To successfully adapt and reinvent business decisions amid the uncertainty of the past year, organizations have leaned on support from their partner ecosystems. Together, SAS and its SAS Partner community have collaborated to find new answers to customers' toughest challenges and to drive innovation and digital transformation.
In honor of this, SAS took to the main stage at SAS Global Forum 2021 to proudly recognize multiple global partners for their outstanding collaboration and contributions.
SAS awarded its annual Partner Excellence in Innovation award to Munvo Solutions based in Canada. Munvo submitted a nomination for its SMS Gateway solution, which enables real-time conversation marketing from SAS Customer Intelligence 360. SMS Gateway expands and enhances the mobile marketing channel for more direct and personalized communications, allowing SAS Customer Intelligence customers to easily create real-time SMS/MMS bi-directional dialogue with their clients.
We spoke with the Munvo team about their organization, their award-winning solution and how they embed innovation in every facet of their company.
Kate Ulveling, Partner Marketer at SAS: Congratulations on receiving the 2021 Partner Excellence in Innovation award! For anyone just being introduced to your organization, please tell us, who is Munvo, and how does Munvo work with SAS?
Anna Ivanova, SAS Practice Lead at Munvo: Munvo was established in 2005 in Montreal, Canada, with a focus on helping our clients maximize value from their marketing technology (MarTech) investments to drive their digital transformation through a combination of technology implementations, management consulting and marketing run services. Simply put, we take the complexity out of marketing technology so marketers can market.
Our partnership with SAS is designed to provide our clients best-in-class customer intelligence capabilities through the implementation of SAS® Customer Intelligence and complementary services. We collaborate to help clients transform their marketing process, enable new use cases, move forward along the marketing maturity curve, and get better engagement from their customer interactions.
Ulveling: In addition to your work with SAS, could you go into more detail about your award-winning submission?
Ivanova: Munvo is honored to be recognized with the Excellence in Innovation award. We’ve seen firsthand some of the great successes our clients have achieved through the combination of SMS Gateway and their MarTech stacks. We’re excited about the value that SAS CI 360 brings to businesses, and we’re thrilled to bring the capabilities of bi-directional SMS to CI 360 users.
In our 15 years of helping clients with marketing automation, we've seen more businesses and brands adopting SMS as part of their core marketing strategy. However, SMS is all too often deployed like email, as a batch and one-directional form of communication. The real power of SMS lies in the ability to have immediate, bi-directional interactions with clients through real-time dialogue. Brands that use conversational SMS messaging see high open and response rates. This allows them to connect directly with their customers, receive immediate feedback, respond quickly to customer needs and deepen the customer’s relationship with the brand.
The groundbreaking power of SMS Gateway is that it lets the marketer easily build interactive conversations with reusable templates and have real-time dialogue. And when all that is powered through the intelligence of CI 360, they can embed it in directly into the customer journeys they’re building, or trigger it through events.
Ulveling: What does innovation mean to your organization? How does Munvo embody innovation in their work?
Ivanova: Innovation is a core value at Munvo. We continuously look for areas where we can enhance and complement our partners’ MarTech solutions. Often our consultants will identify issues or gaps, and solve them through custom programming and integration. This becomes the creative seed for a new Munvo product. Munvo’s in-house R&D department, MunvoLabs, was designed to develop products that add value to the MarTech ecosystem, like the SMS Gateway, but also products that automate quality assurance and troubleshooting, use AI to hyper-optimize email delivery, and more.
We’re excited to have SAS as a partner because we see the same drive for quality and innovation, along with a focus on building great software in-house instead of making quick acquisitions. We feel we speak a common language, and are looking forward to finding new ways to help customers evolve by using Munvo and SAS technology.
The Excellence in Innovation award recognizes a partner’s own solution complementary to SAS software that demonstrates outstanding innovation to uniquely solve a complex business problem. This year’s award was decided among five finalists, chosen from among over 1400 SAS partners worldwide.
Learn more about Munvo and the SAS Partner program.
