ATG Announces First-Ever Adaptive Self-Service Solution
New Web-based ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance helps guide online customers to the most relevant, highly personalized answers to queries
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - March 15, 2004 - ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG), the software provider behind the web`s richest customer experiences, today announced ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance, the first in a series of powerful new Web self-service solutions. ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance builds on ATG`s acknowledged industry leadership in developing guided customer experience software that provides users with an unprecedented depth of information and services.
"ATG is demonstrating that there is still plenty of room for innovation around how businesses can offer effective online customer self-service," said Mitch Kramer, senior vice president, Patricia Seybold Group. "ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance is the type of product that can help you improve the customer experience that you deliver while, at the same time, help you reduce cost to serve. It`s the kind of product that will accelerate the movement to empower customers to be self-served."
ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance represents a significant evolution of "traditional" online self-service. Traditional self-service is modeled after the early stage search engines, where typical responses to queries are answered with a list of thousands of documents with varying degrees of relevancy.
"Leading vendors will carve out a new category of personalization not only driven by personas or profiles, but also the context of consumers` behavior, taking into account attitudinal nuances of a query. Results will be nuggets of content as well as interactive customer service escalation options including e-mail, text chat, and voice. These vendors will transform the self-service search experience by injecting users into relevant tasks," Jupiter Research published in a report last year titled "Self-Service Strategies, Creating Value with Natural Language Search."
With its first-ever combination of intuitive natural language search, a structured unique answer repository and ATG`s award winning personalization capabilities, ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance gives users a direct answer to their direct question, personalized with their specific data, and then guides them towards other resources and next steps. Built on the ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine, ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance has a rich understanding of the customer using the application, which ensures that each question will receive a highly relevant answer.
"Everybody knows poor online self-service can be detrimental to companies that are trying to build strong customer loyalty and repeat business," said Cliff Conneighton, senior vice president of marketing, ATG. "We have cracked the code. Companies using ATG software now give their customers the power to love them."
ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance is unlike other customer knowledge base products currently available in the market. They are not able to provide customer-specific answers because they don`t know who`s asking the question and they don`t know how to utilize their customer`s information. Such products either don`t take the customer into consideration, or the answers are ASP-hosted and therefore have no way of ever knowing.
ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance takes the process a logical step further, turning a simple request for information into a measure of real value to the business. Throughout the answer process, customers can be navigated to other pages of information, or Web forms where they can initiate transactions or invoke and participate in a business process. Unlike traditional customer-facing knowledge bases, ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance can respond to customer inquires from information held within an answer database that is integrated with transactional back-office systems to provide further information to get the right answer.
Features of ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance include:
• An intuitive natural language search engine designed to truly understand the intent of the questions that customers ask in order to provide them with highly relevant responses.
• A robust answer-building application to help business users, knowledge workers and customer care experts collaborate to create information and answers that are held in the knowledge base. New information is added to the knowledge base through comprehensive, flexible workflows that ensure the quality of information remains consistently high.
• A closed-loop feedback system that tracks and monitors the effectiveness of the customer experience being provided. If customer satisfaction is inadequate around a specific set of questions or topics, ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance can drive new tasks back into the business to ensure that suitable answers are made available.
• A repository integration interface that feeds the answers with customer-specific data, such as account balances or preferences, from outside data sources, such as billing systems, CRM applications or other legacy applications.
"With our unique approach and long history of helping world-class organizations create an exceptional guided online customer experience for their customers, ATG is effectively changing an organization`s typical knowledge base into a powerful answer base," said Phil London, senior vice president of products and technology, ATG. "We will also be extending our portfolio of customer service applications with additional products later this year, which will further cement ATG as the premier platform for all consumer-facing applications – through marketing, sales and service."
About ATG
ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG) delivers innovative software to help high-end consumer-facing companies create a richer, more adaptive interactive and guided experience for their customers and partners online and via other channels. ATG has delivered category-leading e-business solutions to many of the world`s best-known brands including A&E Television, Aetna Services, Inc., Alcatel, American Airlines, Barclays Global Investors, Best Buy, BMG Direct, Eastman Kodak, Ford Motor Credit, HSBC, Hyatt, J. Crew, Merrill Lynch, Newell Rubbermaid, Target, U.S. Army, Walgreen Company and Wells Fargo. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with additional locations throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information about ATG, please visit www.atg.com.
© 2004 Art Technology Group, Inc. ATG and Art Technology Group are registered trademarks of Art Technology Group, Inc., and Adaptive Customer Assistance is its service mark. All other product names, service marks, and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.
This press release contains forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause ATG`s actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Important risk factors affecting ATG`s business generally may be found in their periodic reports and registration statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov. Risk factors related to the subject matter of this press release include the possibility that the ATG product deployment will not be successful, on time or significantly enhance the user`s Internet experience or handle user volumes; that those customers leveraging ATG won`t have the opportunity to increase revenue and decrease future costs; the need to adapt to rapid changes so products do not become obsolete; the possibility of errors in ATG`s software products; the possibility that the solution will not make customer implementations faster or more flexible or permit the customer to meet its customer-facing or infrastructure requirements; that the ATG product will not continue to be integrated with third party applications servers or will not support all Web services enabled systems; that ATG`s product strategy may change in the future; and the risks and costs of intellectual property litigation. ATG undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of this press release.
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