Mountain View, California -- Nov. 3, 2004 -- eGain Communications Corp. (OTC BB: EGAN), a leading provider of customer service and contact center software for in-house or on-demand deployment, today announced the availability of its new eGain Service 7 suite.
"Leading customer service organizations are migrating to multichannel interaction management with a centralized knowledge base as depicted in the Customer Interaction Hub (CIH)," said Esteban Kolsky, CRM Research Director at Gartner. "A centralized business processing framework and knowledge repository, the ability to enable a single view of customer data, and an open architecture are what customers are asking for from vendors."
"eGain receives strong ratings for product functionality and technology and remains a good choice for large multichannel contact centers that require a scalable solution," wrote John Ragsdale, VP and Research Director at Forrester Research, in the August 2004 TechRankings report titled "Scorecard Summary: eGain Service 7 Suite."
"eGain Service 7 is packed with innovative new capabilities, and was shaped over the last 18 months by the business needs of our leading customers," said Ashu Roy, CEO of eGain. "The rapid development capabilities of our service management platform (eGain SMP™) that was released last year, makes it easy to incorporate recent innovations and best practices from industries such as financial services, telecom, retail, technology, and outsourcing into our software."
The new release addresses the growing need for end-to-end issue handling, service fulfillment and improved first contact resolution in contact centers. It also caters to the early demand for next-generation web self-service tools that match access methods with customer preferences, stage in purchase lifecycle and inquiry types. Salient new capabilities in Service 7 include the following:
Integrated service resolution
Contact centers are increasingly under pressure to improve first contact resolution to deliver quality customer experience. With a visual workflow designer, centralized knowledge management, data adapters to easily link to other business systems, and multichannel interaction tools, eGain Service 7 provides unique end-to-end issue resolution capabilities. The solution is designed to handle cases that span multiple channels and departments.
In interaction hubs powered by eGain, a customer could start out on the web with self-service and, if she needs more help, easily escalate to an email, web chat, or phone agent. The agent would then build on the self-service context to conduct an "adaptive" conversation to resolve the issue and, if necessary, generate one or more automated tasks to fetch data from or launch order fulfillment instructions to back-office systems and people.
eGain's workflow designer includes templates for issue resolution processes that maximize first contact resolution and drive service level compliance across channels and departments. Through the integrated issue resolution process, interactions that are escalated or span multiple channels can be tracked and viewed centrally. Service levels can be set according to channel, nature of inquiry or customer attribute, and tasks and activities monitored using reports, dashboards, and alarms.
Enhanced contact center capabilities
eGain Service 7 extends the best-of-breed contact center capabilities of eGain Service 6 to manage emails, web chats, and cobrowsing sessions, by providing support for handling faxes and postal mail. Recognizing the benefits of standardizing customer service processes irrespective of the interaction channel, the eGain solution brings customer faxes and letters into the best practice process for email handling.
The new release also includes analytic dashboards to identify hot spots in contact center performance. This feature enables the contact center to channel customer usage and escalation patterns to drive continuous improvement and resource adjustment among contact center processes across self-service and agent pools. Also, these dashboards enable executives and cross-functional teams -- for example, product and marketing groups -- to benefit from direct customer insights.
eGain's customers also helped drive the development of eGain Webforms™ and eGain Outlook Plugin™, two new service collaboration tools to escalate and resolve service requests beyond the contact center, while leaving control over service levels and issue status with service agents.
Adaptive self-service
One size doesn't fit all in web self-service! The same approach to self-service will not work for every type of customer, every type of inquiry, or every stage of the customer lifecycle. Industry studies continue to highlight usability issues in most web self-service implementations. In fact, a 2003 Jupiter Research study concluded that self-service was plagued with usability issues, prompting consumers to seek assistance through email and phone channels to get their questions answered.
eGain's adaptive self-service has two innovative features that differentiate it from existing self-service systems. First, the eGain solution can be configured to adapt to the customer's need by exposing appropriate access methods -- from among a range that includes FAQ, search, browse, guided help, and virtual agent -- to the same content based on user profiles. For instance, a first-time visitor to the website would be greeted by a virtual agent working off the common knowledge base whereas a customer looking for product comparisons would be offered an interactive search capability using the same knowledge base but with a different access model.
Second, the system automatically identifies knowledge bottlenecks based on self-service usage and user feedback to generate alerts and review tasks for appropriate content owners. This self-monitoring feature ensures that the self-service implementation does not languish due to lack of attention from business owners. As customers use self-service and provide feedback (either explicitly or implicitly), their input is processed and interpreted to drive content improvement and access method refinement.
Early Market Adoption
eHarmony, the Internet's fastest growing relationship service, has already deployed the on-demand version of eGain Service 7. "Implementing a multichannel customer interaction hub is a critical part of our strategy to provide superior customer service," said Greg Steiner, Chief Operating Officer of eHarmony. "eGain continues to evolve eGain Service, which is the most comprehensive support suite in the market. The adaptive self-service and integrated issue resolution capabilities in eGain Service 7 will enhance our ability to help members get answers the way they want them -- be it through preferred self-service modes, assisted channels, or a seamless combination of both."
To obtain additional information on eGain Service 7, visit: http://www.egain.com/products/multichannel_service.asp
About eGain Service 7
eGain Service 7 is a comprehensive suite of multi-channel service applications recognized for its best-of-breed capabilities. The solution helps businesses transform their contact centers into customer interaction hubs. Available for in-house or on-demand deployment, it has integrated, award-winning applications for web self-service, email, fax, and letter management, live web collaboration, knowledge management, case management and service fulfillment.
About eGain
eGain (OTC BB: EGAN) is a leading provider of customer service and contact center software for in-house or on-demand deployment. Trusted by prominent companies worldwide, eGain has been helping organizations achieve and sustain customer service excellence for over a decade. 24 of the 50 largest global companies rely on eGain to transform their traditional call centers into multichannel customer interaction hubs, and to extend their service-based competitive advantage. eGain Service 7™, the company's software suite includes integrated, best-in-class applications for web self-service, email management, knowledge management, live web collaboration through chat and cobrowsing, automation of fax and paper-based service interactions, case management and service fulfillment. These robust applications are built on the eGain Service Management Platform™ (eGain SMP™), a scalable next-generation framework that includes end-to-end service process management, multichannel, multisite contact center management, and certified out-of-the-box integrations with leading call center, content and business systems.
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, eGain has an operating presence in 18 countries and serves over 800 enterprise customers worldwide. To learn more about eGain, visit http://www.eGain.com or call the company's offices-United States: (888) 603-4246 ext. 9; London: +44 (0) 1753-464646; Tokyo: 81-3-5778-7590.
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