Five solutions to thaw February's frost. (Technology Highlights).

Affinium 3 By Unica

With today's mix of media available to marketing departments, which serve as both outlets and inlets of information, the challenge for marketing is to measure ROI, collect more accurate data and incorporate better touch point integration while maintaining a consistent corporate marketing message and delivering the tight message, no matter the channel used to deliver it. Focusing on marketing and how it feeds into CRM, Unica has developed its enterprise marketing management (EMM) suite, Affinium, now in release 3.0.

New with version 3.0 is Affinium Campaign iX (Intranet Extension), a Web-based campaign design and execution interface that enables nontechnical marketers to develop cross-channel marketing campaigns, and double-byte data support for Asian and other non-Latin-based languages. In addition, Affinium 3 offers enhanced capabilities for sharing real-time customer interaction information across customer touchpoints, new workflow capabilities and tighter integration with other CRM applications via XML. Intranet Extension (iX) is a Web-based tool for campaign design and execution. 3.0 also includes a point-and-click query builder that guides users through the steps of building complex queries, enhanced e-mail marketing, the ability to capture behavior and activity and integrate this with other channels so that agents can see where the customer was in the other channels, collaborative filtering algorithms for the context of business rules and improved measurement and tracking.

The Affinium software suite includes five modules, Model, Campign, eMessage, Interact and Report. Affinium Model is data mining software that consists of four components, valuator, profiler, response modeler and cross seller, that are designed to help users to understand and anticipate customer behaviors and preferences. Affinium Campaign can interact with multiple data sources to extract data and design and implement large-scale, personalized campaigns, deliver them through multiple channels and analyze the results, Affinium eMessage is designed to be used to create, preview, test, execute and measure personal, permission-based e-mail campaigns that are delivered through the recipients' device of choice, including PDAs, cell phones and pagers. Affinium Interact uses both online and offline data, from current browsing activities to historical profiles and predictive models, to create dynamic, personalized customer interactions. It gathers information from all company databases to build a view of the customer, including profiles and predictive models created by Affinium Campaign and Affinium Model. Affinium Report enables marketers to generate detailed reports based on information gathered from other modules within the Affinium suite and related sources of business intelligence. Report includes easy-to-use report templates, custom reporting capabilities and a browser-based marketing "dashboard" that provides a repository for business-critical marketing information.

www.unicacorp.com/781-259-5900

Kanisa's Kanisa 3.0

Delivering support, when boiled down to the basics, is a matter of finding our exactly what the person needs to know and delivering it to them in a way that is easy for them to understand and implement. Kanisa has been delivering online, self-service solutions for this task, and in its latest release, Kanisa 3.0, Kanisa aims to provide support that is equal to (if not better than) an interaction with a live agent.

According to David Kay, vice president of Solutions & Technology at Kanisa, version 3.0 will: engage a customer in a dialog to find out what it is they know, work across multiple silos of information including structured and unstructured data, and maintain a data warehouse of customer interactions to make the systems and site better. Based on what implementers of Kanisa 3.0 know about a customer, they can ask the questions for them as the information is bubbled up based on a profile or the company's direction. Kay said that .net is helping them to present Kanisa as a service, so the look and feel is customized to the client company. Version 3.0 provides usage-based ranking, i.e., the customer defines the question and uses the information on how other people are working and what they looked for; Business Webs that allow partners to create branded or co-branded sites (which can also create a revenue opportunity for the company by allowing them to offer it to their partners and distributors) and knowledge maps, which are at the heart of the product and automate the adding of content. Knowledge maps are a representation of what customers might be interested in and directions on how to get to it.

Enhancements to Kanisa version 3.0 include support of personal Web portal sites for users of Kanisa's customers. Kanisa's technology can now be used to push targeted content to the users' personal start pages, notifying them, for example, of important software upgrades and security patches. Version 3.0 can now deliver the right content and services through a dialog and retrieval process that takes advantage of both unstructured concepts and structured attributes. Version 3.0 provides improved retrieval capabilities through the implementation of insights gained from studying customer behavior and thousands of query entries, enabling the new release to better respond to the users needs. Kanisa systems can now be deployed in most European languages and Japanese. The entire customer experience and content handling capabilities can operate in multiple languages simultaneously. Enhanced reporting features through a data warehousing environment now support not only distilled and actionable out-of-the-box reports, bu t also an ad-hoc analytics environment. This allows support organizations to effectively drill-down to learn about customers, their issues, how they use products, how to improve the support experience and where to invest in content.

www.kanisa.com/408-863-5800

Contact Center SolutionSets From SmartForce

You have installed the latest CRM technology, you have the systems in place for Web chat, e-mail response, the ability to handle any type of interaction your customers will come at you with, but customer satisfaction is dropping. What's the problem? Perhaps it's the fact that your agents and supervisors have no idea how to use the new technology effectively or they are equally ignorant of the new product offerings just rolled out by your company. In other words, they are lacking the prime ingredient of business success: knowledge.

To fill the knowledge gap while allowing agents to learn at their own pace, SmartForce developed its e-Learning platform, and to fill specific needs for contact centers, its Contact Center SolutionSets. The e-Learning application infrastructure provides users with an integrated student environment, learning management system and customer content creation and publication tools. The system is preconfigured so that companies can customize the materials to include its specific, proprietary information.

Contact Center SolutionSets comes in three tracks, one each for agents, supervisors and managers, and provides six learning modules: core contact center skills; customer service skills; inside sales skills; technical support/help desk skills; contact center systems and desktop training; and client-specific content. To provide content for the modules, SmartForce consulted with more than 35 contact centers and the courses were developed under the guidance of experts Mikael Blaisdell and Patrick Bultema. With the publishing tool, users can add pertinent information to the training program. Through the Ask My Mentor program, agents can collaborate in real-time with mentors. Using the system, agents can also attend seminars, workshops and have role-play simulations, Supervisors are provided with reports on agent progress.

www.smartforce.com/650-817-5900

The problem of multichannel interactions can often be analogous to that of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Data, data, every where, nor any source to synch." Valuable customer data can come in from and be stored in many sources, the Web, email, a CRM system, a sales force automation record, and yet, as an agent on the front lines dealing with a customer or a salesperson trying to update a contact, that means opening up several different, and sometimes incompatible, programs to re-enter or utilize the same information.

To provide an answer to real-time information integration difficulties, LumaPath, Inc. developed its LumaPath Real-Time Relevance Server. Version 2.0 of the LumaPath Real-Time Relevance Server is designed to help organizations to automatically provide end users, in real-time, with highly relevant, comprehensive information from enterprise applications and unstructured content repositories, such as e-mail, file systems and Web sites.

When a user is working in an application, LumaPath analyzes the content of the user's active window, sends a message to the Real-Time Relevance Server and returns results within milliseconds, The LumanPath icon tool bar that resides on the user's screen lights up, letting the user know that relevant information has been found. LumaPath's Real-Time Information Integration algorithms determine relevance by analyzing the content in the user's active window, not by a search of a whole text index, As the user switches windows, LumaPath automatically updates the LumaPath LensBar in real-time.

Among LumaPath's capabilities are: it automatically delivers information to users in real-time; it delivers information that is immediately relevant to what the user is doing, based on a live analysis of the user's active window; it combines enterprise application data, like Siebel and Pivotal, with information in unstructured content sources, like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Office or Web sites; and it immediately allows users to act on the information by enabling them to transfer information between applications with a single mouse click.

Lumapath's extensible Real-Time Relevance Server can also help reduce complex, point-to-point integration projects and take advantage of existing IT infrastructure investments without changing the way end users work, LumaPath integration modules are available for a variety of applications and content platforms, including Siebel eBusiness 2000, Lotus Notes, Pivotal eRelationship, Microsoft Exchange! Outlook e-mail, NT file systems and internal or external Web sites.

www.lumapath.com/978-461-5100

Communications service providers (CSPs) certainly faced tough times in 2001, and are hard pressed to make their services attractive to users. To help CSPs in their plight to reduce costs and improve services, TeleGea has released its Emporium Enterprise self-service platform, which is designed to give service providers a method by which they can give their clients self-service applications to order and manage services over the Web.

Emporium Enterprise supports a range of communications products and services (e.g., voice, data, wireless and IP) through multiple access media that include HTML, WML, XML and vXML. Businesses can manage all aspects of accounts via a single interface, including ordering new products and services; adding, activating, changing or canceling services; as well as reviewing orders, purchases and account activity.

Emporium Enterprise's scalable, open architecture is XML-based and J2EE compliant, and features an adaptor framework that integrates with existing back-office and middleware systems (e.g. order handling, customer management, invoicing, problem resolution, service planning, etc.) to improve processes and rake advantage of existing systems. Emporium Enterprise can extend its functionality to CSPs' agent and reseller networks.

According to Kevin Martini, vice president of marketing at TeleGea, CSPs can use Emporium Enterprise to test out new products and services before launch, therefore helping to drive speed-to-market. And speaking of speed-to-market, TeleGea also announced its JumpStart program, which provides the Enterprise platform on a hosted model, which will provide CSPs with faster deployment.