Blue Pumpkin Software Integrates Its Workforce Management Solutions With Cisco Systems' Customer Contact Software Platform.

Business/Technology Editors

ICCM Chicago 2000

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 1, 2000

Helps Online Contact Centers Better Route Inquiries, Interact With

Customers In A More Effective And Timely Manner

Blue Pumpkin Software, a leading provider of workforce management solutions, today announced that its solutions will integrate with Cisco Systems' customer contact software platform. The collaboration includes a set of out-of-the box integration plug-ins that directly connect the Cisco Intelligent Contact Management software (Cisco ICM) component of the customer contact software platform with the PrimeTime family of workforce management solutions. This integration provides contact centers with a powerful solution for connecting customers to customer care representatives across the enterprise and ensures they are handled with timely and personalized service.

The new integration to Cisco's ICM software is offered as out of the box plug-ins to the newly announced PrimeTime Exchange integration platform and was built to eliminate the costly and time-consuming efforts typically required to tie two contact center components together. Contact centers using Cisco ICM will have access to a direct stream of critical customer contact and agent status information via Blue Pumpkin. With this data at their fingertips, contact center managers will be able to:

-- retrieve necessary historical contact data for optimal forecasting and scheduling of multi-skilled contact center resources;

-- monitor agent activity to ensure that staffing plans created to provide the best customer service are adhered to;

-- react to service level and contact spikes, to maintain the right level of experienced support available across the enterprise.

This allows contact center managers to leverage improved and more precise skills-based forecasting and scheduling against an ever-changing volume of activity; companies can better allocate daily resources while facilitating long-term planning; and enterprises can assess staffing requirements and make sure the right number of agents are on-hand to address service demands. This initial integration has been completed for a wide-range of companies including the Employee Benefits Division of Great-West Life & Annuity Insurance Company, which provides a full range of group life, health and financial products to more than 3.5 million Americans.

"Above all else, our main goal is to provide customers with the utmost in customer care -- that means doing whatever it takes to squarely address their needs as efficiently as possible," said Cindy Thomas, vice president, Service Center Development and Operations, One Corp. at Great-West. "The integration between Blue Pumpkin's PrimeTime and Cisco ICM allows us to further strengthen our service commitment to customers, ensuring that questions are routed appropriately and that there's a knowledgeable individual who's available on the other end to handle customer requests and to address each unique concern," Thomas said. "We're very impressed with what this initial offering from Blue Pumpkin and Cisco provides, and we look forward to working with both companies to continually provide our service centers with the most comprehensive tools available."

More About PrimeTime's Integration With Cisco ICM Software

The next integration phase will benefit eBusinesses who choose to leverage Cisco's customer contact software platform to manage customer interactions. The enhanced integration offering will deliver additional online contact information from Cisco ICM to Blue Pumpkin to help drive workforce plans for businesses needing to balance resources across multiple customer touch-points including email, co-browsing and chat media. With this next step, online contact centers will be able to further extend and complement their ability to provide efficient and responsive customer service across all communication channels.

"A workforce management system is necessary to forecast, schedule and track the employees delivering customer service across multiple service channels," said Bill Carey, senior manager of product marketing for the Cisco Internet Communications Software Group's Customer Contact Business Unit. "The Blue Pumpkin PrimeTime Exchange plug-ins for Cisco ICM ensure that the data that drives customer service management is timely, accurate and synchronized with the Blue Pumpkin PrimeTime workforce management system. Customers with a combined Cisco and Blue Pumpkin solutions can manage their people to deliver world-class customer service."

"We are pleased to be collaborating with Cisco in this integration effort," said Bill Harrison, vice president of strategic integration for Blue Pumpkin. "The new PrimeTime exchange plug-in to Cisco ICM software will allow our joint customers to more effectively and completely leverage the Cisco and Blue Pumpkin solutions. These companies will be able to solve the challenge of offering their customers consistent quality of service via phone, Web, fax, and e-mail across a distributed enterprise."

Availability and Pricing

The PrimeTime exchange plug-in to Cisco ICM is available now from Blue Pumpkin. Pricing is on a per ACD basis and includes installation services.

About PrimeTime Exchange

PrimeTime Exchange is Blue Pumpkin's open integration platform that supports data integration to a variety of contact center applications. The major components of this platform include processing of historical contact statistics, a CTI engine to gather real-time agent events, and a synchronization engine that manages updates of agent information between applications. The PrimeTime exchange plug-in to the Cisco ICM software is added to PrimeTime Exchange to provide a pre-packaged and seamless solution.

About Blue Pumpkin

Blue Pumpkin Software is a market-leading provider of workforce management solutions for multimedia customer contact centers. Blue Pumpkin develops, markets, and supports the award-winning PrimeTime suite of products designed to help companies guarantee superior customer service across a variety of contact media, including phone and email. Blue Pumpkin provides the tools necessary to efficiently schedule and manage contact center personnel, ensuring that the right person with the right skills handles customer interactions.

Blue Pumpkin Software is headquartered in Silicon Valley, with offices around the world. Global leaders in the financial services, e-commerce, telecommunications, and retail goods & services industries depend on Blue Pumpkin solutions. Current customers include ADP, eToys, Airborne Express, Apple Computer, AT&T, Verio, KitchenAid, Drugstore.com, Carlson Wagonlit Travel and PeopleSoft. For more information about Blue Pumpkin and its products, please visit the Blue Pumpkin web site at www.blue-pumpkin.com or call 877-257-6756.