Witness Systems Unveils Browser-Based Enterprise Collaboration Architecture for Capturing and Analyzing ustomer Interactions

– Enhancements to eQuality solution – including advanced business rules, notification and multidimensional analysis – enable companies to leverage intelligence gathered from actual customer contacts for greater customer satisfaction and loyalty –

CHICAGO (July 30, 2001) – Witness Systems (NASDAQ: WITS), a leading global provider of customer interaction recording, analysis and e-learning software that enables companies to optimize their customer relationships, today announced the availability of its new browser-based eQuality software for recording and analyzing multimedia customer interactions. The solution breaks new ground for companies striving to capitalize on the valuable information gathered through their recorded customer interactions by leveraging the enterprise collaboration (EC) architecture from Witness Systems.

With eQuality’s EC recording architecture, organizations, for the first time, can create advanced “business rules” for random, selective or 100 percent recording of the specific types of telephone, e-mail and Web customer interactions that drive their businesses. With this enhanced view of the customer experience, companies are now even better equipped to make informed business decisions. Additionally, contact center management is able to share these interactions with departments that touch the customer, as well as executives, by notifying them when a business-critical customer event occurs. The result is a proactive management tool for cultivating customer relationships and improving communications among departments, as well as fine-tuning workflow, processes and quality of service from within the contact center and throughout the enterprise.

Industry analysts estimate that more than 60 percent of customer interactions occur through the contact center, and they maintain that the quality of service provided by customer sales/service representatives (CSRs) is the most important aspect of any center. Now, more than ever, quality assurance is the focal point of successful contact centers, as well as thriving enterprises. As a result, selectively capturing the customer experience, analyzing its effectiveness, and then collaborating with other departments by sharing these customer contacts throughout the enterprise is critical.

“The eQuality software’s new enterprise collaboration architecture offers organizations a strategic way to pinpoint new revenue opportunities, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction,” said Nancy Treaster, senior vice president of global marketing for Witness Systems. “eQuality enables companies to transform the valuable information stream in the contact center into first-hand business intelligence, which can be delivered to the right people and departments throughout the enterprise. eQuality also helps support business objectives, such as problem-solving and identifying sales opportunities, which in turn, can build customer loyalty.”

Building upon the company’s flagship recording platform – the industry’s first software for monitoring and evaluating CSRs’ telephone interactions with customers, as well as their corresponding computer desktop activities – the eQuality EC architecture offers robust functionality, including advanced business rules, notification and multidimensional analysis.

Distributed Architecture Offers Enterprise Performance Optimization

Witness Systems’ new eQuality EC is comprised of a logical three-tier distributed architecture, offering an open, flexible solution. Reusable software components help ensure a scalable and extendable architecture to accommodate future recording and analysis requirements. In addition, the company has further broadened its technology integration by providing a framework that is highly configurable to customers’ specific environments – including ACD, CTI, customer relationship management (CRM), e-media and Relational Database Management Systems (RDMS).

eQuality’s EC architecture also expands business-driven recording with the software’s advanced “business rules” engine, which enables center directors and other management to specify one or multiple conditions to trigger recordings before, during and after a customer contact. The software’s business rules capture and summarize contact attributes real-time, while validating customer-specific rules against the captured attributes. In fact, companies can retain the entire interaction whether they specified the business rule conditions prior to the contact (i.e., ANI, DNIS and agent ID), during the contact (i.e., priority and product request), or at the end of the interaction (i.e., completed sale). The system then uses these conditions, or business rules, to trigger an action, such as retain the contact and notify an individual or group. eQuality automatically places the recorded contacts into designated folders for easy access, retrieval and replay.

“By supporting the capture, collection and presentation of multimedia interactions, as well as the management of these contacts from any touch point in the enterprise via the Web, our enterprise collaboration architecture is setting new technical standards for helping companies record and analyze their customer contacts,” said John May, senior vice president of engineering for Witness Systems. “The architecture also supports the ability to record, store and easily retrieve large volumes of these interactions, as needed, for analysis, training and enterprise-wide information sharing.”

Leveraging Intelligence Gathered From Captured Customer Interactions

Advanced business rules also allow companies to configure eQuality to notify one or more people when the system triggers a business rule. Notification can occur through e-mail, an alphanumeric pager and/or a mobile device. As a result, organizations can share recorded customer interactions via e-mail or Web links with the executive team to explain revenue trends, marketing to gauge campaign effectiveness, and engineering to examine and manage product defects, for example.

With this new browser-based interface, call center management teams can access all system functions from a Netscape or Internet Explorer browser. As a result, authorized users throughout the company can view recorded contacts, evaluations and reports by replaying recorded contacts from the Web – all without a dedicated replay client. Users can access, retrieve and replay contacts, create and review evaluations, as well as create, retrieve and analyze reports from any workstation with Intranet access. Quality assurance specialists also can post recorded interactions to the company’s Intranet site, enabling remote users to replay contacts using a multimedia player, such as Apple QuickTime, Microsoft Windows Media Player, or RealNetworks RealPlayer.

The eQuality software allows users to add voice and text annotations to any recorded customer contact. The ability to add commentary and/or explanatory notes to specific parts of a recorded contact provides greater insight into the interaction, as well as a way to note areas for coaching and training. Managers can define annotations as private, allowing only the creator to see and hear them, or public, enabling anyone with secure replay access to view/hear the text/voice feedback.