Heavyweight backers for Aussie CRM revolution

A new Australian software company backed by the former CMO of Commonwealth Bank and the founder of ISP pioneer Magna Data wants to rewrite the rulebook on CRM.

Flamingo is the brainchild of Catriona Wallace, who founded award-winning customer experience firm Fifth Quadrant.

Flamingo's backers include former Commonwealth Bank CMO Andy Lark, tech entrepreneur and Magna Data founder Luke Carruthers and Paul Huynor, co-founder of One Big Switch.

The company specialises in vendor relationship management (VRM) – a new take on customer relationship management.

In a live demo last Thursday in Sydney, the Flamingo team showed how a customer and a telco representative could collaborate live on the platform to tailor make – or "co-create", in VRM speak – a phone and data plan based on the user's individual needs.

The first channel partner is Veridian, the Sydney-based systems integrator that was awarded the NBN call centre contract in 2012.  

Veridian chief executive Peter Chidiac told CRN that his firm was the exclusive integration partner for Flamingo. As well as reselling among its SME client base, the company will deploy all systems, including those sold direct by Flamingo.

The platform can be hosted in a client's own contact centre, or they can opt to have it hosted on Veridian data centres in Fujistu's facilities in North Ryde, Sydney and Noble Park, Melbourne.

Chidiac said the company will bundle Flamingo as one of our features and benefits that sits within its contact centre offering.

Veridian's unified communications vendors include Cisco, Hosted COntact, Verint, Genesys and Utopy along with HP and Microsoft.

Asked about clients, Chidiac said it was still early days. "We will be offering Flamingo to certain customers who are ready or interested in a co-creation environment. This is a startup situation and we are that the very beginning of the process."

Catriona Wallace also revealed that Flamingo is at the final stages of locking in a deal with Oracle as its CRM of choice.

The guest speaker at the Sydney launch on Thursday was VRM expert and Flamingo investor Doc Searls. He called CRM a $20 billion business "that is the sound of one hand, instead of shaking, slapping the customer".

"There really is no interaction between the CRM and the customer. It is really about sales. The reason Salesforce is called Salesforce is because it is about sales, not because they're about customer service. No knock on them: the idea behind CRM was a good one but it was a one-sided idea," said Searls.

He said this with VRM, "the customer comes to the market's table fully equipped to relate with CRM in ways that work for both sides."