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Technology Highlights
March 2003


Solutions For CRM, SMB Call Centers And Real-time Information 


CRM 2.0 From J. D. Edwards

J.D. Edwards & Company has released CRM 2.0, the latest version of its customer relationship management offering. Karl Johnson, vice president of CRM Product Management at J.D. Edwards, said the focus of CRM 2.0 from a functional perspective is on customer service and sales automation, and that the company worked hard on integration with other J.D. Edwards suites to provide better business knowledge integration. Johnson said flexibility is a big element of J.D. Edward's offerings and they worked diligently on adapting to the processes of their customers, expanding on the work done in developing J.D. Edwards 5.0, the company's collaborative enterprise solutions suite, which focuses on specific vertical industries.

The integration of CRM 2.0 with J.D. Edwards' Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is enabled by a combination of the company's XPI (eXtended Process Integration) technology and its Data Model Inheritance capabilities. This combination is designed to facilitate rapid integration during deployment and compatibility with emerging technologies. J.D. Edwards CRM 2.0 includes integration to the company's Demand Consensus supply chain application, Mobile Sales functionality and a comprehensive Service Management solution.

J.D. Edwards Demand Consensus incorporates human projections into the forecasting process, increasing collaborative forecasting capabilities. CRM 2.0 captures forward-looking sales information and feeds it into Demand Consensus for a more precise forecast.

CRM 2.0's mobile sales capabilities allow customers to rapidly configure and deploy a pre-packaged mobile sales solution. Technology provided through a partnership with Synchrologic enables salespeople using J.D. Edwards CRM to access information and use business applications while they are 'disconnected.' Johnson said synchronization is down to the field level so that when salespeople synchronize with the company's core systems when they are back online, other employees can access new information from the sales team while the sales team can be updated on developments entered by other employees.

CRM 2.0's Service Management solution combines Contact Center and Field Service applications, allowing a company to track equipment service history and manage the flow of service work being performed. Contact center capabilities provide a broader view of the customer by directing questions or service requests to specific service groups based on specified product characteristics; defining workflow definition for each level of service priority and level of escalation; and preparing customer service staff with access to past history of customer issues and recurring problems.

www.jdedwards.com

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AltiGen Debuts AltiContact 
Manager

Tailoring its latest release to the small to mid-sized business market, AltiGen Communications, Inc. has released the AltiContact Manager, a turnkey IP hardware/software system for inbound, outbound or blended contact centers. 

According to Richard De Soto, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AltiGen, AltiGen asked three key questions when designing this product: 1) Is it affordable for small to mid-sized businesses? 2) Is it easy to maintain? and 3) Is it easy to use? Keeping these questions in mind, AltiContact Manager was designed to provide contact centers with the ability to service, respond to and track performance of customer care professionals. The product is targeted at businesses such as midsized catalog operations, small to mid-sized manufacturers' customer service or telesales groups, and financial organizations such as mortgage companies and debt consolidators. Although AltiContact Manager is intended primarily as a contact center, PBX extensions can also be added for administrative employees, eliminating the need for a separate PBX.

AltiContact Manager can handle inbound, outbound or blended contact centers of up to 128 agents per chassis and multiple server chassis anywhere can be linked together and managed centrally as one image. Every AltiContact Manager system includes the business essentials for those who support contact center staff such as: call processing, either switched circuit and/or IP; eight types of skills-based routing; interactive voice response; built-in screen-pop CTI with popular CRM packages like Goldmine, ACT!, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft CRM; voice mail for up to 2,000 mailboxes including AltiGen's one-number access ('Follow Me') and Zoomerang; full ACD with workgroup functionality that can include 32 workgroups with 128 agents in each; five 9s (99.999 percent uptime) with industrial-quality chassis and built-in RAID5 redundancy; quit queue options to voice mail, workgroups, extension, outside number, operator, call back, IVR tree choice or third-party application PBX functionality for office workers; unified messaging combining voice with e-mail; centralized management of multiple servers; historical and real-time reports; software developer toolkits to integrate third-party applications; AltiWeb Web interaction software; advanced call routing; voice call recording; security features such as password protection options, call restriction, forced account codes, NAT behind firewalls, VLAN and VPN support; and call detail reporting.

De Soto said the AltiContact Manager provides all the same capabilities for remote agents and branch offices as the agents become virtual extensions, with the supervisor maintaining barge-in and monitoring capabilities.

www.altigen.com

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Real-time View From SYMON's 
VISTA

Charles Ansley, the president and CEO of SYMON Communications, Inc., said, 'You can't drive a car without a dashboard and in business you can't drive without a dashboard either.' The analogy to the automobile dashboard is for SYMON's new VISTA product, which tracks real-time, mission-critical business information and provides it to management in a coherent manner so they can quickly make decisions based on up-to-the-minute data. VISTA's central enterprise server gathers cross-platform information and provides browser-based reporting tools so that senior management can drill down on business performance metrics or agents can receive their latest score cards. For example, information on problem areas can be highlighted, showing agents where they can improve their performance, or management can share unique views of information across the enterprise and use it to fine-tune processes by consolidating reports from many enterprisewide business systems.

VISTA features include rapid start-up time; preview mode for displaying new Web pages before users commit to save; an easy-to-use editor tool (which writes the code for you) with embedded process knowledge; consolidation of real-time data into one Web page from different business sources; applet data can be 'pushed' to existing production Web pages; low network bandwidth as only the delta in real-time data fluctuations is displayed; data update intervals are user configurable; and compliance with Microsoft security.

Within the Applet Wizard, the VISTA 'Steps to Success' is an intuitive product navigation and training tool. Combined with embedded process knowledge and help tips, VISTA provides users with a repeatable path to follow on every page that requires a user interaction. The VISTA editing tool provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for setting up HTML pages as well as defining and embedding VISTA Applets into Web pages. Pages are edited as in a word processor, with drag-and-drop features.

The VISTA Applet Wizard guides the user through customizing a VISTA Applet, which consists of assigning values and display properties to its applet parameters. Applets can be created for any employee view including management, help desk information where number of open tickets and ticket resolution by employee are important metrics to display, call center staff, finance, NOCs (network operating centers) and more. With browser views, any employee can view his or her pertinent data anywhere there is Internet access.

www.symon.com

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