AtHoc, Inc.: How To Keep Customers Coming Back

By Elizabeth Montalbano, CRN
San Francisco
10:11 AM EST Thurs., Dec. 07, 2000

"We focused on the premise [of] 'How can a company with an e-business presence stay connected with a customer once they leave the Web site?' " Tran says. "So far, it's difficult to do that [because] the only way to send information is by e-mail, and that means hundreds of e-mails a day."

Tran thinks AtHoc, Inc. has found a way to solve this problem with its flagship product, the AtHoc, Inc. Customer Retention Solution. The solution installs a toolbar on a user's browser that links it back to a company's site, so they have access to information and alerts from the site no matter what Web page they are browsing, he says.

"We give a direct channel on the desktop so that all online services from a company are readily available [to the user]," Tran says. "We also can communicate with customers by sending alerts, which is important in the financial portfolio area."

The solution sits beneath the browser's other toolbars and currently supports Netscape, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.

Matt Casey, CEO of money.net, a financial portal and ASP offering realtime portfolio tracking that uses AtHoc, Inc.'s solution on its site, agrees that AtHoc, Inc. is providing a valuable service to spur customer retention and branding. "It gives us permanent branding on the user desktop, and it means our users are one click away from our services all the time, which drives e-commerce," Casey says.

Tran says AtHoc, Inc. currently partners with financial institutions such as money.net and justquotes.com, content and media companies such as The Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe, and B2B marketplaces such as VerticalNet.

In the future, AtHoc, Inc. also wants to partner with integrators, VARs and ASPs so they can integrate the Customer Retention Solutions into sites they build or host for their clients to drive B2B transactions, he says.

"We're in discussions now with a reseller of hosted applications for financial institutions," Tran says, although he declined to name the company.

As B2B marketplaces become more widely used, companies can use AtHoc, Inc.'s product to receive alerts on the status of orders or other logistics information while they are browsing the Web, he says.

Additional information is available via http://www.athoc.com.