Chordiant 5.5 Arrives

Chordiant yesterday introduced its latest CRM suite, Chordiant 5.5, which provides real-time and wireless capabilities, as well as easier ways to manage business process changes. "With this new release, Chordiant 5.5 builds on Chordiant's JX [J2EE and XML] architecture by taking the world of J2EE solutions to the next level, which is process-based applications solving specific business and industry requirements," Stephen Kelly, president and CEO of Chordiant, said in a prepared statement. Chordiant 5.5 includes 11 additional or updated products from the previous version 5.1, released roughly one year ago. The latest additions and enhancements enable business team members to improve operational efficiencies and customer effectiveness with a process-based approach to solving specific business requirements. For example, Chordiant Business Process Designer and Chordiant Rules Editor version 5.5 can be used to change business rules in a credit card contact center, for activities such as waving late fees for customers that meet certain criteria and determining which overdraft fees to refund. Business-side employees can change policies when they need to within hours without being caught up for weeks in IT development cycles. "That responsiveness has been a big hallmark for our customers," says David Straus, senior vice president of product marketing at Chordiant. Other upgrades and enhancements affect Chordiant 5 Call Center Browser Edition, Chordiant 5 Enterprise Marketing, Chordiant 5 Field Marketing, Chordiant 5 Straight Through Service Processing, Chordiant 5 Business Process Server, Chordiant 5 Rules, and Chordiant 5 Tools Platform. More specifically, Chordiant Marketing Director version 5.5 enhances the support for wireless messaging as a channel for more effective marketing and servicing through the use of Short Message Service, Enhanced Message Service, and Multimedia Message Service. Using the wireless messaging channel marketing professionals can create and manage mobile marketing campaigns and develop service requests based on multimedia messages, consisting of text, sounds, images, and animations. Additionally, Chordiant 5 Straight Through Service Processing version 5.5 enables the capturing of real-time events within Chordiant or from any transactional system in the enterprise. This provides professionals with real-time information like calls into the call center, an ATM transaction, or credit card activity, and can trigger analysis to identify cross-sell or upsell opportunities. Analysts have been applauding Chordiant for its efforts in open-standards J2EE architecture, which it introduced in 2001 for global business to consumer enterprises. "In most organizations the majority of the effort and cost of processing occurs after the initial interaction. Simply automating the front office cannot resolve this problem," said Liz Roche, vice president of Meta Group, in the statement. "Contemporary service organizations require integrated solutions that automate the entire end-to-end process. Managers need to be able to monitor, control, and change how work is being undertaken to optimize processing and manage to specific business goals." "Our entire application is J2EE and XML--based," Straus says of the J2EE architecture. "Our CTO took us there two years ahead of everyone else. And now we're on our third generation product when competitors are first getting into J2EE and XML architectures."