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MOTIVE COMMUNICATIONS CLOSES GAP IN E-BUSINESS WITH "CUSTOMER-POWERED SERVICE" VISION AND NEW VERTICAL SOLUTIONSMotive Olympus Vertical Solutions Enable Companies to Meet the New Service Requirements of Today's Increasingly Complex E-Business ApplicationsAUSTIN, TX, December 4, 2000 - Motive Communications, Inc. (www.motive.com), a leader in online customer-care solutions, today unveiled Motive Olympus, a new set of vertically-focused "customer-powered" service solutions for e-businesses. Separately, Motive also announced supporting strategic relationships with leading e- business application and consulting companies. Motive offers a platform and applications for providing online customer care. The new Motive Olympus vertical solutions provide pre-packaged, industry-specific components and best practices that build on and extend Motive's core products to meet the specific needs of companies implementing corporate e-business and business-to-business initiatives. Motive is initially offering Olympus solutions for financial services, communications, energy and e-marketplaces. E-business applications in these industries often involve long sequences of steps to complete processes like registration, planning, or purchasing. As a result, customers often have questions or problems that require a higher-touch service model than can be achieved with "webified call centers" that are limited to providing chat, e-mail response, generic search and other e- service utilities. Motive Olympus provides "customer-powered" service solutions that enable companies to provide the level of high-touch, hands-on customer care necessary to ensure friction-free e-business for their customers. "Motive's customer-powered service fixes the 'last-mile' problem in e-business: the antiquated service processes that disrupt the online customer experience and prevent widespread customer adoption of e-business applications," said Scott Harmon, Motive's CEO and co-founder. "Traditional online service makes call center and help desk employees' lives easier, but continues to be ineffective from the customers' perspective. By contrast, customer-powered service is organized around customers, their time and productivity. This model of customer care is key for traditional companies who wish to take their service advantages in the physical world with them when they take their businesses online," added Harmon. According to a recent report by Datamonitor, businesses lost $6.1 billion in sales over the Internet in 1999 because of poor service, and will lose more than $173 billion in potential sales during the next five years if service doesn't improve.* Motive Olympus is designed to lower labor costs by reducing calls and optimizing the fulfillment of service requests. At the same time, it enables accelerated e-business growth and return on opportunity by providing a means to attract new customers, accelerate customer adoption, and retain and expand business from existing customers. Motive also announced support for its customer-powered service vision and vertical solutions through new partnerships with e-business software and consulting leaders including ATG, Bowstreet, Cyberplex, i2 and Nexgenix. (See separate press releases.) These alliances add to Motive's existing partnerships with firms Vignette, webMethods and Trilogy. Customer-Powered Service Brings Service "Home" for Customers Current online service is a fragmented, "some-assembly-required" process that places the burden of service on the customer, rather than the business. Customers are forced to compose e-mails, describe problems on the phone and seek out content via generic searches and self-service knowledge bases often, to little or no effect. In contrast, Motive's customer-powered service brings the "service to the customer" by designing service processes around the customer's needs. Customer-powered service uses highly automated and intelligent processes to handle a significant portion of the work for the customer and provide highly targeted answers and resources, automatically based on who the customer is and what the customer is doing at the specific time of need. It also lets companies integrate customer care into the heart of e-business applications and replicate their service cultures online. Motive uniquely meets the three key requirements for customer-powered service: Embedded Service - Motive Olympus wires service directly into the online experience so that customers see it as a built-in feature. When a problem or question arises, the customer simply pushes a button inside of the product, on a Web page, or during a transaction, and receives the answer within that same interface, eliminating the need to abandon the application to request service. Contextual Answers and Solutions - Motive Olympus operates "in context." It determines who the customer is and what the customer is doing at the specific time of the problem or question, and then uses this information to dynamically provide a relevant set of targeted answers and human experts. Customers are free from having to guess at or describe the detailed symptoms of their problems and e-business service personnel are able to handle requests faster because they have complete, current and technically accurate information. Service Networks - Motive Olympus provides the technology infrastructure for bringing all of a company's service assets online. These assets include traditional digital assets such as knowledge bases and self-service content as well as human assets such as employees, partners and suppliers. Assets can span traditional call centers and service departments, functional departments such as accounting or finance and remotely located experts in the e-business or partner companies. Motive calls these dynamic webs of service assets "service networks." Motive Olympus Speeds "Time-to-Customer" of Customer-Powered Service Motive Olympus expedites customer-powered service for some of the fastest-growing e-business markets, by providing industry-specific automated service components and best practices. Each Motive Olympus vertical-market solution includes: Embedded-Service Components - Motive Olympus provides pre-packaged components that provide direct assistance around e-business processes such as registration, provisioning and business transactions. These components are targeted to specific requirements in each industry. Best Practices - Motive Olympus' best practices enable e-businesses' IT staffs, Motive consultants or systems integrators to quickly define the specific context for delivering high-touch, customer-powered service experiences. Web Services - The Motive Olympus solutions are delivered as XML (Extensible Markup Language) web services. The solutions can be managed using directories and tied into e-business applications' authentication mechanisms. How Motive Olympus Helps During the online account sign-up process for a new brokerage account, a customer has a question about whether he qualifies for a certain type of account. The financial services firm has embedded a Motive registration assistant directly into the registration form that creates a "help button." When the customer clicks the button, Motive delivers a list of context-specific answers and real-time links to financial advisors and other human experts who can answer the question. Motive dynamically assembles the resource list, based on the specific context of who the customer is and where he stumbled in the registration process. The firm's Motive-powered service network intelligently transmits the customer's request to the correct expert, along with a package of contextual information about his question. The expert can start handling the question immediately, without asking the customer a lot of additional questions. If the question is particularly unusual, the expert can easily tap into other experts on the service network, while remaining the single point of contact for the customer. Availability Motive Olympus is currently available for purchase by customers. About Motive Communications, Inc. Motive Communications powers online customer care by offering software and services that automatically connect online users to a company's answers and experts when the users have problems. Motive's products are used to build unique service networks that help companies foster customer loyalty, drive revenue, supercharge service capacity and increase market share. Motive's software solutions are used by leading companies in many industries including all.com, Compaq, Dynegy, EDS, Fannie Mae, Fujitsu PC Corporation, Gateway, Great Plains Software, Hewlett-Packard Company, Intuit, Kmart, Merrill Lynch, Peregrine, pcsupport.com, Target Corporation, WebLink Wireless and Wells Fargo. Motive was founded in May 1997 and is backed by $43M in funding from leading venture capital firms and private investors. Motive can be reached at (512) 339-8335 or on its Web site at http://www.motive.com Motive employment opportunities can be found at http://jobs.motive.com *"The U.S. Market for Internet-Based Customer Service"; Datamonitor, Summer 2000. The Motive logo, Motive Communications, Inc. and all other product or technical names are trademarks or registered trademarks of Motive Communications, Inc. All other products or services mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective holders. Editorial Contact: Stephanie Leonard Motive Communications 512-339-8335, ext. 1071 sleonard@motive.com top of page |
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