June 1999

Customer Interaction And Enterprise Service Desk Solutions

• NCR Extends Its CIS Suite
• Peregrine Releases ServiceCenter 3.0

Retaining customers through a better understanding of their needs and habits is the driving theme behind NCR Corporation's InteractionPlus channel integration and personalization software, or as the company calls it, software that helps businesses "transform transactions into relationships."

InteractionPlus enables businesses to capture customer transaction data from various touch points so that they can analyze this data. The data is collected in NRC's Teradata Warehouses for analyzing customer behavior and predictive modeling of the customer's future buying habits. By analyzing the data, businesses can increase their knowledge about consumers and deliver enhanced services - based on this knowledge - back through those same customer touch points. The touch points can include kiosks, call centers and the Internet.

InteractionPlus includes two modules: the Customer Information Manager module performs the work of integrating customer information collected across multiple interaction channels. The Customer Personalization Manager module is designed for personalizing responses to customers across multiple interaction channels based on segmentation criteria, as well as prior customer interactions and information.

The Customer Information Manager provides a short-term, consolidated view of customer interactions and other relevant customer profiles, while the Customer Personalization Manager leverages this information to enable one-to-one service to customers across multiple interaction channels. InteractionPlus, when used in conjunction with the other components of NCR's customer interaction solutions, is designed to provide companies with closed loop marketing initiatives.

NCR's end-to-end CIS offerings include three key components: Packaged Customer Interaction Solutions, which are built with the new InteractionPlus software suite, NCR's Professional Services and NCR's Customer Services portfolio. The Packaged Customer Interaction Solutions include: the Call Center Solution, which transforms the call center into a multichannel interaction center by combining partner tools and software with NCR value-add software integration and high availability modules, leading hardware technologies, and services for consulting, project management, solution design, implementation, and support; the Kiosk-based Solution, which includes custom application development services, packaged self-service applications, and NCR's flexible hardware platforms; and the Customer Interaction Web Solution, includes complete electronic commerce tools and touch point applications for commerce, customer care and customer billing that can be customized and personalized for flexibility at the point of contact.

NCR's suite of Professional Services addresses all aspects of a solution, including the formulation of the overall strategy, prioritization of customer channel initiatives, and the planning, design and implementation of a solution aligned with business requirements and objectives.

The Solution Support/Maintenance Services suite of services allows customers to maintain the high availability demanded of critical customer relationship management solutions. NCR services professionals serve as the single point of contact to minimize the complexity of multiple service provider management.

No. 500, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

ServiceCenter is designed to facilitate service management best practices and used to reduce the time needed to diagnose and solve infrastructure problems, effectively manage change and control the costs associated with these business processes. The broad out-of-the-box functionality of ServiceCenter includes applications for problem and change management, inventory management, integration with major applications such as network and systems management (NSM) products, computer-telephony integration (CTI), inventory discovery and automated event notification.

Peregrine Systems now also offers an Accelerated ServiceCenter implementation program designed to allow integrators to implement ServiceCenter in less than 25 days. Enabling this new service is ServiceCenter's Consultant-In-A-Box feature that simplifies implementation and administration with a series of Wizards that prompt the administrator for the necessary information to set up and manage the system. In this way, Consultant-In-A-Box helps ensure a successful ServiceCenter implementation by ensuring that key steps are followed. Common tailoring tasks such as creating user profiles, defining problem categories and establishing escalation rules are also automated by a step-by-step process.

User interface enhancements in ServiceCenter 3.0 are designed to reduce the time it takes to diagnose and solve problems by providing support personnel with quick, easy access to the right information through a customizable graphical user interface, implementation of a Multiple Document Interface (MDI) mode for Microsoft Windows users and a new "Document/Record List" view.

Enhancements in ServiceCenter 3.0 integrate the software with ERP systems to help businesses leverage their investments in applications such as SAP R/3 by working with ERP data and processes to consolidate internal support and speed resolution.

Peregrine designed ServiceCenter 3.0 to provide a solution that will lead a company through what Peregrine calls the four phases of evolution of a consolidated service desk. In Phase 1, a fire-fighting service desk, loosely organized groups of help desks support such applications as problem management, problem resolution, inventory management and pager and e-mail tools. In Phase 2, a reactive service desk, a single group is answering calls and acting as a single point of contact for end users. The reactive desk also begins looking for ways to be notified of problems before the end users notice the problems. In Phase 3, a proactive service desk, the service desk adopts change management methodology and involves the management of all moves, adds and changes to production systems. In Phase 4, the business policy service desk, the service desk is aligned with business units and creates and manages service level agreements and is usually responsible for end-to-end IT asset management as well.

No. 501, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo