Athene's intelligent software learns from experience.

• Author: PETERSON, ERIC
• Position: Brief Article

IMAGINE if you could talk to your customer just before he or she cancels their account and signs on with your top competitor.

Sound like a dream? Eric Johnson says his company can make that dream come true.

Johnson is president and CEO of Boulder's Athene Software Inc., developers of intelligent customer relationship management (iCRM) software, so named because it is capable of learning from experience. Athene's first product, released in July 1999, is APT Churn. It predicts when a customer of an internet service provider, a financial portal, or a wireless plan is going to jump ship.

For confidentiality reasons, Athene won't reveal who its customers are, but Johnson said one of them reports that APT Churn identifies customers who are about to churn," or switch providers, at an amazing 90 percent rate of reliability.

Another Athene client reported a 40 percent decrease in churn and a 60 percent drop in calls to customer support after it tested the product.

"If you're ticked off with AT&T, you might not call them and tell them that," Johnson said. "You might just switch to Sprint. Now, instead of waiting for a customer to call in--or not call in -- (APT Churn) will basically say, he's not happy, here's why, and here's what you're probably going to need to do to keep him."

It allows you to have "a personal relationship with every customer," Johnson said.

APT Churn computes customer satisfaction through a code that takes some 300 variables into account, including...