Gain, No Pain

You lose sleep worrying that your competition is offering better customer service than you can provide. But the expense of catching up can hurt your bottom line. When your company doesn't have the time or the resources to purchase and implement a state-of-the-art system, hosted customer interaction applications can be the answer.

Often easier and less expensive to deploy than in-house solutions, hosted applications offer many benefits: Your company can save the cost of IT staffing, the deployment is faster than in-house implementations, upgrades are accomplished more easily, and your other Web-based applications are easier to integrate.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based eGain offers its customer service application, eGain Mail, both through licensing and its eGain Hosted Network. Working with partners such as AboveNet, Exodus and Global Crossing, the eGain Hosted Network is able to offer a redundant worldwide network, giving its customers the benefit of global access as well as a complete copy of the system as backup-something that can help you sleep at night.

eGain has built a set of best practices and service level agreements based on experience gained from deploying 100 customer communication solutions, and has deployed eGain Mail on the eGain Hosted Network in 10 days or less.

Assigning a dedicated account manager to each customer, eGain offers technical support with 24 x 7 monitoring, backup and contingency planning, freeing you to concentrate on your core competency.

eGain's platform is designed to integrate with leading call center, database and e-commerce transaction systems, which can help you leverage your company's legacy systems.

This Won't Hurt a Bit
To help you meet growing customer interest, eGain Mail offers productive interaction tools with its Reply and AutoAgent modules. With Reply, your agents can handle high volumes of inquiries. They may respond to either individual inquiries or multiple inquiries on the same topic, giving each customer a personalized response. Agents can field more complex inquiries when they access the eGain Knowledge Base.

The AutoAgent provides two functions to help raise the productivity of your e-mail agents. AutoAcknowledge sends a personalized response to every e-mail and Web-form submission. The reply lets the sender know that his message has been received and will be answered shortly. AutoReply, an optional feature, can send an automatic response to certain topics (such as lost passwords) from the eGain Knowledge base, as well as analyze inquiries.

Quote.com, an online financial services company for active investors and day traders, uses eGain Mail as a hosted application. To provide service to its growing client base, Quote.com anticipated it would need additional personnel. Using eGain Mail, Quote.com's projected headcount costs were reduced by 60 percent. The hosting option also eliminated the need to hire a system administrator, saving roughly $40,000 annually in staffing costs. Using eGain Mail, Quote.com's customer service representatives increased their productivity by 30 to 40 percent. Eighty percent of customer inquiries were answered within 24 hours, with revenue-generating customers receiving the fastest replies.

The price of eGain Mail's hosted service is $3,750 per month for 10,000 e-mails per month. The on-site price is $49,950. For more information, contact eGain at www.egain.com or call (888) 603-4246.