Sterling Commerce, ChoiceStream partner on personalized merchandising

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — ChoiceStream Inc., a leading personalization service provider, announced that it is partnering with Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc. company, to offer ChoiceStream's hosted personalization service with Sterling Multi-Channel Selling. The joint sales and marketing efforts of ChoiceStream and Sterling Commerce will enable business-to-consumer (B2C) companies to create a more relevant, customer-centric buying experience by combining the power of automated personalized merchandising with a comprehensive multi-channel selling platform.

With clients like Blockbuster, Overstock.com and Borders, ChoiceStream's patent-pending service delivers personalized merchandising based on each consumer's preferences and shopping intentions to increase sales conversion, boost average order size, and drive incremental sales. Sterling Multi-Channel Selling is a comprehensive platform that drives B2C business, helping companies increase revenue by enabling sales through multiple channels and various business models and reducing costs by automating the entire sales process.

"Personalized product recommendations have become a 'must-have' for retailers and other B2C companies, and we are delighted to partner with Sterling Commerce to offer online merchants the ability to cater to consumers with the most relevant shopping experience possible," said Toffer Winslow, executive vice president of ChoiceStream Sales and Marketing. "By combining our two proven retail solutions that help consumers quickly and easily find the products they want, we're delivering capabilities that are critical to retailers' success—particularly in today's tough economic climate."

"ChoiceStream's fully-automated personalization complements our own rules-based capabilities and we are excited to be able to offer it to our customers," said Cory Wiegert, vice president of global product line applications at Sterling Commerce. "We are giving the B2C merchandiser the best of both worlds: control over recommendations through rules-based personalization, and automated recommendations for situations where rules are too cumbersome or difficult to manage."

Sterling Multi-Channel Selling synchronizes selling and order management across all of a company's channels (online, call center, and store) to drive measurable improvements in sales. It complements and extends customers' existing ERP and CRM investments by automating marketing, guided selling, quotes and proposals, and order management processes. Sterling Multi-Channel Selling provides rules-based marketing analytics and segmentation capabilities that make customer behaviors and purchase history actionable for marketing purposes.