AmberLeaf: Implementing business experience solutions to deliver business value

AmberLeaf is a customer experience consultancy delivering applications which provide business value. Its process involves planning strategically and functionally to help its clients meet their business requirements and technical needs. AmberLeaf adheres to existing standards while helping to develop competitive solutions. Years of application development and support has enabled them to provide the highest level of customer service. “In today’s marketplace you need to be relevant immediately. Though, a great vision and roadmap are nice, showing the value today has become paramount,” says Larry Goldman.

We have with us, the CEO and Founder: Larry Goldman

Why was the company set up?

The part of business that involves customer interactions like customer service, sales and marketing, were converging at an alarming rate. Customers were insisting on personalized, information based relationships, and consistency across the ever exploding interaction channels. Many solution providers were focused on or provided only one aspect of the customer experience. Some provide sales solutions, some provided service solutions, and others provided marketing solutions. We saw the need, and AmberLeaf was incepted to provide solutions across all customer facing functions. AmberLeaf helps our clients to create yearly or multi-year plans to launch or redefine their go-to-market strategies. It also helps customers in planning new and revised strategies regarding contact planning, offer relevancy, personalization, CRM, coordination, systems, integration, or marketing automation.

Tell us about your first project.

We did our first large scale project in the mortgage industry. We created a single customer database that consolidated over 20 sources of information. This single customer database powered a marketing automation, customer service, and loan officer sales application. The system provided batch and real-time marketing capabilities where all interactions were stored in a centralized database; so all channels shared a common view of the customer.

How successful were your early projects?

The productivity applications were not available during the early days of Customer Experience. Cloud based applications were still in their earlystages. Master Data Management applications had not been introduced to the mainstream and application configuration hadn’t reached the current level of sophistication. So, the technology was too complicated to have provided the promise of a relevant, personalized, and consistent customer experiences. Moreover, the business side was just starting to conceptualize how they wanted an orchestrated service, sales, marketing, digital, off-line experience. It was new to everyone.

What were the grounds on which you have expanded your company and its offerings over the years?

The directions we explored have always been driven by our clients. As cloud computing became pervasive, we made sure that we were certified in all of the right cloud applications. With the advancement of visual analytics, we ensured that we knew the right technologies. We have always tried to be a thought leader to our clients with new business strategies and effective, creative use of customer experience technologies. In the end, our clients drive our understanding of current requirements.

What were the challenges that you faced in your initial years? What can your peers learn from it?

Educating the market is time consuming, and it takes financial investment as well as patience. While the next wave of customer experience strategies and technologies were hitting the marketplace, we were thinking about implementing new approaches and why they were better than the old ones. Assuming everyone is going to run to the next shiny thing just doesn’t happen. But proper education, ROI analysis, and finding the right first adopters can lead to the huge growth potential that you had hoped for originally.

What are the factors that have been/ are the biggest assets to your organization?

As solution providers, we can list out two major factors that have been and will be our biggest asset. The first one being human resource, and the second being technology choices. In the fast moving environment of cloud computing, we need flexible people who can help manage clients, integrate applications, configure applications, deliver sales presentations, and write marketing collateral.

What do you feel are the reasons behind?

• Your client satisfaction. AmberLeaf has always maintained both functional and technical architects. By bridging the gap between business units and IT at our clients, our customer relationships have been extremely successful.
• Your consistent growth as an organization Making our customers satisfied has contributed towards our consistent growth. The satisfaction ratings from our clients helped us to acquire more clients and many more clients started using our services after our initial projects. Working closely with our software partners has also been a great growth strategy for us as we sell, market, and deliver projects together.

What drives you to excel in your field of business?

Happy clients, happy employees and technology innovations have driven us to excel in our business. I believe it’s our responsibility to help clients achieve their goals. This is what inspires us. Our consultants help our clients to stay focused, so that the client management team can declare success. We work with our major software partners on new product developments and product roadmaps. We pay close attention to the feedback that our clients give us and support the best cloud based customer experience software to stay ahead of the curve.

Let’s meet the man who made it happen: CEO, Larry Goldman

Larry Goldman has built his career around providing professional services in the customer experience and business intelligence spaces. Larry was instrumental in building the business intelligence practice at Braun Consulting in the 90’s and starting their Customer Relationship Practice. Priorto founding AmberLeaf in 2004, Larry helped jump-start Inforte’s Business Intelligence and Marketing Automation practice. Larry is experienced in architecture design, requirements gathering, and project management for large data warehousing, business intelligence, CRM and marketing automation projects.

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