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ePeople Service Network 3.0: Delivers First Multi-Party Collaborative Issue Resolution CapabilitiesCollaboration Within and Outside the Company Proves Key for Increasing Customer Satisfaction and Employee ProductivityMountain View, Calif. - December 11, 2001 - Recognizing that today's increasingly complex technical support requirements demand a team effort for more efficient problem solving and greater customer satisfaction, ePeople announced Service Network 3.0, Web-based, collaborative issue resolution software. ePeople Service Network 3.0 enables support analysts, for the first time, to identify and engage the right resources within and outside of the company on a per-incident basis to quickly and collaboratively resolve issues, extending the value of CRM and knowledge management systems. "Because of the increasing complexity of enterprise technology deployment, resolving support issues frequently requires multiple people with differing specialties, often involving cross-vendor cooperation," said Bill Rose, founder/executive Director of SSPA (Service and Support Professional Association). "For these issues to be efficiently resolved, it's imperative for technology vendors to collaborate. There is an enormous industry need for ePeople Service Network 3.0, which allows multiple people to collaborate as teams to expedite problem solving." "One of the toughest issues facing support organizations today is that over 60% of customer issues require multiple people to resolve it them," said Anthony Lye, president and CEO, ePeople. "ePeople enables technical support organizations to efficiently address the rise in more complex inquiries resulting from today's accelerated pace of new technology introductions and increasingly integrated technical environment." The Need for Collaboration Most support organizations use informal, unstructured communication methods, such as phone, e-mail and instant messaging to form ad hoc teams to resolve an issue. However, this type of informal collaboration generally limits support analysts to working with a limited group of colleagues rather than benefiting from a broader group of experts, both within and external to the company. In addition, informal collaboration has no facility for capturing information from each problem solving interaction and lacks accountability for reaching resolution of an issue within a given timeframe and set of service levels. ePeople Service Network 3.0 extends the support organization's flexibility and reach by allowing companies to create a virtual support organization that taps into their network of partners, suppliers, developers, and customers, improving the efficiency and productivity of its customer support services. ePeople Service Network 3.0 creates collaborative support workspaces, Web-based environments where multiple parties can communicate and work together, yet still allows support analysts to retain service level accountability. Collaborative support workspaces provide the common platform and integrated support tools for problem resolution amongst all parties, enabling multi-party communication, file exchange and data sharing. Through ePeople Service Network 3.0, incoming support requests are automatically distributed to support analysts based on skills, quality, business affiliation, cost and service level requirements. During the course of resolving the issue, support analysts can invite other experts into the workspace by name or route the request to an available pool of resources that possess the appropriate skill set. Multiple experts can jump in and out of a request as needed, while a single point of end user contact and accountability is always maintained. ePeople Service Network 3.0 also allows for private side conversations between support analysts, which are transparent to end users, enabling candid discussions and providing a mechanism for supervisors to provide direct input. Ensuring Customer Satisfaction ePeople Service Network 3.0 enables companies to maintain high quality service across a distributed set of resources by managing service levels between collaborating providers and end users, as well as providing an end user customer satisfaction survey to rate service providers at the resolution of every request. Unlike informal communication methods or e-mail correspondence, ePeople Service Network 3.0 allows support organizations to capture the knowledge from all support interactions, and feed it back into their knowledge bases and other self-service support systems. Support information can be exported via XML to knowledge management systems or seamlessly integrated into CRM applications. About ePeople ePeople, founded in 1997, is the leading provider of Internet-based support solutions. The ePeople Service Network - a patent-pending, collaborative issue resolution application - helps companies capture, manage and resolve customer issues more effectively, thereby increasing customer satisfaction. Customers of ePeople include Adobe, Openwave, Oracle, PC World, Sybase, and Symbol. 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. Editorial Contact: Wendy Grubow Eastwick Communications 831-626-7503 wendy@eastwick.com top of page |
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