market Changing Technology Helps Bulldog Solutions Reduce 90% of Time, Effort and Cost Previously Required in Marketing Closed-Loop Analysis

Philadelphia, PA - HardMetrics Inc., announced today the availability of Marketing Performance Manager (MPM), the industry’s first marketing outcome analysis tool that eliminates at least 80% of the time, effort and cost involved in closed-loop marketing. Built on HardMetrics core performance management engine, MPM has been adapted for marketing campaign outcome analysis with requirements driven by lead optimization and management company, Bulldog Solutions.

HardMetrics' developed MPM to help enterprises align sales and marketing goals, improve marketing accountability and demonstrate campaign ROI for closed-loop analysis. Closed-loop analysis is a process intended to set business goals, monitor progress, assess impact and effectiveness of activity, and realign objectives and tactics as required. Through a codeless implementation that requires no back-end application programming, MPM allows marketing executives to define their own dashboards, scorecards, reports and alerts, to keep on top of campaign results in real time. MPM offers maximum flexibility to correlate any source of marketing data, whether it is an Excel spreadsheet or a campaign management platform, to sales, financials and any other information source relevant to measuring the impact of marketing on the bottom line.

Bulldog Solutions turned to HardMetrics to address a cumbersome and time consuming process for delivering campaign reports and qualified leads to its clients. To keep pace with a growing list of clients, Bulldog Solutions was forced to dedicate valuable resources to full-time client reporting. "We had to pull together 40 different reports for each client campaign," noted JT Buser, manager of HardMetrics Unveils Marketing Performance Manager Page 2 analytics at Bulldog Solutions. "There were mountains of reports from Eloqua, our marketing campaign management software, but it was a lot of work to make sense of all that data for closed - loop analysis."

"Bulldog Solutions presented us the opportunity to work with a marketing subject matter expert and enter a very important market, that for years has struggled with the time, difficulty and cost involved in the multi-channel analysis of customer acquisition," commented Rob Winner President of HardMetrics. "HardMetrics MPM solution allows marketing organizations to tap into any data source anywhere in the organization to get the answers they need for timely insight that supports fact-based marketing tactics and resource allocation.

"I was very skeptical when I was first introduced to HardMetrics," continued Buser.
"HardMetrics was positioned as a performance management solution, but it claimed not to require any database modeling, cubing or customization that other performance management tools typically mandate. It was not until I handed over a couple of files to the HardMetrics team and received within hours, a configuration of our own business data, that I knew we had hit on something truly remarkable."

HardMetrics has provided Bulldog Solutions the ability to drill down into any level of marketing campaign detail to understand what is going on, to proactively identify problems and fix them immediately. "HardMetrics helps us automate data extraction from our Eloqua platform and merge it with any other data source," noted Buser. "We can ask questions like: 'how much did we spend on each media promotion,' 'did our clients close a sale as a result,' 'what are the top three lead sources,' and get answers within minutes.

HardMetrics Marketing Performance Manager Highlights:

  • Consolidate/correlate/aggregate marketing data with any other data source for closed loop analysis
  • Capture: response rates, open rates, lead scoring, event attendance, click-through rates,
    conversion rates and any other success metric meaningful in campaign management
  • Marketers can define, drill and maintain on their own: dashboards, scorecards, reports
    and alerts
  • Do outcome analysis in an instant and receive answers in minutes
  • Shortest time to implement, production ready in hours/days not weeks or months
  • Lowest cost to own
  • Easy 'codeless' implementation, reducing the implementation burden on IT:
  • No software customization required
  • No database modeling, change or maintenance required
  • No connectors or data extraction code to implement and maintain
  • No data formatting or layout standardization requirements
  • 100% pure Web application (zero client, cross-platform, multi-browser)
  • All function and data access privileges controlled by role-based security
Todd Davison, President at Bulldog Solutions concluded: "Without HardMetrics, we could not have scaled to support new client business with the kind of analysis we are committed to providing. HardMetrics has reduced 90% of the time, effort and cost previously required for closed-loop marketing. The ability to throw a file into the HardMetrics engine and have it configured automatically is unbelievable. No other market solution offers us this kind of flexibility with the ease HardMetrics offers."