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Technology Stocks : Edify (EDFY) IPO -- Any Comments? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TLindt who wrote (124)	12/22/1998 8:00:00 AM
From: AugustWest	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 355

figures I'd run into you guys over here. Been on my radar again too, but read this. Call centers grab for Web December 22, 1998 Network World via NewsEdge Corporation : Dollar Bank in Pittsburgh, in the late 1970s, was the first financial institution east of the Mississippi to implement automatic bill paying by phone. So you'd think the $2.6 billion financial institution would be among the first to implement Internet banking and link it closely to live customer service. Well, it is . . . up to a point. The bank was an early purchaser of Edify's Electronic Banking System, a Windows NT 4.0 server system that presents customer account information on a bank's Web site. And the bank has integrated its Edify Web banking service, called NetBanking, with its interactive voice response (IVR) phone banking service. Not only that, e-mail messages sent from the Web site are routed to a call center agent who makes certain the customer gets a response. But there's one thing customers can't do on Dollar Bank's NetBanking system: click on a call-me button to have a call center agent call them back live to answer their questions. Although a user could jump off Dollar Bank's IVR system to a live operator, bank officials don't want to assume customers have a second phone line to provide a simultaneous voice connection with their Web sessions. And the officials are skeptical about special hardware and software that would interleave voice traffic over the customer connection to the NetBanking Web server via a single phone line. Don Beacom, the bank's manager of Internet applications, once tried such a single-line call-me system. "But I didn't think that the quality of that connection was very good," he says. And he's worried that he would have to pay for more access bandwidth to accommodate such a converged application. Trend shift Dollar Bank's experience illustrates the dilemma of many of today's early implementations of Web call center integration. The technology generated a burst of enthusiasm from vendors about a year and a half ago that resulted in a slew of first-generation call me products from PBX manufacturers and independent software vendors. But now the trend is toward the more mundane concern of how to get call centers to begin to deal with non-real-time Web responses such as e-mail. "A lot of people think of [Web call center integration] as the call me button. That's a very small piece of the market right now," says Francisco Kattan, senior product manager for call center marketing at Edify in Santa Clara, Calif. Today, observers agree, most companies give users the option to send inquiry e-mail over their Web sites, but from there the link between the Web site and the customer service call center is broken. Either the customer service agents receive the e-mail inquiries in a vacuum or the mail goes to an entirely different part of the company, sometimes to languish for weeks on end or die unanswered. Several highly publicized tests have highlighted corporations' inability to deal with Web sitegenerated e-mail. But Kattan says the real problem is not network administrators' competence or attitudes. It's just that they can't afford two platforms - one for call centers accustomed to dealing with calls immediately and another for electronic commerce development teams not used to strict standards for customer response. That's a problem Edify's Electronic Workforce, an application development and run-time platform for Windows NT, attempts to address. "You build Electronic Workforce for either the Web or the telephone system," Kattan says. "You get to pick. You do integration with the back office once. You do business rules once." To advance the application-generation work for certain markets, Edify offers two industry-specific variants of Electronic Workforce: the Electronic Banking System for financial institutions and the Employee Service System for large human resource departments. E-mail as an 'event' To be sure, Edify's Electronic Banking System includes an optional call-me button, so customer service agents can call customers back. And many other call center vendors are not convinced that organizing retail customers' e-mail is the complete answer. Those vendors say the call-me button is still key, especially for financial institutions that don't want to be obligated by what a call center agent might write in a casual message. "Large financial institutions don't want to respond to e-mail in writing because of the liability," says Dan Keshian, president of WebLine Communications in Burlington, Mass. "They want to queue it up with an agent and have the agent call back." WebLine 2.0, introduced last June, is a Java application that, when downloaded to a customer, connects the customer to a collaboration server shared by the agent. The user and the agent are then able to share screen displays, co-navigate the Web and collaborate on shared forms. WebLine also offers a feature called Media Blender, which integrates e-mail into the priority system established by call centers via their automatic call distributors (ACD). An ACD works on the principle of treating an incoming 800 phone call as a red alert, searching wherever it can for a free agent to take the call. Media Blender extends the principle to e-mail as well as other possible methods of customer contact, such as fax. It's also important to decide exactly where to place the call-me button, Keshian says. It's a mistake to place it on your home page or many other Web pages, he says, because call center labor is expensive and most companies can't afford to tie up agents' time with idle questions from people who are not likely to buy. Instead, Keshian says to place it well into the e-commerce application only for qualified customers, or pop up a dialog box asking if the customer wants to be called. <<Network World -- 12-21-98, p. 34>> [Copyright 1998, Network World]