Why Thunderhead.com speeds Microsoft's Dynamics CRM customer engagement story

Microsoft is teaming up with customer engagement platform Thunderhead.com to build a new integrated "omni-channel customer engagement solution" based on Dynamics CRM and Thunderhead.com's ONE Engagement Hub. As with other deals over the last two years like Netbreeze, MarketingPilot, and Parature, this partnership introduces a product and company with limited exposure to the Dynamics CRM channel. The move has led some to wonder what this newcomer can offer Microsoft that others in the ecosystem cannot.

Thunderhead.com's secret sauce

From a pure technology standpoint, Thunderhead may just be the best engineered technology people have ever seen, Paul Greenberg, analyst and president of The 56 Group, a consulting firm focused on CRM. Greenberg advises both Thunderhead and Microsoft..

"It's kind of brilliant and they do some amazing stuff and there's nothing like it anywhere else," he says.  

Thunderhead.com's solutions specialize in improving customer engagement by tying together customer insight, context and journey behavior and enhancing customer experiences across touch points.

"Thunderhead created an engagement platform to establish long-term tracking for customers interacting with an organization," says customer strategist Esteban Kolsky. "First they access all sorts of knowledge and data and content and they have it available. Then they track all the actions from the consumer and they put two and two together and they find the most appropriate piece of data, knowledge, and content for the specific time at which the customer is interacting with the organization."

However, the ...