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Clarify To Weave Web Interactions Into Customer-Relationship Management Suite


By Jeff Sweat
InformationWeek
March 17, 1999 07:35 AM

Clarify Software Inc. will unveil today Clarify eFrontOffice, a customer-relationship management suite that ties Web service, sales, and marketing to traditional customer interaction points such as call centers. The suite, which will replace Clarify FrontOffice, will also link customers to E-commerce activities.

Although there are numerous Web self-service products on the market, and many traditional customer relationship management vendors provide some sort of Web access to their software, analysts say the Clarify suite's approach is important because it weaves Internet connection methods in with voice, fax, and direct interactions. "The Web is becoming a mainstream point of interaction," says Liz Shahnam, an analyst with the Meta Group. "By combining the Web with conventional interaction points, [Clarify is] creating a CRM ecosystem."

The company will introduce three applications that address its new strategy. Computer Telephony Integration interfaces will link voice communications with written communications; E-mail Response Management will provide tools to automatically classify and respond to E-mail; and Web Collaboration will let customers ask call-center agents questions from the Web and let call centers monitor customers' click-stream activity.

All interactions pass through a common database and message queue so that customers are treated according to priority, not the way they're contacting the company. That gives companies all of a customer's information -- calls and Web activity -- when that customer contacts a customer-service representative. "If you start your order on the Web and bridge out to the call center with questions, the representative knows what you've done on the Web so they can help you better," says Rod Lehman, Clarify's director of product marketing.

Clarify eFrontOffice can be used to give a company's employees Web access, or to give customers self-service and self-sales capabilities that integrate with E-commerce. For instance, customers asking questions about a product could link directly to a page that would let them buy that product.

Pricing for Clarify eFrontOffice, available this month, will start at $20,000 per application, plus $4,000 for each concurrent user.


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