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ePeople Teamwork 4.5 Reduces Time to Resolution for Organizations that Support Complex Products
New release extends collaborative issue resolution capabilities with features including Resolve Anywhere for email collaboration
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA; December 10, 2002 —
ePeople, the market leader in collaborative CRM, today announced ePeople Teamwork 4.5, web-based collaborative support
software for companies that sell complex products. With new features including Resolve Anywhere for email collaboration,
Knowledge Automation and support for account management, ePeople Teamwork 4.5 enables support organizations to continually
improve the quality and time to resolution of customer issues and increase visibility into the resolution process for greater
customer satisfaction and reduced support costs.
"CRM and knowledge management systems are well-suited for simple products sold in high volumes, typically consumer-oriented
industries, but fall short in addressing the requirements of companies that sell complex products (build to order, service to
order, etc) to enterprise customers," said Anthony Lye, President and CEO of ePeople. "ePeople has exclusively focused on meeting
the needs of organizations that support complex products in industries such as high technology, heavy industrial equipment, managed
services providers and manufacturers of medical devices."
Collaborative Issue Resolution: The Future of Support
Organizations that support complex products typically require multiple people working together to address customer issues. Traditional
CRM/support systems were designed for a "1:1 resolve or escalate" model, rather than a "many: many collaborate, keep ownership" model,
resulting in a large percentage of incoming issues getting resolved informally outside the CRM/support system. Hence support executives
end up losing control over the issue resolution process resulting in an inability to reduce resolution time and costs, negatively impacting
resolution quality and customer satisfaction.
"Collaborative issue resolution represents the future of customer support technology," said Bill Rose, industry visionary and Founder and
CEO of Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA), the leading industry association for information technology support professionals
representing over 2200 support centers world-wide. "Organizations that do not adopt collaborative support models will fall competitively
behind."
ePeople Teamwork enables collaborative issue resolution by routing the customer issue to the right support analyst and then automatically
providing the most relevant knowledge to resolve the issue. If the issue cannot be resolved, ePeople Teamwork's expertise location and
management capability enables the analyst to select and engage the most relevant experts. Collaboration takes place in a web-based workspace
where team members can track events, interactions and documents to resolve an issue quickly. Team members can work on-line and offline, on
the web or exclusively in email. Key information such as the resolution, interactions, checklists and documents is automatically captured
during the resolution process and immediately available for re-use by the entire support organization. ePeople is designed to work either as
a standalone solution to manage the entire incident lifecycle or as a complement to current CRM/support systems.
Key New Capabilities of ePeople Teamwork 4.5
Resolve Anywhere
Resolve Anywhere reduces barriers to collaboration by allowing ePeople Teamwork users to collaboratively resolve issues via a very broad
set of user interfaces regardless of their location, including the ePeople web client; email clients, such as Microsoft Outlook, Eudora,
and Netscape Mail; text pagers and RIM Blackberry devices and other PDAs with wireless Internet access. With Resolve Anywhere, team members
can "live in email" while collaborating on issue resolution, rather than through the ePeople Teamwork application. In addition, team members
can receive regular updates to an issue via email and even work offline.
Knowledge Automation
In companies that sell complex products, a large amount of new knowledge to support the products is created during the resolution process.
When the resolution process is informal, new knowledge that is generated is never captured. The time-delay associated with publishing knowledge
articles creates information that quickly becomes out-of-date and results in addressing only a small percentage of new customer issues.
ePeople Teamwork 4.5 offers Knowledge Automation that captures key information such as resolution, interactions, checklists and documents
during the collaborative resolution process. This multi-dimensional knowledge is then immediately available to support analysts and includes
content (similar issues and their resolutions), available expertise (recommendation on the best experts to solve a particular issue based on
their expertise and participation) and recommended processes (steps used to solve similar issues).
Account Management Views
The customer support processes at organizations such as Managed Service Providers (MSP) and Contract Manufacturers, require cross-functional
account teams across various disciplines to work together on customer issues.
ePeople Teamwork 4.5 enables support of such organizations that have service provider business models. The new release includes capabilities
to provide account managers with a view into all the customer requests, including the latest status, the ability to define internal, customer
and extended account teams, and the ability to create and share a set of account-specific documents with the extended account team through
web-based workspaces.
OpSource, a provider of outsourced, on-premises and private labeled IT infrastructure services to Global 2000 companies recently selected
ePeople Teamwork to integrate with its Web-services based ΣOperations Platform.
"Prior to evaluating ePeople Teamwork, we were convinced the only way to get a CRM application that would seamlessly integrate with our
multi-services technology platform was to build it ourselves," said John Rowell, Co-founder and Vice President of Engineering and Operations
at OpSource. "Not only has ePeople Teamwork been easy to integrate with our services, it enables our engineers – regardless of
location – to collaborate in real-time on issue resolution. For OpSource, real-time collaboration improves internal efficiencies and
reduces the amount of time required to resolve matters related to our customers' mission-critical IT infrastructures."
About ePeople
ePeople, founded in 1997, is the leading provider of knowledge and expertise management solutions for resolving business-critical
situations throughout the enterprise. ePeople Teamwork focuses on Customer Support, Team Selling, Professional Services and
Research & Development organizations. Customers of ePeople include Oracle Corp, Cognos, InstallShield, Openwave Systems, Inc.,
Adobe Systems, Inc., Production Access, OpSource Inc., and Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA). Headquartered in
Mountain View, Calif., ePeople is privately held. Investors include Redpoint Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Integral Capital Partners,
Bedrock Capital, Brentwood Venture Capital, and CNET. More information on ePeople is available
at www.epeople.com.
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ePeople and the ePeople logo are trademarks of ePeople, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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