PeopleSoft Support: Vantive Tech Built In
Teri Robinson
story.news.yahoo.com
As the contact center grows increasingly important to the enterprise, PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT - news) is aggressively entering the field with PeopleSoft Support, a full-bodied application -- based on acquired technology -- that can be rolled into PeopleSoft 8.
"PeopleSoft is going at the contact center mostly through what it bought with Vantive, a lot of which has been retooled," Mark Peacock, an analyst with Deloitte Consulting, told CRM Buyer Magazine.
Brad Wilson, vice president of product marketing for CRM at PeopleSoft, told CRM Buyer that Vantive had "terrific contact center technology and expertise" in areas such as case management and trouble ticketing, which has been transferred onto the PeopleSoft 8 architecture.
The application is intended not only to give a company the much-coveted 360-degree view of the customer, but also to provide the customer with a 360-degree view of the company, said Wilson.
But Andrew Kass, a senior vice president of development for CRM at Oracle ( Nasdaq: ORCL - news), told CRM Buyer that because SAP ( NYSE: SAP - news) and PeopleSoft provide the pieces of CRM through separate companies, they appear to view CRM as a separate entity rather than as an integrated part of an enterprise's business processes.
On the other hand, Oracle focuses on creating a single data model for all processes, he said.
Turn and Face the Changes
Wilson pointed out that much of PeopleSoft's efforts have been fueled by rapidly changing expectations for a contact center. The enterprise "wants to allow customers to get access 24/7," he said. It also wants customer service reps to make snap decisions as to how to best handle the individual customer.
No longer seen merely as a profit center, as John Ragsdale, an analyst with the Giga Information Group, told CRM Buyer, the contact center has become an important touchstone -- representing, perhaps, the only direct path -- to the customer.
"The advent of the CRM messages around 'attract, retain and serve customers' has given more visibility to call centers and technical support," he said. "Customer service agents are often the single interface between a company and its customers. More companies are recognizing that excellent customer service not only helps retain customers -- it can help attract them, too."
Reach Out and Touch
"Vice presidents, CIOs [and other executives] used to view the call center as a necessary evil," said Wilson. "But in the past few years, service on those 100 million touches with customers has been seen as a way to either do something [positive] with the customer or to bungle the relationship."
Increasingly, those companies are turning to vendors like PeopleSoft for the tools that will help their customer service representatives accomplish the former and avoid the latter.
They are seeking self-service tools and knowledge-based systems. And they want to implement contact center technology quickly.
According to Wilson, PeopleSoft can get a call center up and running within 35 days or so, as it recently did with one customer -- "and it wasn't just a call center," he explained. It offered customers "self-service features" and technology to deal with more complex queries.
The Right Tools
Because the contact center represents "an extremely important way for a business to build and maintain a relationship with customers," CSRs must be armed with enough knowledge of customers that they can make snap decisions as to whether to cross-sell, up-sell or simply service the customer, Wilson said.
PeopleSoft has put considerable effort into infusing its contact center offering with knowledge management capabilities. Reps can get "some notion of the customer's background and how angry or happy they are" before offering answers to their queries, said Wilson.
Using embedded analytics, PeopleSoft's offering processes data "in real-time and historically, and presents [results] in the course of an agent's interaction with the customer," said Wilson.
Oracle, too, is putting a great deal of stock into its analytics and intelligence these days in an effort to reach a wider audience, said Andrew Kass, a senior vice president of development in CRM at Oracle.
Serving Two Fronts
PeopleSoft has aimed its technology at both the contact center that suffers high turnover and the center that is home to long-term employees with a decade or more of experience.
Some industries are also looking for ways to make the call center rep's job easier, thereby providing higher levels of customer satisfaction and reducing churn among center employees.
At centers with high turnover, "the challenge is to make call center technology easier," said Wilson. For that, PeopleSoft touts its intuitive interface and the building of guidance into the application -- rather than a manual.
Ragsdale noted that in the quest to answer the changing needs of the contact center, "vendors are making it easier to create different UIs (user interfaces) for different user categories, so the application becomes optimized for whatever responsibilities the employee may have."
Integration Rules
While competitors like Siebel ( Nasdaq: SEBL - news) and Pivotal ( Nasdaq: PVTL - news) also preach back office integration, as do enterprise CRM vendors like Oracle, Wilson believes that PeopleSoft has more experience actually making integration a reality, particularly since the company offering is built on a pure Internet architecture.
"We offer complete front-office to back-office integration that a lot of CRM vendors talk about," he said.
Oracle's Kass told CRM Buyer that vendors like PeopleSoft and Siebel "require [experts] with very special skillsets" to implement and integrate their applications.
Siebel, E.piphany ( Nasdaq: EPNY - news) and Kana are still strong competitors of PeopleSoft, according to Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst with the Yankee Group. She told CRM Buyer that others, however, such as Clarify, have dropped off the radar screen, which she said "used to be a strong contender."
The Right Price
PeopleSoft has avoided "just selling seats" for its modules, opting instead for what Wilson called "value-based pricing." Prices are based on a number of metrics, including company size and number of employees.
PeopleSoft is hoping to attract enterprises that will view it as a company that they can "take a risk on," allowing ample room for future growth, said Wilson. According to Kingstone, "PeopleSoft is leveraging its installed base with a complete solution from the front office to the back office." |
