June 1999
Customer Interaction And Enterprise
Service Desk Solutions
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NCR Extends
Its CIS Suite |
A problem facing many companies as they try to
integrate all of their customer interactions is that they may come from many customer
"touch points," such as the call center, the Internet or kiosks, and thus the
information may go into different databases. Often the customer data collected go into
data silos that are unavailable to other parts of the enterprise, and are unavailable when
a customer contacts the company by a different method than previously, and the sales or
marketing department or call center agent will thus have an incomplete picture of the
customers and can't react to the customer's changing needs. 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
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Peregrine Releases
ServiceCenter 3.0 |
As companies grow, their infrastructures become more
complex, often leaving various departmental help desks in their wake, struggling to keep
up with the changes. In the expansion process, new technologies are constantly being
introduced, business rules are often lost, service levels drop, systems administrators
grow old before their time and support costs get out of hand. To help bring order to the
chaos, Peregrine Systems, Inc. has released version
3.0 of its enterprise service desk solution, ServiceCenter. Enhancements in ServiceCenter
3.0 are designed speed deployment, simplify administration, provide a state-of-the-art
user interface, integrate and interact with data and processes in enterprise resource
planning (ERP) systems and offer fully localized versions in French, German and Japanese
to consolidate service desk applications in multilingual organizations. ServiceCenter 3.0
also provides a multicurrency capability that enables companies to track and calculate
costs in their currency of choice, as well as significant remote management capabilities. 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
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