February 2000

Change Management, Telecommunications System And CRM Products For The Call Center

One of the few certainties in life is change, and for businesses, managing change has always been a headache, but for IT departments, it can be a bane of existence. Keeping track of the constant changes in the various versions of software and hardware has piled trouble upon trouble for IT departments, creating an often-tangled web of user systems, networks and departmental requirements where a change in one can affect the functioning of a seemingly unrelated other. To help bring order to the chaos, royalblue technologies has released royalblue ChangeManager-IT, which is designed to manage the entire change lifecycle across an organization’s IT infrastructure.

ChangeManager-IT is designed to make change predictable and repeatable, allowing users to plan for and avoid change-related problems. It analyzes problem trends, controls the complete lifecycle of a problem or change and manages configuration items for businesses of any size. It is designed to find out who will be affected by changes and get approvals before the change is made. It also can examine service-level agreements and point out how they will be affected by a change.

Given that approximately 35 percent of calls to help desks are because of a change, ChangeManager-IT is specifically designed to integrate with a customer’s existing help desk solution to manage the process behind tasks including hardware upgrades, software upgrades and version control, impact analysis and reporting. Users can directly generate change requests from the help desk and subsequently reflect the status of the request back to the help desk staff.

ChangeManager-IT can provide a full analysis of the impact of a proposed change (impact analysis), authorizations, scheduling, automated call routing, prioritization and version control according to the company’s business rules and schedule. ChangeManager-IT looks at change in the context of other changes and takes in the parameters of the business’ resources. It can allow the setting of time parameters, send notifications of resource or scheduling conflicts, prioritize one change over another or even “lock down” assets that are currently being changed to avoid conflicting changes to a common item.

ChangeManager-IT is the first in a series of vertical line of business change management solutions that royalblue is scheduling for delivery. All of these versions address the change lifecycle for vertical industries, such as pharmaceuticals and ERP deployment.
No. 540, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

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Pegasystems, whose core competencies have long been business automation and sales, has released its Pegasystems Enterprise Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) solution. Pegasystems uses its background of serving transaction-intensive back offices, receiving service requests, drawing information from a wide variety of disparate systems, automating mundane business processes, updating records, generating correspondence, and presenting the results to users in a useful context to form the basis of its eCRM system.

Pegasystems products manage connectivity, messaging and the exchange of data among a wide variety of enterprisewide applications, providing bi-directional interfaces and a set of services that integrate structured and unstructured messages from a wide variety of electronic sources, such as legacy systems data stores and third-party data sources.

Pegasystems’ support of multiple interfaces is designed to allow the easy integration of back-office systems for data and also insulate business process logic from changes in back-office systems and external applications, so that the application does not have to be rewritten when back-end systems are upgraded.

Pegasystems solutions integrate data stored on multiple systems, eliminating the need to replicate data and the synchronization issues that accompany data replication.

Pegasystems’ system-driven process automation capabilities prioritize activities, gather appropriate data from legacy systems and third-party sources, make decisions, update transaction systems, and generate follow-up correspondence — often without any operator intervention.

Underlying the Pegasystems solution is a robust rules engine. These rules dictate how the user’s solution should react to any given customer interaction. The system’s patented rules hierarchy may draw on any number of data, including data culled from the content of a customer interaction, the profile of the customer, the organization’s policies and procedures, or even the authority or qualifications of the representative handling the contact to drive differential processing. This capability, for example, allows the provisioning of special services or consideration to prized customers or provides the ability to give newly trained personnel more guidance and scripting than that given to a seasoned employee.

Pegasystems’ channel independence allows users to configure the Pegasystems rules once, and make them accessible over multiple channels, such as Web browser, interactive voice response (IVR) units, call center platforms, branch platforms, etc.

Pegasystems’ support of multiple channels allows the support of a large number of concurrent users. And because all channels are integrated with the same business rules, customers receive consistent information and service throughout the enterprise, no matter how they contact the organization. Tight integration between channels such as the call center and Web self-service applications allows the provisioning of callback and shared browser options.

Pegasystems supports standard computer telephony (CT) interfaces such as TAPI, TSAPI and Dialogic CT-Connect, or other CTI platforms such as Genesys and GeoTel.
No. 541, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

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AltiGen Communications announced the release of AltiServ OE 3.5. Bundling functionality such as voice over IP (VoIP), automatic call distribution (ACD) and Web-based call integration with AltiGen’s PBX capabilities, AltiServ OE 3.5 is designed to offer small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) a variety of phone system capabilities.

Using a Windows NT server and virtually any analog phone, businesses can implement multimedia telephone systems, capitalizing on the advantages of both VoIP and circuit-switched networks.

Based on AltiGen’s recently announced Intersect Strategic Vision, AltiServ OE 3.5 allows SMBs the use of VoIP service. With digital T1 and PRI channelized network access for voice transmission, SMBs can conduct Internet-based connections between remote offices using their existing data networking infrastructures.

Advanced ‘hop-off’ capabilities allow businesses to save money on long-distance charges to cities with local offices by connecting their long-distance calls over the Internet to a local office, then ‘hopping off’ to the local public telephone system.

Additional features include integrated automatic call distribution, auto attendant, voice mail and e-mail, remote management, plus AltiGen’s SMB PBX. Advanced PBX functions include: one-step conference calling; call forwarding and remote call forwarding, which allows users to forward calls to four different numbers; caller ID, which delivers alpha-numeric caller ID to analog caller ID-capable phones; and power failure transfer, which automatically provides an emergency line in the event of a power outage.

Auto Attendant features include: personal call queues, which allow users to handle multiple incoming calls; the ability to escort users through call menus; schedule-based call processing, which allows multiple call routing plans depending on time of day or day of the week; and music or custom messages on hold.

Additional voice mail and e-mail capabilities offered with AltiGen’s OE 3.5 include: voice mail with up to 1,000 virtual extensions; the ability to create a personalized voice mailbox for special customers, contractors or off-site workers; Zoomerang (one-number callback), which allows users to return messages from within the voice mailbox; advanced follow-me features, which allow users to keep in touch with important clients; and the ability to attach voice mail messages to e-mail as playable sound files and forwarded to anyone on the Internet.

AltiGen’s optional AltiView desktop call control application allows users to monitor their business calls remotely through the Internet. Caller ID screen pop based on Microsoft’s Outlook directory is also available.
No. 542, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

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The Great Elk Company has released Version 8.0 of its Visual Elk CRM solution. Version 8.0 is designed to provide multinational businesses with a single, enterprisewide solution to manage and integrate all traditional sales, marketing and customer service functions.

Visual Elk’s architecture allows companies to rapidly configure the system to meet immediate business requirements, and subsequently modify the solution to adapt to changing needs. According to Great Elk, the software’s inherent flexibility virtually eliminates the negative effects of “Technology Drag,” a term coined by Great Elk to describe the inability of computer systems to react in a timely manner to new business initiatives.

Visual Elk’s architecture consists of two distinct components, the application shell and the model. The application shell provides the framework for all standard sales and marketing functions, and includes profiling, call management, segmentation, mail merge, integrated diary/calendar and integrated report manager. The model can be configured to support an organization’s unique sales and marketing processes. In addition, the model may be continually and rapidly reconfigured as a business’s requirements change. Upgrading to new versions of Visual Elk is also accomplished quickly and seamlessly as the model automatically converts to work with any new release.
Enhancements to Visual Elk Version 8.0 include: an enhanced interface with a look and feel consistent with Windows 98, Windows NT, and Microsoft Outlook; search and query capabilities; a hierarchical results tree that allows complex relationships between data entities to be easily understood, navigated, and explored; a details window that delivers grouping and sorting functions in a grid format; a fully integrated drag-and-drop diary menu; an integrated report writer; and increased data model flexibility to facilitate the management of complex customer relationships

Companion Products for Visual Elk Version 8.0 include Synchronization for Visual Elk, which in combination with Visual Elk 8.0, provides a global facility that is fully synchronized across all operational divisions and geographies. Enhancements and systems changes can be quickly reconfigured and immediately distributed to remote sales forces across an existing communications infrastructure.
The companion product Web Works can be used to extend the system to prospects, customers, distributors, and Intranet users via a Web browser interface. This allows organizations to deliver self-service systems to customers, or host CRM solutions on behalf of distributors.

Great Elk also announced the formation of splash-net, a new division which offers a hosted, Internet-based CRM solution designed for small to mid-sized companies.
No. 543, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

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