ATG Seasons Its E-Commerce and Service Functionality

ATG has added several new capabilities to its e-Commerce Platform and Customer Care Offering. Many of the e-commerce enhancements center on "searchandising," while offerings within the company's customer care suite like ATG Live Chat, ATG Response Management, and ATG Customer Intelligence are aimed at delivering an integrated and relevant multichannel experience. Scott Johnsen, ATG's product marketing director, describes searchandising as the company's ability to tie offer management in with an online shopper's search activity to present relevant offers. Its searchandising functionality includes allowing online merchants to define, manage, and update catalog navigation facets or attributes, which can be based on any available catalog attribute including size, brand, and style, according to the company. Facets can be displayed across home category and product pages on the commerce site, the company adds. Additional searchandising enhancements include the integration of catalog search and Web store merchandising functionality, and a single interface that allows merchandisers to make modifications on the fly. ATG Live Chat, previously showcased at the company's third annual ATG Insight Live conference in April 2006, is a personalized chat app built on the company's Wisdom platform. ATG Wisdom, a standards-based architecture that can be delivered on premise or on demand, is a series of underlying principles and technologies that include content targeting; customer scenarios; and consistency and relevancy across the marketing, sales, and service customer life cycle and across channels. The chat capability, which uses ATG's offer management capabilities, provides agents with the view of the customer's self-service, phone, email, and chat history, and a knowledge base of answers which can help shorten resolution time. ATG Response Management, which previously managed email sessions, now handles sessions from ATG Live Chat and SMS mobile devices. With ATG Response Management, the best available rep can interact with customers using these channels via rules-based routing that takes into account information like message content, customer profiles, and agent ability. Agents have access to customer history across channels, and can tap into a knowledge base and use predefined response templates, according to the company. The company notes that the app also monitors the interaction process and creates supervisor alerts when service levels fall short of targets. ATG Customer Intelligence, a new offering, is an integrated set of datamart and reporting capabilities compatible with popular BI tools. According to the company, it consolidates activity across ATG's own apps and external sources into a single view. The common thread among the enhancements, Johnsen says, is providing a 360-degree view of the customer across channels. "Regardless of how they might have contacted you, it doesn't matter anymore. That complete view of the customer is available." Mitch Kramer, senior vice president and senior consultant and analyst at Patricia Seybold Group, contends that ATG's overall positioning is good because they have products that cover more of the customer experience than most of their competitors, but adds its marketing and merchandising capabilities can stand some improvement. "They've got some rudimentary kinds of marketing functionality, but if they were able to deliver richer cross-channel campaigns they would have a really strong offer." Related articles: Wise Guides Confer at ATG's Insight Live 2006 ATG Gets Wise About Customer Experience KANA Leads Forrester's E-Service Suite Wave

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