Chaikin Power Tools

case_screen_and_mobile_chaikin.jpgMarc Chaikin has been a force on Wall Street or more than forty years. His latest entrepreneurial endeavor brings pro-quality stock analysis and decision-making tools to the average investor, giving them the ability to invest like the pros.

Chaikin Power Tools are available as iPhone and Android apps, and as a desktop widget.

Chaikin Power Tools needed a robust website and CRM system with sophisticated integration and workflow features to help them provide existing and future digital products, and to maintain contact with their many customers and other interested parties. Moreover, Chaikin was interested in providing their customers with custom social features to allow special investment groups to form and carry on private collaboration, and where serious investors can plan strategy. The latter features are currently in development.

Also required were a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management system, fully integrated with their web site so that the company can manage marketing communications and create reports to measure their business growth.

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Needs and Problems to Be Solved

Website Upgrade: Chaikin's website needed several new features, prominent among them, an e-Commerce capability, a sophisticated workflow engine to power new electronic products, and enterprise social networking and collaboration.

Customer Relationship Management: Chaikin required both a robust website and the means to understand how their customers were using it. To accomplish these tasks, Concursive deployed ConcourseSuite, and wrote a custom integration between it and the web site running ConcourseConnect. The integration makes the CRM system aware of all the significant happenings on the web site: customer registrations, click-throughs, and purchases. The CRM is then able to use this information to institute targeted email campaigns based on customer activity.

Workflow Engine: Chaikin's products often require registration and payment, which then results in the delivery of custom, real-time content from outside systems. ConcourseConnect and ConcourseSuite provide a sophisticated rules engine and workflow system which is able to modify user permissions in real time, and initiate contact with outside systems through an integration engine.

Ease of Managing Sophisticated Content: Chaikin's web site requires constantly changing content, including corporate blog, industry news, and new product information. Connect is used in this case as a content management system, where the customer is in control of frequently changing content.

Process Employed

Chaikin deployed their site through the iterative approach followed by most organizations building hubs. As such, the phases they went through:

Prototype: Covered roughly one month; 1 week for configuration and roughly 3 weeks for socializing it to stakeholders, gaining feedback, and then reaching consensus to go to the next phase.

Beta: Began immediately as the prototype "turned into" the beta. Additional customizations were made, users brought up live, and initial programs begun.

Soft Launch: As the beta continued and confidence grew, Chaikin morphed into the initial "for real" system as successful programs were developed.

Production: It's now in full production with a full suite of capabilities employed: Web, CRM and a number of integrations to third-party cloud services plugged in.

Production Phase II: As new capabilities and features are required, Chaikin works with Concursive to complete the development and rollout.

Technology Components

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