Many consumer-oriented companies are using the Web, E-mail, and other communication channels to automate customer support and drive down costs. To these companies, the less human interaction with customers, the better. However, aerospace, financial-services, high-end technology, and other companies that sell complex, high-priced products want more hands-on contact with their customers.

To support customers, companies are bringing together cross-functional teams from engineering, support, sales, and marketing to address the needs of their high-value customers.

Most of the customer-relationship management tools on the market are designed to help companies track, report, and automate customer interaction. However, ePeople Inc., a privately held software maker, is addressing the collaborative requirements of cross-functional customer-support teams.

Twenty percent of a company's top customers represent 80% of revenue, says ePeople CEO Anthony Lye. "Companies that have a small number of highly valuable customers are customer-centric, rather than product-oriented. They focus on collaborating as much as possible with customers to retain their business and take advantage of other selling opportunities," he says.

EPeople recently released Teamwork 4.0, a CRM platform that works with other sales and support applications to provide a real-time view into customer inquiries in a collaborative environment. The Web-based application lets companies work with multiple contacts at a customer's site, and with internal and third-party service and support personnel to resolve problems and provide needed information to customers.

Teamwork 4.0 includes an enhanced knowledge database to track employee and partner expertise and capture that information in a systematic way. It also provides decision support and customizable workflows to escalate problem resolution to the appropriate personnel. The software lets companies organize their support groups around cost, availability, and service-level metrics.

In the next several months, ePeople plans to incorporate business processes and software capabilities to support engineering and financial-services sectors. Its customers are primarily in the computer industry, ranging from OpenWave Systems to Oracle and Sybase. The price of the average license is $250,000, ePeople officials say.

Applications that handle the entire life cycle of the customer relationship are a top priority for businesses, according to consulting firm the Aberdeen Group.

The top end of the customer-service market, an area that some are calling expertise management, is gaining momentum with a number of other startups also addressing support-team collaboration and customer life-cycle management. Clerity, Kamoon, Quiq, and Tightlink have joined ePeople in what promises to be a strategic area for customer-centric businesses.