April 2000

BY TRACEY ROTH

But are companies really going forward and advancing their efforts in this area? Or was Aldous Huxley right...are all the new products and services causing us to regress?

Businesses have started to look beyond the dictionary to define "customer relationship." They are beginning to orient every detail of their business toward identifing and enhancing components of value to consumers and the enterprise. We can't assume that competition is the bank down the street, or the department store on the next block. Businesses are operating in a new economy, and the challenge is how to move toward an environment where technology is leveraged at every stage to provide solutions that are personalized to the needs of each customer.

I don't think I need to give examples of poor customer service; we've all experienced it, and dare I say we're becoming used to it? This isn't what companies want to hear, to be sure. But what's the best way to give customers great service that will keep them coming back? Don't despair. There are plenty of great CRM solutions on the market that leverage CTI technology to retain customers.

For example, Hyperion and Onyx Software have partnered to fully integrate Hyperion CRM with Onyx Front Office to enable companies to more easily access and analyze their customer data, gain a better understanding of their customer interactions and optimize customer relationships. Also, Clarify has announced Clarify eFrontOffice 9.0, a fully integrated CRM and e-business suite that empowers customers to interact with companies on their own terms via the medium of their choice. Clarify eFrontOffice extends the power of the front office via a portal that gives customers a single place to go to configure and order products, learn about promotions and check the status of orders, and support requests.

This month's Customer Contact news section highlights more of the latest advancements in this area. Also, be sure to read the feature article, "Reaching The New World: A Map To Work Management." It sets up a comparison between the segemention that is used as the starting point for customer service, and the maps that explorers used to navigate their way through uncharted territory.

Tracey Roth, this month's guest editor, is managing editor for C@ll Center CRM Solutions.

Customer Contact News

• IMA Releases EDGE 5.0
• Kana And Silknet Sign Landmark Multibillion-dollar Merger
• Talisma Announces Enterprise Edition
• POINT Reveals E-CRM for E-Commerce Companies
• Ask Jeeves Partners With PeopleSupport
• e-assist.net, Lipstream Partner On Web Services
• RightNow Technologies Announces RightNow Web 3.1
• NICE Offers New Version Of NiceUniverse
• Witness Unveils eQuality Response
• Comverse Infosys Introduces e-Cording

IMA Releases EDGE 5.0
IMA has announced the general availability of EDGE 5.0, the latest version of the company's award-winning solution, for e-business and contact centers used for sales, marketing, and customer service and support. EDGE 5.0 offers a number of new and enhanced features for inbound, outbound, and Web-enabled contact center environments. The result is a powerful, fully integrated front-office architecture that helps contact centers become a strategic part of an enterprise-wide customer relationship and loyalty management process, and helps businesses attract, win, and retain customers while increasing efficiency and profitability.
No. 533, www.comsolmag.com/freeinfo

Kana And Silknet Sign Landmark Multibillion-dollar Merger
Kana Communications and Silknet Software, two of the industry's fastest growing public e-business software companies, announced the signing of a merger agreement valued at $4.2 billion dollars. This represents one of the largest e-business software mergers to date. With this merger, Kana will take online customer communications to a new level by adding Silknet's comprehensive customer-facing e-business platform and applications to Kana's existing solutions for marketing, sales and service. Customer-facing applications are unique in that they allow customers, including consumers, employees or partners, to view their relationship with an e-business such as their preferences, support requests, sales questions and order status. E-businesses will be able to rely on Kana to proactively connect customers and partners together, increasing revenue, decreasing costs and building customer loyalty fundamentally changing how e-businesses relate to their customers.
No. 534, www.comsolmag.com/freeinfo

Talisma Announces Enterprise Edition
Talisma has announced the newly enhanced Talisma Enterprise Edition version 2.02, that incorporates customer feedback to provide high integration and improved Web access functionality. The new edition is a software package that provides enterprises, call centers, and dot-com companies with the tools they need to deliver e-service, e-marketing, and e-sales functionality for total customer satisfaction. Talisma Enterprise features comprehensive inbound customer communication tracking and integrated electronic direct marketing functionailty. It also offers automation and productivity features in user-defined rules, canned responses, rapid responses, auto text, and categories. Talisma's monitoring and analysis features allow users to track job performance and customer trends. It also features enhanced integration capabilities with CRM, help desk, call center, knowledge base, transaction, and Web collaboration applications.
No. 535, www.comsolmag.com/freeinfo

POINT Reveals E-CRM for E-Commerce Companies
POINT Information Systems today reveals the first packaged customer relationship management (CRM) system specifically for the new generation of e-business and e-commerce companies. WebPOINT moves industrial-strength CRM beyond the enterprise and out through intranets, extranets, and the Internet. Companies can better serve their e-customers by securely plugging staff, partner organizations, and clients direct into customer-facing business processes. Everyone in the customer service loop is empowered to give best service, irrespective of where customers are or how they choose to do business. The new product adds Web-based enterprise, partner, and customer portals to POINT's established TeamPOINT CRM suite. Staff, resellers, and customers can place requests, check progress, update records, and more, with or without the assistance of customer service agents.
No. 536, www.comsolmag.com/freeinfo

Ask Jeeves Partners With PeopleSupport
Ask Jeeves has announced a partnership with PeopleSupport. PeopleSupport plans to integrate Ask Jeeves' intuitive natural-language question answering and live help technologies to enhance its current suite of e-mail, telephone, live text and voice chat services. PeopleSupport will offer these expanded services to diverse businesses seeking high-quality customer care. The Ask Jeeves-PeopleSupport alliance will extend Ask Jeeves' reach, providing another channel through which its real-time personal services can help businesses increase e-commerce, reduce support costs and build customer loyalty. The alliance provides PeopleSupport clients with more touchpoints to enable multi-channel customer care.
No. 537, www.comsolmag.com/freeinfo

e-assist.net, Lipstream Partner On Web Services
e-assist.net and Lipstream, the leading Internet voice service provider for e-business, have partnered to add Lipstream's PC-to-PC Live Voice service to e-assist's customer interaction services. The partnership will voice-enable emerging dot-com Web sites to allow their customers to talk live with support representatives via the Web. e-assist.net has added voice over IP (VoIP) capability to its existing outsourced eBusiness customer care service offering, which includes e-mail, chat, and direct marketing services, and an artificial intelligence knowledge base that captures online transactions and facilitates expert analysis of the information. With the growth of the Internet, e-assist.net has evolved as an interactive Web center incorporating e-mail, chat, and VoIP for delivering effective, easy-to-use customer support. The company helps e-commerce businesses attract and retain positive customer relationships by managing two-way communication and customer intelligence to achieve their online business goals and objectives.
No. 538, www.comsolmag.com/freeinfo

RightNow Technologies Announces RightNow Web 3.1
RightNow Technologies has announced RightNow Web 3.1, a major upgrade to the company's flagship product suite. RightNow Web 3.1 builds upon the system's customer self-help capabilities by integrating new modules for e-mail management, live customer interaction, and contracts management. "RightNow Web 3.1 helps companies quickly deploy robust Web customer service systems, and is guaranteed to be fully implemented within 15 days," said Greg Gianforte, founder and CEO of RightNow Technologies. "Each module within RightNow Web 3.1 was built from the ground up to seamlessly interoperate with the other modules in the suite, making the suite's rich functionality easily accessible to customers and customer service professionals alike." Separately, RightNow Technologies announced that the company's customer base for RightNow Web has surpassed 500. RightNow Web's comprehensive functionality, ease-of-use, and rapid implementation time have been key contributors to the system's rapid market acceptance.
No. 539, www.comsolmag.com/freeinfo

NICE Offers New Version Of NiceUniverse
NICE Systems has released NiceUniverse version 4.2, offering customer contact centers a total quality management solution that satisfies multiple recording requirements of voice and screen. NiceUniverse 4.2 now includes real-time monitoring for instant access to live customer interactions and enhanced reporting and administration features allowing the system to be tailored to any contact center environment.

NiceUniverse 4.2 combines NICE's advanced CTI digital voice recording and screen capture technologies with enhanced evaluation tools to track, record, and evaluate agent performance in the contact center. The new NiceUniverse system includes an expanded range of application offerings on a single, flexible core architecture, and fully supports total recording, selective recording, recording-on-demand, and quality management for voice and screen.
No. 540, www.comsolmag.com/freeinfo

Witness Unveils eQuality Response
Witness Systems has announced a new product architected specifically to address the growing number of interactions contact centers receive via e-mail. eQuality Response provides a means to record and evaluate specific e-mail contacts, allowing organizations to gauge the effectiveness of customer sales/service representatives' (CSRs) e-mail communication skills. As contact centers expand to include multimedia interactions, one of the biggest challenges encountered is how to effectively handle the flood of e-mail messages. Witness Systems believes many organizations are not able to keep pace with the complex requirements needed to manage such traffic while maintaining high customer satisfaction levels. Ensuring customers receive the same quality response to e-mails that they would receive when speaking with a CSR over the telephone presents a growing challenge to the multimedia contact center. As the number of inquiries received through the Web and Internet continues to expand dramatically, the ability to monitor the quality of e-mail responses -- as with eQuality Response -- becomes critical.
No. 541, www.comsolmag.com/freeinfo

Comverse Infosys Introduces e-Cording
Comverse Infosys, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, announced e-Cording, a multimedia capture technology that enables contact centers to record and monitor Web interactions with their customers. The new application allows contact centers to monitor and analyze e-commerce interactions including Web page navigation, collaboration, customer-agent chat, agent "push" and, e-mail. VoIP is captured by e-Cording as well. e-Cording is a sophisticated capture technology that allows contact centers to monitor and assess the effectiveness of their Web offerings, self-help programs, as well as agent interactions. It is offered as an application with rules-based triggers and automated analysis to further define, manage, and enhance the customer experience in the multimedia contact center
No. 542, www.comsolmag.com/freeinfo