September 2000

Kanisa Delivers E-Service Solution
Kanisa Inc., a provider of solutions designed to enhance online customer experience, has announced the release of version 2.0 of Tier Zero, the company's e-service application. Version 2.0 was designed to increase the capacity of Kanisa's solution, which provides online customer service by emulating person-to-person interaction in an automated environment. The latest version includes improvements to Kanisa's core technology, helping boost performance in both the front-office and back-office processes and enhancing reporting and analytics. With Kanisa's Tier Zero technology, customers are guided through an online personalized dialog that helps them define their service needs and guides them to the best information or interactive service channel. Tier Zero can enable an e-commerce site to become a personalized, effective and efficient first point of service for customers. Features of Kanisa 2.0 include new tools for managing and training Kanisa's knowledge maps, refinements to front- and back-office processes including improved performance in internal data processing and Web-based document delivery, and enhanced reporting and analytics for both Kanisa's customer experience managers and Kanisa's customers.
No. 500, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

ServiceWare And Lipstream Partner For Support Solution
ServiceWare, a provider of Web-based solutions for enterprise service and support, announced it has formed a strategic partnership with Lipstream Networks, Inc., which offers real-time voice over the Internet for e-business, to voice-enable ServiceWare's Web self-service solution, eService Site. The addition of Lipstream's Live Voice service is intended to allow customers to talk directly to a live service representative over the Web at any time during a support session. This partnership builds on ServiceWare's recent product enhancements that allow customers access to immediate answers to their questions through a variety of media, including voice, e-mail and multimedia. The partnership will combine Lipstream's Live Voice service with ServiceWare's eService Site to allow users to begin a real-time dialog with an agent, at any time during their service experience and at the click of a button. ServiceWare's eService Site is designed to be the entry point for customers and employees, enabling businesses to provide Web-based self-service to their end-users, whether through the Internet or a corporate Intranet. eService Site allows self-help users to access a company's knowledge base at any time, through a simple interface via a natural language query.
No. 501, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

Brightware Extends Contact Center Suite
Brightware, Inc., a supplier of customer assistance software for the Internet, has announced Brightware Email Assistance 4.0. Building on the recent launch of the Brightware 2000 suite of e-customer assistance products that offer Web, e-mail and live assistance, Brightware Email Assistance 4.0 offers an intelligent, integrated contact center designed to assist large, complex enterprises manage their customer interactions. Email Assistance 4.0 helps allow e-businesses to deliver more efficient, personalized and cost-effective customer care and reduce supervisory costs while building e-customer relationships. With this release, Brightware intends to address the business challenges that large, multisite or multinational enterprises face when bringing in new customer service agents and ensuring that those agents deliver the consistent level of service that e-customers expect. Email Assistance 4.0 addresses these issues by providing multisite management, monitoring and review capabilities to streamline customer interactions. These features can help e-businesses better guarantee consistent communication between customers and service agents, regardless of the communication channel, distributed contact center environment or agent skill level.
No. 502, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

Motive And Vignette To Offer Integrated Solution
Motive Communications, a provider of online customer-care solutions, and Vignette Corp., a supplier of e-business applications, have announced an agreement to integrate Motive's AnswerWeb solution, a high-touch service solution, with the Vignette V/Series eBusiness Application Platform. The alliance, which will involve joint sales and marketing activities in addition to joint product development, will help enable organizations to deploy e-business solutions with context-driven online customer support, simplifying complex commerce-centric applications. Resolving questions or problems associated with e-business transactions and business processes, AnswerWeb was designed to power online customer care strategies for companies with complex customer service relationships, high-value transactions and the need for specialized experts when customers have questions and problems. Motive-enabled service can provide more specialized, domain-specific answers and connections with multiple human touch points to ensure end-to-end completion. Motive's solution targets the core issue in online customer care by funneling responsive and targeted answers and experts to users with questions, while making the best use of the customer's time. Under the agreement, Motive will integrate its products with the Vignette V/5 product family through the Vignette Application Foundation (VAF). The integration can enhance customer service through the relationship management, content syndication and multiple communications delivery channels provided by the V/5 products. Using its SmartBridge technology, Motive's AnswerWeb solution will be integrated with the V/5 Content Management Server and the V/5 Lifecycle Personalization Server, helping enable personalization of customer service content delivery.
No. 503, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

Taviz Provides A Solution For Internet, Enterprise And Mobile Integration
Taviz Technology Inc., providers of electronic integration solutions, has announced the introduction of its new eIntegration Suites. The suites were designed to provide a single source solution for Internet, enterprise and mobile integration, enabling companies to adapt e-business technology faster and more cost effectively. The eIntegration Suites were designed to provide a solution for managing the integration of real-time content and data from legacy and ERP systems and e-business applications for CRM, supply chain management and e-commerce. Taviz helps enable customers to more rapidly and efficiently manage the process of integration by the use of intelligent caching, business rule templates, a distributed "e-integration" architecture and a robust transformation engine. The Taviz eIntegration Suites consist of a number of market-tuned solutions backed by an experienced technical- and customer-service-oriented organization. The new Taviz eIntegration Suites include the Taviz B2B Suite, which provides rapid data and content integration for CRM, supply chain management and e-commerce development initiatives; the Taviz Mobile Internet Suite, designed to enable the repurpose of operational data for portable devices; the Taviz EAI Suite, which enables easy-to-use data interfacing for the management of enterprise application integrations and data conversion initiatives; and the Taviz B2C Suite, which provides data and content integration for the development of electronic catalogs and Internet marketplaces.
No. 504, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

Kana And eLoyalty Sign Partnership Agreement
Kana Communications, Inc., a provider of enterprise relationship management solutions, and eLoyalty, an e-CRM services company, have announced a worldwide partnership. Under the agreement, eLoyalty will integrate Kana's e-business applications with eLoyalty's e-CRM consultancy skills and technology to provide a multichannel solution designed to enable clients to build better relationships with their customers. The partnership aims to leverage eLoyalty's experience in deploying multichannel customer loyalty solutions, specifically its LVA (Loyalty Value Added ) approach to measure the impact of investments in Kana's e-CRM solutions on customer loyalty. Additionally, eLoyalty's Loyalty Suite, when used with Kana's e-business applications, can allow customers to model and measure the impact of customer programs across key customer contact channels. The companies aim to offer a comprehensive solution to e-businesses that build and maintain loyal customer relationships while reducing the cost of customer acquisition and retention, increasing customer "wallet share," and ultimately providing a more sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace.
No. 505, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

AlertSite Offers Testing To Provide PerspectiveOf Web Site Performance
AlertSite, Inc., an Internet device monitoring service used to detect possible hackers, disruption of service and slow response time, has announced the availability of MultiPOP monitoring for its service designed to monitor Web sites around-the-clock. AlertSite is stepping up its efforts to monitor Web sites with a new monitoring station on the West Coast to provide redundancy. Each independently operated, time-synchronized POP station tests Web sites and reports results to a central database. Geographic monitoring provides customers with a redundant and consistent view of how the Internet sees their e-commerce presence. Depending upon where in the world a business is located, monitoring tests may result in different responses from local problems such as router outages, inoperable servers at the host, problems with the local phone company or the company's own routers and internal networks. Before alerting users of a problem, the MultiPOP system verifies the error with a secondary station. Users are notified only of problems over which the company has control and not for isolated Internet outages. Other features of AlertSite include round-the-clock monitoring, content verification (to ensure Web sites and CGI scripts behave as expected and that pages have not been changed or compromised without prior knowledge), e-mail and pager notifications, performance tracking (the time it takes to connect to a Web site and retrieve a requested page) and diagnostic reporting. Data are collected to measure, assure and improve the quality of e-commerce sites, helping improve competitiveness and customer satisfaction. Graphical performance reports complete the picture to show how a site "looks" from a variety of locations worldwide.
No. 506, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

eGain Offers New Self-Service Elements
eGain Communications Corp. has announced delivery of two new Web-based solutions: eGain Assistant 4.0, an intelligent, life-like conversational agent; and eGain Inform 3.0, which publishes and manages frequently asked questions (FAQs). These applications were designed to help companies respond quickly, accurately and cost-effectively to online customer inquiries. EGain's intelligent self-service solutions aim to provide an interactive and personal online experience that turns site visitors into loyal, repeat customers. They help customers find the information they seek quickly and easily, at any time, in a format that best fits their needs. They also give companies reporting tools that deliver insight into customers' issues, wants and needs so they can continually improve their level of service. Recently, eGain made its self-service solutions smarter with personalization features. With this added element, the software can "know" a customer's interests based on prior inquiries and transactions. eGain Assistant was designed to create a way of interacting with customers through a conversational, life-like customer service agent that "chats" in plain English with Web site visitors. The goal of this product is to lower support costs and ensure an improved online experience. These automated agents go beyond simple search engines, helping make customers feel they are being served by an actual CSR. They also gather information on user issues and will escalate difficult problems to live CSRs via eGain Live or eGain Mail. eGain Assistant 4.0 features natural language comprehension, decision support, conversation logging and analysis, integration with back-end data and security.
No. 507, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

Talisma Service To Create Individually Tailored E-Service Plans
Talisma Corp., a developer of electronic customer relationship management (e-CRM) solutions, has announced SpringBoard, a new service designed to provide start-ups and newly created e-businesses with a comprehensive action plan, created in just five days, to deliver improved electronic customer service. In addition, customers can choose to implement the SpringBoard plan in two days by deploying professional customer service representatives (CSRs) through Talisma's outsourced customer support to manage and deliver lower-cost e-service and build the necessary infrastructure for better online customer satisfaction. In addition to workflow analysis, personnel assessment and training needs, the Talisma e-service specialist reviews how Web visitors navigate the client's Web site and provides details on how to improve the design of the site, including where e-mail aliases should appear for best customer interaction, as well as effective Web form creation. The SpringBoard plan also leads to the creation of knowledge base questions and answers, which are a starting point for in-house or outsourced personnel to use in responding quickly to customer inquiries. The final component of the plan offers personnel recommendations and outlines the cost and time-to-deploy benefits of hiring Talisma Outsourced Intellect to put the SpringBoard plan into action.
No. 508, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo

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