June 1999

As e-commerce becomes more and more prevalent and acceptable to consumers, companies must focus on how they present their Web sites to satisfy visitors' needs. These needs include quick response time to any technical or sales question and the availability of agents who can interact with Web visitors in real-time. By adding functionality that allows online agents to observe a visitor's present activity and history on the site as well as to engage one or more visitors in real-time discussions, a company can greatly improve its relationship with existing and potential buyers.

One of the most powerful tools that aims to meet these needs is eShare's NetAgent Customer Interaction Center Version 2.1. This customer service solution is broken down into four components that address the four groups of people who interact with one another: the administrator, the visitor, the agent and the agent's supervisor. The administrator sets or adjusts the configuration of the NetAgent server. The visitor uses an integrated interface on the company's site to browse Web pages while interacting with an online agent. The agent communicates with visitors or other agents while attempting to improve service levels with scripts and other methods. The supervisor has the same functionality as agents but can also monitor and graph the performance of agents. By employing these groups to work interactively and efficiently with one another, NetAgent can be a resourceful and powerful tool for companies that are beginning to rely more heavily on the Internet for sales and to provide technical support.

Installation
Before the NetAgent administrator or client can be installed and configured, you must make sure all of the requirements for your system and your server are in place. While we had no problem finding a computer to satisfy the system requirements, we had to add Microsoft's Internet Information Service (IIS) to our Windows NT 4.0 server. We also wondered why the minimum requirement for RAM on the server is 128MB because this seems like an extremely high requirement. After our system was ready, we installed the server and client software without a problem.

To configure the customer interaction center, the NetAgent administrator must log on to the NetAgent server to designate all of the settings from its Web-based GUI. While there are some default settings already programmed, most of the set up data must be entered into the system. Since different companies have different business needs for their agents, this does not present a problem. Of course, some procedures are fundamental to most companies. Having some default material, such as the ability to already have "technical support" or "customer service" as an option that can be clicked in order to be added to the settings, would be helpful.

The Web-based GUI follows standard HTML and Windows conventions, making the entire configuration process easy and straightforward. It is not difficult for you to figure out what needs to be done to allow NetAgent to work properly. However, there are many features that must be set by the administrator, which makes the learning curve for this product more difficult. Nevertheless, the product makes up for that with its enhanced functionality. There is significant data-entry work required, including typing in accounts, service lines and scripts. For this reason, this process may be time-consuming due to the need to continually add, delete and modify entries, especially for a large corporation. A portion of this busy work may be avoided if some of the repetitive aspects can be added automatically when the information has been typed once. Overall, however, the installation was simple and the configuration was easily administered.

Documentation
NetAgent's user manual has everything you would desire in an instruction guide: understandable and informative text, many screen shots, a detailed table of contents and an index. All the information you may need is contained in both the manual and the help files. The only change we would suggest is the positioning of the administration chapter. Currently, this chapter begins near the middle of the manual. We would rather see the administration section positioned right after the introduction and installation chapter since the administrator must set up the configuration before others can use the software. Aside from this inconsequential complaint, the documentation is superb.

Features
NetAgent has many feature-rich qualities that allow for better interaction between customers and online agents, but the Live Agent Interaction is the essence of the product. Some of its features include up to six simultaneous one-on-one sessions with the agents toggling between service lines, filtering by site zones and intelligent routing. Common answers and instructions, frequently used sayings, presentations and other helpful references can be pushed to visitors. NetAgent can also alert an agent on "hot spot" hits and uses case-based reasoning (CBR) features that allow agents to assess the customer's problem more accurately.

The following is a list of some of the other major features:

• Administration - Service line and mailbox configurations controlled by the administrator along with the NetAgent server's set up.
• Supervisory - Real-time agent monitoring, agent productivity monitoring and the ability to join or take over a monitored session and review transcripts of agent sessions.
• Visitor Monitoring - Real-time view of visitor activity.
• E-mail Response Management - Acknowledgment messages, e-mail routing to appropriate mailboxes and real-time spell checking.
• Compatibility - Integration with PBXs and other systems, open database connectivity (ODBC), customization to virtually any environment and compatibility with firewalls.

Operational Testing
First, we opened the NetAgent client and connected as a supervisor. The first thing we noticed was the layout of the GUI. It was clean-looking with a simple menu across the top and buttons underneath. Tool tips helped us determine how these buttons are used. Running down the left side of the screen were important icons that had been configured in the NetAgent Administrator. If we clicked one of these icons, its directory appeared on the top window on the right. Below that is the chat window where an agent can talk to a customer. As the agent accepts more calls, this larger window splits into as many as six smaller windows as needed. The agent can chat with all of these customers at once so that his or her service can be obtained more quickly and he or she can be more efficient in the job. Below the chat windows is a browser window where the agent can access any Web page he or she might need while still talking to customers. Of course, all of the windows can be adjusted in size as the agent sees fit.

To obtain an overview of NetAgent, we acted as an agent, a supervisor and as visitors. In this way, we could receive a clear perspective of how the system works. As a visitor, we went to eShare's Web pages and logged on to a demo server as a customer. We proceeded to ask a question, and sent it to an agent . Of course, the "agent" in this case was a TMC Labs engineer located on the next computer. That's how we discovered that the question box in the visitor section is a bit misleading, because it is actually a subject box, so text is not displayed in the chat window. Anyway, we added another visitor into the mix as well so we could more closely simulate a scenario of a typical agent at work.

After testing the client for a while, we began to understand how it all worked. We were able to view information about the visitors - this information was quite obvious due to the fact that we were the visitors! We looked at the e-mail boxes, service lines and, of course, the sessions between the customers and the agent. We viewed some pages on the Internet while in a chat session, were able to talk to other agents on the server, and were able to play with some supervisory features as well. Also impressive was the ability for our agent to push a presentation to one of the customers.

We feel that it is also necessary to take a few moments to discuss the e-mail functionality of NetAgent. Not only does NetAgent provide basic e-mail features, it can also attach notes to an e-mail and provide a view of the history of all the interactions between a customer and the agent(s). Even more impressive is that it can search incoming e-mail for keywords or phrases to be able to send an intelligent, automated response, or more important, to determine which agent would be most appropriate to answer the e-mail. This is crucial for customer service because it helps serve the customer in a timely fashion with more pointed results.

We did have an occasional problem with the visitor staying connected with the client. An error message would come up stating that we had to re-establish the connection, but after a while (in anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds), NetAgent would reconnect itself. This error is likely a problem with our own client or perhaps our configuration, but the problem is worth mentioning just in case the glitch is a NetAgent bug. All in all, though, the customer interaction testing was not overly difficult and was largely successful.

Room For Improvement
Like every product we have ever tested, we found some areas for improvement. While both the Web-based administrator and the NetAgent client were admirable, both had minor glitches. We didn't like that we had to scroll down the page so we could view all of our options in certain sections of the administrator. Showing all of the options up front would be more practical. For the client, the only functionality we would add is the ability to right-click in more areas to access certain features more easily and quickly.

Unless this feature was hidden somewhere and we could not find it (which would be a "room for improvement" issue anyway), we did not locate a way to program the product to designate which agents could talk to other agents. It seemed to us that an agent could talk to any another agent even if there was absolutely no reason for them to communicate except just to chat. We think agent communication ability should be regulated. Of course, the supervisor transcripts go a long way to allow them to observe their agents' actions. For this reason, the above point loses some of its significance, but is worth mentioning nevertheless.

We also noticed that on the Visitor Receptionist screen, there is an option to talk to the visitor directly while the agents are observing the visitor's progress on the Web site. We are not sure this option is necessary because visitors should always be invited into a chat, not just put there if the agent deems this necessary. If anything, this might just annoy the visitor.

One other suggestion we have is to add software or hardware that integrates with ACDs into a switch so customers can request a voice callback to the agent if necessary. This would go a long way in further personalizing the agent/customer relationship.

Conclusion
The features of eShare's Customer Interaction Center Version 2.1 give customers a chance to interact with agents over the Web. The methods in which this is done as well as the supervisory and administrative features are impressive. As a result, eShare deserves an Editor's Choice Award. As more technology develops in this area, we fully expect eShare to continue to develop high-quality software and keep up with the trends as e-commerce heads down some new roads on the Net.