LogMeIn Makes Bold360 Entrance at CRM Party
LogMeIn on Thursday unveiled Bold360, a customer engagement platform that evolved from Boldchat — the live website chat software it acquired five years ago.
Bold360 has an intuitive interface that consolidates data from different systems to present a unified view of all customer interactions.
Among its features:
- Easy integration of data from Salesforce and Zendesk into its interface;
- Omnichannel support, including live chat, Facebook Messenger and email;
- Intelligent automation, which lets agents respond to commonly asked questions and create, curate and manage answers. The system gets smarter over time and can be applied to self-service interactions or to inform agents when they engage with customers; and
- Seamless escalation of customers to remote support from the existing interface.
Bold360 builds intelligent and actionable profiles that let businesses offer the right recommendation at the right time, based on a customer’s information overall, rather than on a small subset of data gleaned from previous interactions.
Focus on the Engagement Layer
“While many CRM vendors are experimenting with emerging technologies like [artificial intelligence] and trying to address omnichannel engagement, there are still important needs that are currently being unmet by today’s CRM and ticketing systems,” said Paddy Srinivasan, general manager of LogMeIn’s customer engagement and support business.
There really hasn’t been a focus on the engagement layer, he told CRM Buyer.
LogMeIn created Bold360 “to be a true system of engagement, rather than a static system of record,” Srinivasan said.
Bold360 is built with the end-customer in mind, he noted. It includes “the most popular engagement channels — social, live chat, email, and self-service tools.”
The channels work seamlessly together, added Srinivasan.
“We are adding in remote support tools, and it easily integrates with CRM systems to present a rich customer profile all in one place,” he said.
Bold360’s Nuts and Bolts
LogMeIn offers highly intelligent, homegrown automation capabilities to help agents create, curate and manage answers.
“We’re hearing a lot about AI in customer service — but like most brands, we’re in the beginning phase,” Srinivasan said.
Bold360 has an integration API that let users integrate with numerous Web-based systems, including Salesforce and Zendesk.
“What stands out over time is [Bold360’s] ability to get to intelligent automation, which is now a requirement,” noted R “Ray” Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research.
“Customers want to easily automate and orchestrate engagement in customer service,” he told CRM Buyer.
Deconstructing Bold360
Omnichannel engagement, AI and self-learning have become table stakes for CRM platforms and products.
“It’s important to keep up, and by making this announcement, LogMeIn’s showing that they belong in the peloton,” remarked Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research.
Bold360’s strength lies in its interface and ease of use, Constellation’s Wang observed. Also, LogMeIn “has a good brand and good customer support.”
However, the key to success will be how easy it will be to integrate with Salesforce, Zendesk and other popular systems, he suggested.
LogMeIn will incorporate out-of-the-box integrations with more Web-based systems in the future, the company’s Srinivasan said. “Bold360 as it is today is just the first step. It will continue to evolve, and we anticipate that emerging technologies like AI will play a role in our long-term strategy.”
Bold360’s Chances in the Market
The CRM market is pretty crowded, and “anyone in today’s market should seek to quickly find differentiation in processes its products support,” Beagle’s Pombriant told CRM Buyer.
“Too often they spit out a product and expect the market to understand and apply it,” he said.
“We believe there’s a significant white space when it comes to the engagement capabilities of traditional CRM and digital customer service solutions,” Srinivasan pointed out.
Traditional product omnichannel solutions “more often than not are good enough rather than robust and powerful … and customer information lies in disparate systems,” he said. “Bold360 was designed to bring together customer information and vital business data in one solution.”
Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.