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, Calif., Dec. 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 Sigma Operations 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, Inc.

ePeople, founded in 1997, is the leading provider of web-based, collaborative CRM solutions. The ePeople(TM) Teamwork application helps companies manage and resolve complex customer issues more effectively, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and retention. Customers of ePeople include Adobe Systems, Inc., Cognos, Enkata Technologies, Openwave Systems, Inc., OpSource Inc., Oracle Corp., 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 http://www.epeople.com.