Sharpening its pitch, ePeople tackles collaboration in complex support environments

by Ian Jacobs
Mon, 16 Dec 2002

The past 18 months have been rough in the CRM market. Yes, business has been slow, as in the rest of the IT industry, but the market has also come under some intense criticism as customers increasingly complain about implementations that have insane cost overruns and major underperformance from the technology. The customer service and support segment of CRM has not been at all immune to these issues.

This din might lead casual observers to believe that most large companies have some sort of CRM suite-based support tools installed, but there are several markets where penetration in still quite low. Companies that have extremely complex products – products that have support issues that can rarely be resolved by one support agent on one call – have not embraced CRM suites because these suites are ill-adapted for such environments. It is precisely this market, however, that collaboration vendor ePeople is homing in on with its newest release. Called Teamwork 4.5, the product adds an email collaboration tool as well as knowledge automation technology into the mix.

Impact assessment

Context When the451 spoke to ePeople about a year ago, the company seemed a right muddle. Its message was fairly unclear, and its unique value proposition seemed extremely hard to discern. EPeople looked destined to run head first into a wall made up of the major CRM players, and appeared to be banking on a major partnership with, or even an acquisition by, one of those vendors to help buoy its fortunes.

What a difference a year makes. The company has radically clarified its vision by narrowing its focus. Its message is now crystal clear: it wants to bring collaboration to the support process of companies that have complex and often decidedly customized products. Amazon.com, for example, has significantly different support issues with book buyers than does Lockheed for its aircraft parts customers.

EPeople's new product includes a method for collaborating via email. When a support agent wants to collaborate with someone, a simple email will bring this third party into the collaboration cycle – without that person even knowing that they are using ePeople's application. The work of the third party is saved in the ePeople tool and included in any audit trail. It also sticks around for reuse, which is especially useful since the problem being solved might well occur with a different user or customer. Teamwork builds its collaboration around cases and requests, not documents, as do knowledge management vendors such as Entopia.

Strategy The complexity that ePeople is now focusing on means that support needs to be able to be one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many. In addition, the support process needs to be able to cross company boundaries. Airplane maintenance issues, for example, don't usually work the same way as a support call for a PC. Troublesome airline parts are usually yanked out of the plane and replaced with a new part, and then the maintenance staff attempts to figure out what went wrong and why. This investigation could easily cross company lines, as an airplane will have interrelated parts from several different suppliers. The answer to the problem may also require the manufacturer to supply fixes to several customers, not just the one that initially reported the issue.

In its initial phase, ePeople targeted enterprise software and hardware manufacturers. It has greatly increased its scope by adding sales teams that focus on made-to-order companies in the industrial manufacturing space and engineer-to-order companies such as contract manufacturers. It has also begun pitching its value to services companies in the legal, accounting and consulting markets. The level of CRM penetration is very low in these areas, and that clean slate gives ePeople much more room to work its way into accounts. Still, the company must overcome both market confusion and its own low profile to get into those bids in the first place.

Competition According to ePeople executives, before it came along, companies with complex support needs often attempted to patch systems together themselves, or would use one of the standard CRM suites, such as Siebel. Siebel and its ilk would say that their support software is robust and flexible enough to handle such complexity, and might point to high rates of issue closure on the first call, to back it up.

But ePeople believes that such rates are an artifact of the systems' architecture. Here's what ePeople believes usually happens when such support issues arise at a company using something like Siebel. The call would come in to the CRM package, and the agent would realize that the issue needed more than one person working on it; the call would then be parked in Siebel, and the agent would switch over to email. From the email package, the agent would then essentially bombard everyone they know. Once an adequate answer was found, the agent would switch back to the CRM package and solve the caller's issue. The CRM system would record this as an issue solved on the first call – one done with no escalation.

Obviously, customers with complex products to support will be considering the traditional CRM vendors – companies such as Siebel, PeopleSoft and SAP. But these customers may not be the right fit for standard CRM packages, which focus much more on task-based, one-to-one interactions.

Other service and support pure plays are also likely rivals. Back in September, for example, Kanisa bought a company called Quiq that specializes in exploiting the knowledge of user communities to augment technical support. Primus, which also partners with ePeople, would be another potential challenger.

The biggest challenges though will likely come from other vendors of collaboration-like tools. Some companies with document and expertise management tools are trying to extend their reach into line-of-business-type applications. Intraspect, which has moved heavily into account management, is a real competitor. Companies such as Kamoon and AskMe may not have the breadth of tools that ePeople has, but that won't mean they won't bump into each other. In addition, it is possible that pure collaboration vendors such as Groove and eRoom (recently picked up by Documentum) could end up in the same account pitches – however, ePeople CEO Anthony Lye claims that if that happens, one of the companies is in the wrong place entirely.

SWOT analysis

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