2020 marks the 20th anniversary of OpenTextTM Exstream.
It is hard to believe that the market-leading Customer Communications Management (CCM) software was “born” in the garage of two University of Kentucky engineering students in 1999, and the first customer was a French telco company one year later in 2000.
A lot has changed in those 20 years, with the technology changing hands, first to HP and then to OpenText in 2016. Despite the change of ownership, one thing has remained constant: our customers require a fast, reliable and scalable solution to produce high-volume, batch transactional documents. Exstream was, and still is, the fastest engine in town and can easily handle millions of pages in minutes.
Over time, customer requirements have expanded to include a need for interactive document creation for one-to-one personalization. Customer service representatives needed to be able to interact with customers and then immediately follow up with a personalized letter. Agents and brokers often have real-time customer interactions that require follow up. Exstream evolved to support these ever-changing customer requirements, including innovations such as an interactive editing capability (Empower) to meet that need and for one-off, real-time, individual customer requests.
When our customers asked for tools to help their business users and content owners be more proactive in creating and editing content, Exstream delivered with Content Author and Communications Designer for easy content development and business user-driven communication template creation.
More recently, Exstream announced an integration with Salesforce to allow users to create many different types of customer correspondence directly from within the popular CRM system. This eliminates errors associated with salespeople manually cutting and pasting contact names and notes from Salesforce into Word or an email. To learn more about this new capability, check out this webinar-on-demand.
The last 20 years have seen the world change radically. From client server to cloud, from PCs and laptops to smartphones and devices, from text messages to WhatsApp and TikTok. Whatever the future brings, the OpenText Exstream team will continue to partner with our customers, helping them to unlock the information advantage from our evolving digital economy.
