Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take maybe a couple of your customers from different sectors and walk us through the use cases of how they use your product.

Bob Dufour: One of the things that’s common to all of our customers is that as they go online and as their business becomes more digital, price transparency increases for consumers. It’s accelerated by the presence of aggregator or comparison websites. It pushes their core margin down. Then they all have a very strong need for ancillary products. If we think of the airline industry, it would be a seat on an airplane. If you think of the healthcare industry, it would be the core health insurance product. If you think about auto insurance, it would be the core auto insurance product.

Let me take those three industries. Our role, again, is to take information that somebody has left behind—their digital footprint. That could be a referring site or information that they left on a form. It could be CRM information. We take that information on a real-time basis. If you take the use case of an airline, you’re going to pick a website and try to find a flight. You’ve also been referred to that airline by an online travel agency. Maybe you’ve been at a couple of different pages. Then you start entering information. That information could be you want to go from Chicago to somewhere. You’re going with family and have selected your seats. You’re paying this much money. All of that information is packaged up and sent to us on a real-time basis.

At the same time, there’s a whole lot of things that they can buy outside of just an airline ticket. You have to assume that if you’re going there, there’s probably a good chance that you’re going to need a hotel and transportation. Certainly, you’d be interested in restaurant reservation. You’d probably be interested in some kind of excursion. You think of all those products that somebody has that they would, from a different supplier, like to make available to that person. Our role then is to say, “We can help you curate and organize this for that customer.” A lot of the early digital entrants add one or two of these add-on products. Lo and behold, they get some additional sales. That’s a really good thing. Then instead of trying to curate the experience for the consumers, they just keep adding those on. All of a sudden, that list of add-on products is not two or three but 20 or 30.

Our role is to take those 20 or 30 and keep them outside of the customer’s experience until we can determine their propensity to buy. We have all that information and we have all these potential products. Our job is to use real-time analytics and statistical models to figure out what is the next best product that we can offer to that person, do all of that in a real-time basis, and present it back to the consumer. That’s the use case.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion
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