2003 Marks the Five-Year Anniversary of Exstream Software
Press release from the issuing company
March 20, 2003 -- Exstream Software, Inc. marks the arrival of its fifth anniversary with a wealth of significant accomplishments and exciting innovations. Founded in 1998 by entrepreneurs and long-time digital publishing industry experts, Davis Marksbury and Dan Kloiber, Exstream has achieved revenue growth of more than 100 percent for the past three years. This impressive growth is due to the fact that Exstream's award-winning Dialogue software is quickly becoming the standard for high performance enterprise personalization.
Exstream serves all kinds of companies—from small businesses seeking a competitive edge to multi-national corporations—across a wide range of key markets that include financial services, insurance, banking, service bureaus, telecommunications, utilities and retail. To date, close to 200 sites worldwide have successfully implemented Dialogue. Over 50 new companies adopted Dialogue last year, and Exstream plans to double that number in 2003. Several new customers include industry giants such as AFLAC, which plans to use Dialogue for the production of 80 percent of its 208 million documents; CIGNA, producing communications for 1.5 million retirement plan participants; and Total System Services (TSYS), implementing Dialogue to personalize up to 100 million bank statements monthly. Other companies on Exstream's impressive client list include: AT&T, American Express, J.P. Morgan, KeyCorp, Fidelity Investments, ING, Time Customer Service, Merrill Lynch and Federated Department Stores. The use of Dialogue by Merrill Lynch and CIGNA contributed to these companies winning the prestigious DALBAR award for communication excellence.
“The demands of customers, partners and employees for electronic content is forcing many enterprises to re-evaluate how they produce content,” said Garth Landers, research analyst at Gartner. “A large percentage of correspondence in the business-to-consumer (B2C) arena is still paper-based. However, competitive pressures and demands from consumers and other enterprises are forcing many enterprises to augment their content delivery processes to include multiple options.”
From its inception, Exstream's vision was to develop a product that would enable companies to create any kind of personalized communication—from high-volume, complex statements to on-demand direct marketing and fulfillment to ad hoc correspondence generated interactively over the Web—while substantially reducing time to market. Exstream's product, Dialogue, is a revolutionary solution that combines personalized document creation, campaign management and tracking, and multi-channel delivery in one easy-to-use software suite. Due to Dialogue's extremely high performance engine and its intuitive graphical interface, companies are experiencing up to 80 percent in cost reductions and getting to market up to 40 percent faster.
Over the past five years, enhancements to the product have been on-going and so significant that today Dialogue has over 40 fully integrated modules, allowing companies to create and deliver fully personalized communications such as complex 401(k) statements, policies, publications, contracts, marketing pieces, correspondence and more—in half the time it takes with other solutions. Dialogue's sophisticated content management, campaign management and tracking capabilities help businesses of all sizes segment their customer base and treat different customers differently, depending on their value and growth potential. This ultimately drives increased customer loyalty and additional revenue through cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
“Dialogue fits perfectly with our strategy to communicate with participants on their terms. It enables us to send personalized, targeted messages to individuals based on their particular situation,” said Kelley Rome, project manager, CIGNA. “It's very user-friendly, allowing us to get to market with a new statement in half the time it previously took.”
Exstream attributes much of its success to an unprecedented attention to customer care that provides myriad opportunities for customers to become part of the company's ongoing development process. Customers are able to access some of the most advanced customer support tools on the market through Exstream's trio of web-based support systems. Resolve supports the customer relationship with issue tracking and the ability to accept software enhancement requests; Exchange offers a knowledgebase of procedures, tips and shortcuts; and Exact allows customers to submit their applications to Exstream for inclusion in its ongoing testing environment, and substantially reduce their regressions testing effort for implementing new versions of the software.
“Our goal is to have 100 percent satisfaction among all our customers,” said Davis Marksbury, president and CEO of Exstream Software. “We are not satisfied until our customers are in production and happy. Staying customer-centric has until now been one of the keys to our success, and will continue to guide us into an even more exciting and successful future.”