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			Business Research: Customer Performance Vendor Research: AIM Technology, Chordiant, Ciboodle, Cincom, ClickFox, CustomerSat, eglue, Enkata, Envision, HardMetrics, Informiam, Inova Solutions, InQuira, Intelligent Results, KnoahSoft, KomBea, Merced Systems, Oracle, Portrait Software, Queplix, ResponseTek, Responsys, RightNow, Salesforce.com, SAP, Symmetrics, Tealeaf, thinkAnalytics
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Summary
With competition to attract and retain customers intensifying, companies need to pay attention to what customers experience every time they interact with the company: getting it right can lead to more loyal customers and more sales, while getting it wrong can easily loose potential sales or even the customer. Benchmark research completed by Ventana Research shows that most customer interactions still come in the form of telephone calls to a contact center. To ensure the best customer experience thus requires that companies not only have skilled agents but that they provide them with better support as they carry out their job. The eglue InterAct Suite enables companies to create business rules that will pop relevant supporting information into the agent’s desktop as they are speaking with customers. Organizations can reduce the time it takes agents to complete a call and help achieve the best business outcome.

Assessment
Ventana Research’s extensive benchmark research into customer experience management (CEM) finds that the most mature companies recognize agents play an extremely important role in influencing the customer experience during telephone calls. However, it is only a smaller set of the most mature companies that actually assist their agents in doing a good job by tailoring the information they see at their desktop to address the needs of a given customer. This is an important advance because earlier benchmark research confirms that the desktop remains a complex and challenging environment, with many agents having to access four or more applications to resolve a customer issue. In such an environment, agents need all the help they can get to reduce the average length of a call and ensure the desired outcome.

eglue is one of small number of vendors with a product that helps companies address the challenge facing agents, and it does this in a unique way. Rather than replacing the agent desktop, as some other vendors do, eglue InterAct Suite supplements the existing desktop by adding to it in the form of pop-ups that deliver additional information determined by rules that have been previously configured. The additional information can range from the relatively simple, such as a profile of the customer and his or her previous transactions, to complex information detailing how to up-sell or cross-sell the customer based on his or her past purchasing profile combined with links to information about the suggested products. The rules governing the pop-up can also be configured to ensure that the pop-up will appear only if the agent has the right skills to try to make a sale.

eglue customers can design the format and the content of the pop-ups to suit their requirements; indeed, a trained business user can do this him- or herself. For the initial implementation, though, the IT department must develop the interfaces to the systems that are required to deliver data into the pop-ups. eglue has developed a number of prepackaged InterAct modules to deliver information to address common business issues such as driving additional revenues, retaining customers and risk and fraud management. The product comes with a comprehensive reporting system that helps companies identify areas where agents need assistance and the effectiveness of the different modules.

Market Impact
The agent’s desktop technology has been a source of inefficiency ever since call centers came into existence. Most companies originally developed the desktop their agents use in-house using tools from the suppliers of their infrastructure. Jacada was one of the first to develop a purpose-built product that gave companies the tools to develop a desktop to meet the needs of their business. Recently, as pressure has increased for contact center managers to cut costs, usually by reducing average call handling times, attention has been focused on the desktop, with the result that over the last 12-plus months more and more vendors have emerged with products. eglue therefore is now part of a group that includes Ciboodle, Cincom, Jacada, numero, SmartPoint and Queplix, all of which offer specialized products to support the development of smart agent desktops. Each works in a slightly different way, ranging from replacing the agent user interface entirely to popping information into an existing desktop or supplementing the existing desktop with new options. eglue sits firmly in the pop-up group, making it quite easy to implement and minimally disruptive to the way agents are used to working while still making helping agents to become more efficient and effective.

Recommendation
The benchmark research that Ventana Research has done as well as our client interactions have led us to conclude that only the most mature companies really grasp the essence of customer experience management. CEM focuses on influencing what customers experience as they are interacting with a company to ensure the outcome is positive for both customer and company. In the case of telephone calls, CEM thus is concerned with assisting the agent to resolve the customer’s issue and also taking full advantage of the fact the customer is on the phone to seek to strengthen the relationship and generate new business. The path to effective CEM is to provide the agents with a smart desktop that helps them in their decision-making and prompts them to proactively structure the call to gain the best business outcome. We recommend that companies follow the example of those mature companies and deploy a smart agent desktop; as they do so, we recommend they evaluate eglue for improving agent performance.