Expanded Functionality Delivers Service Excellence, Drives Enterprise-Wide Business Results
COLUMBUS, Ohio, August 19, 2008 –Leading the charge to help consumer-focused companies differentiate through service excellence, Astute Solutions (www.astutesolutions.com) today announced the launch of ePowerCenter™ 7.0. The new version of its award-winning customer service application distinctly meets the demands of the extended contact center.
“Best in class” customer-centric companies are seeking ways to extend the role of the contact center to address the immediate needs of consumers, employees and partners; increase revenue and retention; and capture and communicate actionable feedback throughout the organization. But many of these companies face significant barriers to success without technology designed to support customer-centric business strategies.
“It’s ironic. As companies compete for an edge in the market, they are looking at an assortment of technologies to deliver a better customer experience. But in doing so, they face integration and information-related challenges that ultimately diminish the customer experience,” said Astute Solutions President, Joseph Sanda. “At Astute Solutions, our goal is to help companies overcome these challenges to create customer advocates through high-value experiences.”
Enhancing ePowerCenter for the Extended Contact Center
ePowerCenter is a customer interaction and relationship management solution that meets the needs of customer-centric companies. It offers new ways to deliver high quality customer service, while leveraging “voice of the customer” insights to quickly identify and respond to needs, issues, and trends.
Companies implement ePowerCenter 7.0 and its family of applications to: expand to additional interaction channels, improve performance, monitor quality, involve key personnel across the enterprise in resolving customer issues, and reduce interaction costs and complexities.
ePowerCenter 7.0 has over 400 updates that address traditional business challenges and those of the extended contact center. Features include:
•RealDialogTM Agent Assist Integration provides agents with a “conversational” knowledge management tool that improves quality and accelerates issue resolution and agent “ramp up”. Agents type a consumer’s question verbatim (within the ePowerCenter interface), or select one received via chat or email, and receive an immediate, accurate response. Unlike search and FAQ solutions that deliver a long list of links for the agent to review, RealDialog delivers a precise answer (and/or the specific place in a document or Web page where it resides), or engages the agent in a “dialog” to pinpoint their exact needs.
Because it can conduct a diagnostic process via a two-way “dialog,” RealDialog is ideal for companies with numerous/complex products and services. Moreover, it can be extended to provide “conversational” self-service on the company’s website(s) and Intranet portal.
•Web Chat Integration enables agents to converse with consumers in real-time, while maintaining case information in ePowerCenter. With drag-and-drop responses, the integration enhances productivity and improves the overall quality of chat responses.
•Normalization Reporting enables organizations to generate reports that display the number of issues, normalization data, and the normal factor (for example, complaints per units sold). This feature is especially valuable for the retail, restaurant and travel industries – where data surrounding “products sold,” “meals served,” and “number of passengers” provides critical insight for business decisions.
•ePowerCenter Suggestion Rules improve agent performance, enable organizations to collect highly specific and accurate customer data, and improve fulfillment, compensation and follow-up activities. Agents at all experience levels benefit from prompts (in the form of pop-up windows, highlighted fields, and subsets of codes) to ensure they have collected the right information for accuracy in reporting. The prompts also ensure adherence to company policies and procedures.
•Mass Mailer facilitates creating and managing consumer mailing lists. It is used to send printed letters, newsletters, surveys, email or enclosures to specific consumers within the ePowerCenter contact database. It provides marketing and sales with cost-effective, highly targeted marketing opportunities and valuable insight into consumer needs and wants.
•Record IQ Integration provides a feature-rich voice and video/screen interaction recording solution within ePowerCenter. It provides options and configurations for recording voice interactions, capturing on-screen activities, and tracking agent performance. Offering sophisticated management tools, the solution enables managers across the enterprise to leverage specific recordings for quality assurance, product/process improvement, compliance, risk management, and training purposes.
•Enhanced Hierarchical Categorization satisfies complex reporting, workflow, fulfillment, and data capture needs. It leverages business rules to drive automated workflow processes and decisions, and provides an effective means for reporting a virtually limitless number of details surrounding issues, products, services, and business operations. Combined with event-driven notifications, it enables companies to quickly identify and respond to problems, trends and opportunities. This serves to protect the brand, mitigate risk and liabilities, and drive competitive advantages.
At the core, ePowerCenter utilizes .NET technology to offer seamless integration into any environment. It can scale to meet the demands of high volume contact centers, and is configurable to the specific needs of global companies.
Outstanding customer experiences, increased productivity, reduced costs and IT-related expenditures, and reduced agent attrition are a handful of the measures that reinforce the value Astute Solutions brings.
“At Astute Solutions, our philosophy is that the contact center is at the heart of a customer-centric strategy. It’s where ‘moments of truth’ occur. These give companies an opportunity to win the loyalty of their customers, and to capture valuable insights that can be utilized by decision-makers throughout the enterprise to improve products, services and processes,” Sanda continued. “We deliver solutions that help companies succeed in these areas, while reducing costs and improving profitability.”
About Astute Solutions
Through award-winning customer interaction and relationship management solutions, Astute Solutions enables companies to differentiate through service excellence. Its user-friendly ePowerCenterTM and RealDialogTM solutions provide the robust capabilities companies need to deliver efficient, high-touch, and high-quality service; while ensuring consistent and accurate responses across all communication channels. Moreover, Astute’s solutions capture actionable “voice of the customer” insights that lead to improved products, services and operations. By partnering with Astute Solutions, leading companies across a variety of industries achieve exceptional ROI by reducing overall interaction and operational costs, improving agent performance, retaining more customers, delivering market-leading products and services, and increasing revenue. For more information, visit http://www.astutesolutions.com/
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