http://www.psgroup.com/The latest research from the Patricia Seybold Group.(c) 2005, Patricia Seybold Group, INC. All rights reserved.5Many of your customers prefer doing business with you online. They go to your Web sites to find, learn about, and buy your products that address their needs. They also set up and manage accounts with you. When those customers are consumers, we call these activities B2C ecommerce. B2C software products and services help you implement and deploy Web sites that support these consumer customer activities. In this report, we present our framework for evaluating B2C ecommerce software. Use the framework to reduce the time, cost, and risk for evaluating and selecting the B2C ecommerce software product that is best for your organization.Mitchell Kramerhttp://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=881Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMTIntelliResponse is the customer service offering of IntelliResponse Systems Inc. IntelliResponse was introduced in 2001. To date, 91 customer organizations, mostly universities and colleges, have implemented it. IntelliResponse 5.6 is the current version of the product, the version that we evaluate in this report. We recommend that you consider adding IntelliResponse to your customer service portfolio. Add it to your Website to let customers ask questions about the capabilities of your products and services, your policies and practices for doing business with them, and, even, for helping them navigate your site’s content. IntelliResponse is a great complement to site search and Internet search. Mitchell Kramerhttp://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=879Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMTATG Commerce Service Center is ATG’s assisted-service for ecommerce offering. CSC was introduced in June 2007 and is available as one of the separately-priced modules of the ATG Service suite, all of which are add-ons to and tightly integrated with ATG Commerce. To date, ATG claims that approximately 20 customer accounts have purchased CSC. With qualification, we recommend ATG CSC to every organization that has implemented ATG Commerce as the mechanism for delivering assisted-service ecommerce. The qualification is for the lack of packaged reports in the current product version to help you analyze and refine your assisted-service ecommerce experience. For those organizations in the process of selecting an ecommerce platform, ATG CSC makes ATG Commerce a more attractive choice. Mitchell Kramerhttp://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=873Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMTCustomer Service suppliers closed out 2007 with a very good fourth quarter. No exceptions. All of the customer service suppliers that we cover—ATG, eGain, InQuira, InStranet, KANA, KNOVA, and RightNow—had good fourth quarters Customer growth was the driver in 4Q2007 as it had also been in 3Q2007. Fourth quarter is typically quiet from a product perspective across the software industry. Two customer service companies had significant product activity: RightNow and KANA. There was very little company activity in 4Q2007. Most significantly, despite what appears to be tough economic times ahead, suppliers continue to hire aggressively. Excellent customer service delivered effectively and efficiently keeps customer satisfaction and loyalty high and operational costs low.Mitchell Kramerhttp://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=870Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMTIBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce is IBM’s assisted-service for ecommerce offering. Sales Center was introduced with IBM WebSphere Commerce V6.0 in May 2006 and is available as a separately-orderable add-on. To date, IBM claims that approximately two dozen customers have purchased it. We recommend IBM Sales Center to every organization that has implemented WebSphere Commerce as the mechanism for delivering assisted-service for ecommerce and a cross-channel customer experience for ecommerce. For those organizations in the process of selecting an ecommerce platform, IBM Sales Center makes IBM WebSphere Commerce a much more attractive choice.Mitchell Kramerhttp://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=869Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMTEcommerce systems are your self-service Web marketing and sales applications. They let customers learn about your products, compare them, configure them, price them, buy them, and even return them. Ecommerce systems also have account management capabilities, letting your customers create accounts for payment, shipment, and order processing. Sometimes customers need your help to perform ecommerce activities. They’d like to escalate from self-service to assisted-service in order to complete their work. We call that help assisted-service for ecommerce. We’ve extended and combined our evaluation frameworks for ecommerce and customer service to create an assisted-service for ecommerce framework, which is the topic of this report.Mitchell Kramerhttp://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=865Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMTFueled by excellent customer growth, customer service business was very good in 3Q2007. That customer growth produced excellent financial performance almost across the board. Product activity for the quarter was slow. Only RightNow made significant announcements. There were only a few company announcements. The most significant was InQuira’s creation of a customer advisory board. The real company action is in hiring. Customer service suppliers are hiring aggressively. eGain, InQuira, InStranet, and KANA are trying to grow their staffs by 10 percent or more!Mitchell Kramerhttp://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=857Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMTVirtual assisted-service is the use of technology to simulate the activities of your customer service agents to help customers. Human Digital Assistant (HDA) is a virtual assisted-service offering from H-care, a software startup based in Treviso, Italy. HDA’s virtual agents are quite lifelike. They deliver personalized customer service that is seamlessly integrated with your self-service systems. HDA is a visionary product, a technology breakthrough in virtual assisted-service. You should consider virtual assisted-service as an effective and efficient half step between Web self-service and contact center assisted-service and you should consider HDA for its implementation. Mitchell Kramerhttp://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=852Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMTLiveLOOK CoBrowse is an assisted-service application that lets your customer service agents help your customers answer questions about and solve problems with your products and services by browsing your self-service Web pages with them. This is an SaaS offering with excellent browser and desktop support and no software deployment. It lets your customers escalate from your Web self-service applications yet stay within their self-service context. LiveLOOK introduced LiveLOOK CoBrowse in March 2007. To date, nine customer accounts have implemented the product.Mitchell Kramerhttp://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=848Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMTThrough our work with customers, we’ve learned that customer service remains a critical factor for their satisfaction and loyalty. Cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customers service; support for common Customer Scenarios; finding answers quickly and easily; access to fresh/current information; using forums for “how to” information; escalating easily to assisted service; receiving notifications for key events; having a customer service Web place to go to; and being able to manage their account, product, and entitlement information are customers’ key customer service requirements. In this report, we describe how you can address those requirements to deliver an excellent customer service experience.Mitchell Kramerhttp://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=845Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT