New IBM Corepoint product provides secure Web collaboration

IBM`s new e-CRM Corepoint Web Collaboration product, now available in South Africa, is the first to enable multiple users to share the same HTML page, to work across two firewalls and to provide security which allows only the customer to enter his confidential information into any electronic transaction.

Says Russel von Ruben, country executive of IBM SA`s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) unit. "Web collaboration is the first technology to allow customer and company to collaborate across contact channels.

"Web collaboration is also the first step in providing remote marketing to and service of customers with the warmth of human-to-human partnership in a transaction."

Web collaboration is triggered by a customer at an Internet kiosk or a PC clicking on a "Live assistance" or "Call me" button in a web site. The customer is intelligently routed to the correct call agent to help him with what he is trying to do on the web site.

Corepoint Web Collaboration uses client functions running on the customer`s and agent`s PCs and interacting with a collaboration server. The collaboration server controls and synchronises the display of the customer`s and agent`s PC.

This allows a customer and an agent to view the same web page and to control navigation to other web pages. The pointers used by agent and customer are differentiated, say, by colour, and, in this way, the agent can guide a customer through a process such as filling in a form or understanding the contents of the web site. Collaboration tools enable drawing annotation, remote pointing and keyboard input from both customer and agent.

Corepoint Web Collaboration allows the agent and customer to speak to each other as they work on the web page - either on voice over the Internet, where available, or on two lines. There is also a secure text chat facility.

"Web collaboration," says von Ruben, "enhances and differentiates customer service to provide a competitive edge. It also enhances telemarketing because a sales agent can better understand the customer`s interest and requirement and can therefore supply a more complete response. It also reduces the time lapse between sales activity and order placement."

Von Ruben points out that customer service administrators tend to give priority to voice contact with customers. "Written communications such faxes and emails get pushed into the background. But why should a customer be penalised, in terms of a slower response, just because he writes instead of phoning?"

In order to enable equal priority for written contacts, IBM developed the Corepoint Mail Analyser - a powerful tool which rapidly analyses text objects based on criteria selected by an organisation. Using those criteria, the analyser routes emails and faxes to the correct person for dealing with them and prioritises them as to urgency of response required. Mail Analyser feeds urgent emails into call queues, ensuring that agents deal with them.

"This has obvious benefits for any call or contact centre - guaranteeing that the customer gets quick attention whatever his choice of contact medium," says von Ruben, "It is also useful in web collaboration, where the analyser can trigger an agent to initiate either a voice-linked or a text chat web collaboration."