X2Engine
Automate, Personalize and Monitor the Customer Journey

Customer service is at an inflection point, propelling businesses to rethink customer service in a connected, digital age. While today’s volatile marketplace demands high competencies and disruptions through innovations, a majority of businesses have not yet tapped into the true potential of their CRM systems. However, reaping the full benefits of a CRM implementation requires rich IT expertise or external IT support services, which come at a hefty price. Recognizing the need for harnessing the power of CRM implementation, X2Engine leverages a combination of next-gen CRM and marketing automation to support multiple aspects of customer engagement, thus laying the foundation for the first open source business workflow solution.

In an interview with CIO Applications, David Buchanan, CEO of X2Engine shares his insights into the company, the value proposition, and the industry-grade CRM solution called X2CRM that the company offers in the MarTech arena.

What are the challenges in the MarTech space and how does X2CRM overcome them?

Rapid advancements in technology across the MarTech landscape have driven numerous companies to adopt CRM systems to improve customer experience with customized email and landing page templates. However, implementing a CRM system without skilled personnel to design email/ landing page templates is a tedious task. At X2CRM, we streamline and automate the construction of those templates, and seamlessly implement CRM systems out of the box.

Could you elaborate on the CRM solutions that X2Engine offers?

With a deep history in CRM, we are one of the first companies to build a Cloud infrastructure on AWS with white-glove customer service and support—it’s called X2CRM Enterprise. This fully integrated CRM supports a traditional sales and service model, providing a sales, service, and digital marketing application on one database and Cloud infrastructure, using the same language all integrated on a single application platform. X2CRM addresses digital requirements by combining enterprise-grade CRM and marketing automation systems with intuitive digital tracking to procure valuable insights into the customer relationships. Under the enterprise solution, X2CRM offers eight modules fully supporting customer journeys across multi-channel interactions.

For example, to avoid customers from viewing static and unhelpful website content, X2CRM’s X2Digital capabilities allow companies to deploy progressive profiling that manages different web forms or interactive landing pages that quickly customize, track, analyze, and modify clients’ website interactions within the workflow in real-time.

X2CRM’s X2Quotes automates product and services quoting and invoicing using email campaign and X2WorkFlow. X2Social will guide customers from social media platforms and online discussions into an engaging digital customer journey covering X2Commerce. Customers can then order products directly from the social media platform and obtain the shipping and invoicing information— all through X2CRM Enterprise.

Who are your typical clients, and how do your solutions benefit them?

X2CRM Enterprise caters to both B2B and B2C companies. We have a contact record serving as the main hub of the application for B2C companies, and an account record handling multiple contacts for B2B companies.

Our clients enjoy the benefits of extendibility without the need for coding. X2CRM is easily expandable, with low or no-coding required. An X2 Administrator can create and deploy a highly integrated module—such as project management, HR recruitment, or channel partner management by themselves within 15 minutes. All modules are linked to emails, campaign management, workflow, notifications, calendaring and all of the X2CRM components and features.

How does X2Engine stand out in the MarTech space?

Apart from the architecture of our products, what makes us unique is that we save 30 percent of the development costs by building a server on Amazon AWS. We use open-source components with proven software, with each layer open to testing by many users around the world contributing ideas on X2 enhancements. Contrary to our competition that spends up to 80 percent of their development budget on cloud infrastructure and cloud hardware.

As for the intangible, X2Engine stands behind X2CRM Enterprise, and we assure every customer migrating from competing CRM solutions to X2CRM that their deployment will be successful—or they don’t pay for the license or migration services. We call this the X2Engine White Glove service. No other major CRM provider has its actual developers working on extensions for customers to ensure client success. This drives our total commitment to customer success and our deep understanding of the many ways our clients need X2CRM to operate.

Kindly elaborate on a client success story.

One of our B2BF2C clients running a business with 150 franchises around the world, each sold to individual contacts, exhausted their budget trying to build a model that includes a list of buyers and sellers for over six years with Salesforce and four different SF implementation partners. We implemented X2 and successfully loaded all their data from Salesforce and modeled the B2F2C application within six weeks. The client is now taking our implementation to another level—from customer journey and generating key reporting information to inserting tailored goals settings and tracking for each franchise and franchise employees—and automating their entire workflow. This saved them over a quarter-million dollars in the first year alone.

What does the future hold for the company?

Our open source stack boasts 40,000 implementations worldwide and is translated into 14 different languages. We have partnered with other MarTech companies to enhance our app and open source stack with exciting new features that enable clients to record digital fingerprints and procure valuable insights during their customers’ web journey. We will soon be releasing a marketplace version of X2CRM for full mobile responses WYSIWYG editor compatible with all devices to add email templates and construct landing pages, web lead forms and documents to share with the customers. We are also looking to expand our solutions into the financial vertical.