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ServiceWare Announces General Availability of eService Suite 3.0

Self-learning eService Infrastructure Provides Superior Service and Support on the Web

OAKMONT, PA-August 15, 2000-ServiceWare, a leading provider of eService solutions, today announced the immediate availability of eService Suite 3.0, a software and content solution that allows companies to provide personalized, automated eService tailored to the needs of their customers, partners and employees. eService Suite 3.0, based on ServiceWare’s patented Cognitive Processor technology, is a self-learning, self-organizing and self-maintaining eService infrastructure that empowers customers through self-service, while providing a path of escalation for questions that require personal intervention. eService Suite 3.0 delivers cost-savings by off-loading call center inquiries to Web self-service, ensures the accuracy of recommended solutions, provides support personnel with immediate access to answers for escalated inquiries and raises the bar for exceeding customer expectations about the speed and quality of online support.

eService Suite 3.0 features a host of enhancements providing an eService infrastructure for the extended enterprise through a Java and XML architecture and a Thin Analyst Client that minimizes the desktop footprint. An intuitive, professionally designed self-help component, called eService Site, extends knowledge to the end user, thereby decreasing operating costs and improving access to and distribution of enterprise knowledge. eService Suite offers audience partitioning to control the presentation of audience-appropriate solutions; and a five-stage Knowledge Quality Assurance approval process that ensures the accuracy and consistency of the knowledge base. eService Suite 3.0 is backed by the eService Success Program, an implementation methodology that gets customers up and running with a production knowledge base within 30 days. Beyond the knowledge base, eService Suite 3.0 is integrated with Kana Response for e-mail escalation of problems and has been integrated with all of the popular CRM products. To further integrate seamlessly with other existing CRM systems or escalation technologies such as e-mail, Chat and Voice-over-IP, eService Suite offers a robust, documented set of APIs, enabling the complete eService solution.

“e-Customer Relationship Management is a growing area of competitive differentiation for our clients. They expect excellence from us on all facets of the customer experience,” said Lloyd Linnell, CTO at Stream International, an eService Suite 3.0 beta customer. “We chose ServiceWare’s product because we believe it will deliver a significant value proposition: it will enable us to exceed our clients’ expectations for timely, high quality service and offers the opportunity to increase revenue by providing sophisticated information for up-sell/cross-sell opportunities. In addition, it may enable our clients to reduce overall customer management costs by providing innovative self-help capabilities.”

ServiceWare’s Cognitive Processor, a statistical engine that mimics human thinking, lends critical value to eService Suite 3.0. It is highly customizable and has the potential for use with any type of knowledge - not just technical information - allowing customers to build knowledge databases that are appropriate for their specific business. It is a self-learning technology that evolves with each interaction, remembering what worked in one instance and applying that to subsequent related questions. Due to this learning process, the Cognitive Processor promotes the reuse of knowledge to deliver consistent, fast and accurate responses that encourage user loyalty and promote customer satisfaction. Through this combination of application intelligence and ease-of-use, eService Suite 3.0 strengthens relationships with customers, partners and employee. ServiceWare also provides first-rate integration, training and consulting services, helping customers to build the best service destinations for eBusiness.

“Stellar online service has become a requirement for success,” said Mark Tapling, CEO of ServiceWare. “The world of eBusiness has changed the rules, and successful companies are those that respond immediately and accurately to customer inquiries. And these inquiries are not just after the point of sale; every commerce transaction breeds a host of related service opportunities before, during and after a sale. eService Suite 3.0 allows companies to win on service in highly competitive markets because it is the most intelligent, customer-empathetic solution available.”

eService Suite
eService Suite consists of the following products: eService Site, eService Professional, eService Architect. With rich functionality to match role-based modeling, each product serves a different purpose for different users within an organization, but all are part of an integrated solution designed to create superior service for eBusiness.

 eService Site is the customer-facing entry point for customers and employees that allows businesses to provide Web-based self-service to their end-users, whether that be through the Internet or a corporate intranet. This Web-based e-service solution allows self-help users to access the knowledge base at any time, using a simple, easy-to-use and intuitive interface via a natural language query. The eService Site can be customized to conform to the look and feel of a company’s Web site. Finally, eService Site provides access to ServiceWare’s customers’ knowledge sources and provides escalation processes to promote issues to the support desk if necessary.

 eService Professional provides a Web-based application interface for customer service professionals, which have now become a point of escalation as opposed to a point of entry, to more easily navigate through the knowledge base, view various components of the knowledge base as well as capture and revise additional knowledge. eService Professional integrates with many of ServiceWare’s partners’ customer relationship applications to provide a seamless interface for a customer service professional.

 eService Architect provides a robust set of knowledge tools that allows a company’s subject matter experts and system administrators to administer, design, manage and maintain knowledge bases. The eService Architect provides knowledge authoring and editing capabilities as well as administrative tools for all necessary product suite functions.

RightAnswers.com, an Internet-based knowledge portal, will be available as a component of eService Suite. RightAnswers.com enables ServiceWare customers to access a continuously updated database of currently over 350,000 problem-solution pairs in a cost effective and timely manner. RightAnswers.com enables customer support organizations and end-users to have direct access to solutions to the most commonly asked technology-related questions. Through RightAnswers.com, customers can simply go to the Web site, type a natural language query and receive back a single, unified list of probable answers from licensed knowledge bases. ServiceWare currently offers multi-vendor support content obtained from premier, industry-leading technology companies, including Microsoft, Novell and 3Com. In addition to the technology content supplied by top tier partners, RightAnswers.com includes technology content produced in-house by ServiceWare for common desktop, network and SAP R/3 applications. RightAnswers.com is primarily distributed on a subscription basis. Within its first 90 days of launch, RightAnswers.com received more than 3000 users register and more than 2 million hits, substantiating the need for this type of capability from a trusted knowledge content source. A CD-ROM version of this product is also available.

Professional Services and Customer Support ServiceWare’s professional services organization provides customers with best practices implementation and integration services, which allow them to deploy eService solutions quickly and effectively. In addition, the professional services organization offers education and training to enable customers’ internal teams to support implementation and maintenance. All customers under a maintenance agreement have access to ServiceWare technical support engineers via telephone, fax or e-mail. In addition, ServiceWare provides self-service support to customers on a twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week basis through the RightAnswers.com Web site.

Pricing
ServiceWare provides “role-based pricing” to make its products attractive to the widest possible community of users. eService Architect is available on a per-seat basis, pricing as low as $1,500. eService Professional is available on a per-seat basis, pricing as low as $1,200. eService Site pricing is tiered, by concurrent Internet users, starting at $50,000 RightAnswers.com is available by annual subscription, pricing ranges from $250 to $500 per seat, depending on the Knowledge Channels subscribed to.

About ServiceWare

ServiceWare is a leading provider of Web-based solutions for enterprise service and support, which enable organizations to win on service in the incredibly competitive world of eBusiness. ServiceWare delivers a comprehensive, integrated family of eService solutions that enable organizations to easily provide customers with fast, accurate answers to inquiries across all touch points - Web, email, phone, fax or in-person. Based on ServiceWare’s robust knowledge base and patented Cognitive Processor™, ServiceWare’s eService Suite enables customers to build the best service destinations for eBusiness. ServiceWare customers represent a cross-section of industry leaders in the financial services, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, entertainment, education and government sectors. More than 4000 organizations have implemented ServiceWare’s eService solutions including Pfizer, Lucent Technologies, Marriott International, Fleet Services, Stream International, Texas Instruments, Ingram-Micro, John Deere, and Bear Stearns. ServiceWare is the recipient of the prestigious CRM Excellence Award 2000, and was also named one of the “Top 100 Companies to Watch” by KM Magazine. Learn more today by visiting ServiceWare’s Web site at www.serviceware.com or call 800-572-5748.

About Stream International

Stream International is a global provider of eCRM outsource solutions for leading technology companies and e-businesses. Stream’s Emediatesm services provide a fully integrated suite of e-mail, live chat, voice and self-help solutions to enhance the customer experience. Through Emediatesm, Stream will solve over 3.5 million email issues this year. More than 7,000 Customer Interaction Agents, at 15 locations, in seven countries, will enhance over 30 million customer experiences this year. For more information visit Stream International’s Web site at www.stream.com.

Editorial Contact:
Jennifer Donovan
The Horn Group
415-905-4029
jdonovan@horngroup.com

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