Motive Mounts Olympus.

Motive Communications, Inc. presents several reasons why "Webified" contact centers are not working, particularly in meeting the needs of companies establishing corporate e-business in the business-to-business realm. Rather than collaborative, many sites offer self-help/self-service not designed for complex e-business transactions. Others simply fail to respond to customers in a timely manner, if they respond at all. Some commerce concerns think that implementing a cyberfix solution will make their customer service problems go away. Customers must compose e-mails, describe problems on the phone and search for relevant content through generic searches that have little effect other than leaving customers cold.

Addressing the need for handling complex transactions, Motive's Olympus Vertical Solutions are intended as a comprehensive set of pre-packaged, embeddable components focused on specific vertical markets. Motive is providing irs initial Olympus solutions for financial services, communications, energy and e-markerplaces, and describes them as providing" customer-powered" service by enabling companies to integrate customer care into their e-business applications. Motive states it is targeting traditional companies that want to take their enterprisewide service assets and advantages with them into the online environment and business-to business companies whose online success depends upon high-touch, hands-on service being tightly woven into the online experience. Olympus connects service into the online experience as a built-in feature so that, if a question or problem arises, customers can receive answers (by pushing a button on a Web page or during a transaction, for example) without abandoning the application to request service. Olympus determines who the customer is and what he/she is doing at the time of the question or problem, then uses this information to provide a relevant set of targeted answers and human experts. It accomplishes this by providing the technology infrastructure for bringing all of a company's service assets online, including knowledge bases, self-service content, employees, partners and suppliers. These "service networks" can span traditional call centers and service departments as well as remotely located experts in the e-business or partner companies.

Each vertical market solution includes embedded service components targeted to specific requirements in each industry, is delivered as extensible markup language (XML) Web services and can be managed using directories and tied into e-business applications' authentication mechanisms. Motive Olympus' best practices enable IT staffs, Motive consultants or systems integrators to define the specific content for delivering high-touch, customer-powered service experiences.