XING, the International Social Network for Business Professionals, Adopts Message Systems to Boost Its Member Engagement Efforts

COLUMBIA, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Message Systems announced today that XING, the social network for business professionals, has consolidated its member communications operations on the company’s recently launched Customer Conversation Hub. The Message Systems Customer Conversation Hub solution will enable XING to originate and manage all its member communications through a single system and unified interface, rather than maintaining separate systems for automated transactional messages and marketing email as it had in the past. With a centralized customer messaging capability, XING has far greater flexibility in how it manages its member engagement efforts, and will be able to maintain a consistent brand experience across all its message-based communications.

“XING has been a valued client of Return Path for many years now, and we’re excited that Message Systems has been able to help this innovative company to bring their member engagement efforts to a higher level”

“The complexities of customer communications in the social networking environment call for state-of-the-art messaging infrastructure, and we’re delighted that XING has brought together all of its email operations on the Customer Conversation Hub,” said George Schlossnagle, CEO of Message Systems. “We work with most of the largest social networks in the world, so we’ve seen that member engagement is a constant challenge for these companies. We’re confident that with the Customer Conversation Hub, XING will not only provide its members with a seamless email experience, but that this improved communication experience will drive increased return traffic, more time spent on-site and greater amounts of social sharing. We’re delighted to welcome XING to the Message Systems community, and we’re pleased to be working with our partner Return Path to help XING realize its important member engagement and overall business objectives.”

This implementation grew out of a project XING has pursued with Return Path, a close Message Systems partner, to solve certain email deliverability issues and improve the social network’s overall email performance. Having successfully reached the original objectives set for the project, the two companies turned their attention to resolving the problems raised by XING’s two-track messaging operations. XING had been outsourcing much of its marketing-oriented customer communications to an email services provider, and handled direct member communication – system-triggered messages – through an on-premise open-source MTA-based product. With this arrangement, the look and feel of the messages that XING members received varied widely depending on the purpose of the communication at hand. Because the brand experience for members could be confusing, XING decision-makers were eager to eliminate the divide between its marketing-oriented and transactional messaging operations.

“The Message Systems solution is a big upgrade not just in our email capabilities, but in our overall ability to communicate effectively with our global member base,” said Holger Burger, director of site operations at XING. “Our challenge at XING is to maintain a beneficial ongoing conversation with our members, so convenience and ease of use are critical. For instance, being able to send digest emails with multiple member requests in a single message rather than multiple individual emails for each request increases convenience levels and makes it easier for members to get the most value from the XING experience. We’re already seeing positive results from our Customer Conversation Hub implementation and look forward to passing on more of these benefits to our members in the months and years ahead.”

From the email performance standpoint, XING made the transition to Message Systems to continue building on the positive deliverability results it was seeing through its work with Return Path, and it also wanted to ensure it could scale volumes to support the fast growth of its member network. Just as important was improving its ability to track metrics including click and open rates, feedback loop monitoring and other measures. In the past, XING had such limited visibility into its messaging operations that if, for instance, a password request email got caught in a member’s spam folder, there was no way for XING’s customer team to detect this problem, and member satisfaction suffered. On the transactional side of its messaging operations, there was potential for these kinds of problems to escalate and degrade member experiences because XING sends out more than 100 distinct system-generated emails for communications such as notifications of new connection requests, new connection confirmations, job openings and many more. Additionally, since XING supports 18 different languages and operates in dozens of countries around the world, coordinating such complex system-triggered communications – and maintaining compliance with local privacy regulations – is a daunting data management task. With the Customer Conservation Hub, XING now has the ability to orchestrate two-way customer interactions based on any number of customer data sources and successfully handle all of these issues.

“XING has been a valued client of Return Path for many years now, and we’re excited that Message Systems has been able to help this innovative company to bring their member engagement efforts to a higher level,” said Matt Blumberg, CEO at Return Path. “Our work with XING has focused on core deliverability and ISP relations, which is the essential foundation to any message-based customer engagement program, and we’ve successfully boosted their inbox placement rates into the mid-90% range. We look forward to working with XING and Message Systems to further these efforts and cement XING’s market position as the leading international social network for business professionals.”

About Message Systems

Message Systems solutions power many of the world’s largest, most complex email, text and cross-channel messaging operations. Our solutions enable companies to integrate messaging with any number of data sources and applications in order to orchestrate real-time two-way customer interactions through any messaging stream. The result is more effective customer communication that boosts engagement, drives down costs, increases revenue and builds closer relationships. Founded in 1997, Message Systems is headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, and maintains offices around the globe. World-class brands that rely on Message Systems solutions include Facebook, US Airways, PayPal, Match.com, Angie’s List, Yesmail and many Fortune 500 leaders in banking, consumer technology and telecommunications. For more information, go to http://www.messagesystems.com or call 877.887.3031

About Xing

XING is the social network for business professionals. More than 12 million members worldwide use XING to boost their business, job, and career. XING is a platform where professionals from all kinds of different industries can meet up, find jobs, colleagues, new assignments, cooperation partners, experts and generate business ideas. Members can meet and exchange views in over 50,000 specialist groups, while also getting together at networking events. The platform is operated by XING AG, which was founded in Hamburg, Germany, in 2003, has been publicly listed since 2006, and listed on the TecDAX since September 2011. In December 2010, XING acquired amiando AG, a Munich-based company and Europe’s leading provider of online event management and ticketing. Please visit www.xing.com for more information.

About Return Path

Return Path is the worldwide leader in email intelligence. We analyze more data about email than anyone else in the world and use that data to power products that ensure that only emails people want and expect reach the inbox. Our industry-leading email intelligence solutions utilize the world’s most comprehensive set of data to maximize the performance and accountability of email, build trust across the entire email ecosystem and protect users from spam and other abuse. We help businesses build better relationships with their customers and improve their email ROI; and we help ISPs and other mailbox providers enhance network performance and drive customer retention. Information about Return Path can be found at: www.returnpath.com.