Four months after completing its $1.8 billion merger with Citrix's GoTo business, LogMeIn has revealed its first post-merger product — something that could put the Boston company up against Salesforce, Pegasystems and others in the customer relationship management market.
LogMeIn's new product is Bold360, what it calls an "intelligent customer engagement platform" that promises to provide a fuller view of customers and give companies more ways to interact with them. Announced on Thursday, the company's CRM product is completely focused on the customer service side, putting it in the same category of products as Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud and Pegasystems.
However, Bold360 is not meant to replace these systems. Instead, it's intended to augment and complement them, according to Paddy Srinivasan, LogMeIn's former Internet of Things head who is now general manager of the company's customer engagement and support solutions division. That said, LogMeIn would clearly like to become the new dominant tool: Bold360 comes with no-code, point-and-click integrations for Zendesk, Salesforce and other systems so that everything can be viewed from LogMeIn's software.
"We want to be the best system of engagement, not the best of everything," Srinivasan said.
"System of engagement" is a term Srinivasan used a few times in my interview with him, and it's clearly how he views Bold360. He said the number of interactions happening between companies and their customers is an order of magnitude higher than what legacy CRM systems are able to capture. With Bold360, the goal is to capture all of those interactions — including ones happening across newer channels, like Facebook Messenger — and give companies ways to automate more repetitive tasks, on both the customer side and the agent side.
For instance, Bold360 comes with a self-service feature that provides ways for customers to get questions answered without having to speak to a human agent. The feature uses chat bots that respond to customer inquiries using information from a company's database. The other way Bold360 uses automation is through what LogMeIn calls "smart assistants," which learn how human agents answer questions from customers and provides feedback on how those agents can provide better service.
Srinivasan said LogMeIn has had ambitions about getting into the CRM space for several years. But the company only decided to launch Bold360 after a few key puzzle pieces came together. The first big puzzle piece was LogMeIn's merger with GoTo, which gave the company "substantial market share" in the customer service space through GoToAssist's remote service product. Another important piece was BoldChat, the live chat customer service product that was added through LogMeIn's 2012 acquisition of Bold Software.
Automation is about to radically disrupt the space.
The final piece was the insight of how automation will change customer service.
"Automation is about to radically disrupt the space," Srinivasan said.
LogMeIn's stock price has risen substantially since its merger with GoTo was announced last summer, going from about $70 a share to $112 before market open on Thursday morning. Mergers and acquisition have been an important part of LogMeIn's long-term strategy, and the company has used those deals to build new products and get to the market faster.
“In the markets in which we compete, time is our enemy, and we need to move and be aggressive as possible and move quickly,” LogMeIn CEO Bill Wagner said in a previous interview.
