Introduction
Even though Comrz is a relatively new company, its solution Affino has been in constant development and evolution for nearly 15 years now. Back when we developers of Affino started talking about a Web-based system which would take advantage of the ’Customer Ladder’ methodology, we were very much ahead of the curve of mainstream thinking.
Whenever we developed a new area of functionality for the solution, the concept of the ’Customer Ladder’ was always at the back of our minds. The Affino solution set out to be the best sales-making solution ever - by that I mean the best solution for selling - and not just limited to selling packaged goods, but any kind of hybrid service or product - via more traditional catalogue stores, as well as digital and subscription services. The solution would make use of all the key marketing techniques possible, including word-of-mouth and viral and social campaigns.
It has taken us this long to get all the necessary components in place to fulfil the full spectrum of what the ’Automated Customer Ladder’ encompasses and delivers.
Affino the Social Commerce Hub
As many of you will know by now, Affino combines the best qualities of the social and commercial Internet, taking inspiration from and integrating with technologies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, WordPress, YouTube and Flickr, Google, Amazon and eBay.
Affino is fully autonomous and stand-alone as a technology, offering you everything you might need in a single solution. It is also aware of its relative position within the Internet at large, and thus integrates directly with larger customer pools - as you might find on Facebook, YouTube and eBay for instance. Affino distributes content out to these larger resources to give Affino owners even more reach and market penetration.
Affino is very much a holistic empowering technology intended to be manageable by the smallest of companies - with the slimmest of resource overheads. Affino covers Content Management, Media Playback and Digital Asset Management, eCommunity and Social Networking, Retail and Distributed Commerce, ePromotion and Web-Marketing and a welter of real-time Analytical Tools.
The Affino Automated Customer Ladder
Since Affino now combines and tracks so many different areas of engagement, interaction, participation and transaction - we evolved the system so that all customer activities could be actively monitored and assigned point values, statuses and rewards.
There are 30+ different types of automated ’Conversion Events’ in Affino, which allow you to assign a recognition and reward to pretty much every level of customer engagement and activity. The customer gets rewarded by on-screen status badges and points values, but also can benefit from service rewards and even purchasing discounts.
Affino utilises a similar ’Gaming Methodology’ to what you might find on Foursquare or Gowalla, but the Affino process is entirely seamless and unintrusive - your customers are rewarded for what they do naturally anyway - networking and communicating with other customers, tweeting, blogging and writing comments and reviews for instance.
The Art of Persuasion
The strongest form of product promotion is a word-of-mouth recommendation, followed by ’social buzz’ then customer features and commentaries. Affino provides and enables all this via the active social engagement plaform that is the ’Affino Automated Customer Ladder’ which is now central to the full ’Social Marketplace’ suite.
Two key components to this are the ease of participation - the seamless simplicity in interacting with and participating on an Affino site; the other half is the strength and force of persuasion. In Affino we achieve this via the ’Corollary Effect’ by way of our comprehensive ’User Public Profiles’. When you read a customer commentary or review, the immediate question you should have is one of pertinence and saliency - i.e. how relevant is this customer’s opinion to me? The Corollary here is the sum total outcome of a user’s every activity (you are what you do and what you like!).
By clicking on a User thumbnail, you get taken to a multi-tabbed ’User Public Profile’ where you can browse through that User’s extensive onsite activity record - this displays every part of their onsite interaction - tweets and blogs made, comments and articles written, media uploaded etc. - you get the full overview of that customer, and understand directly whether their opinions are likely to strike a chord with your own likes and dislikes. No other system handles as many points of information and comparison in as seamless and integrated a fashion.
For these reasons and more, Affino is truly the ultimate engine of engagement and persuasion.
