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Press Release
FaceTime and eLoyalty Partner to Deliver Access to Public Instant Messaging Networks for Call Centers
Integration helps achieve customer loyalty by enabling call center agents to locate and access experts in real-time for rapid problem resolution
FOSTER CITY, Calif., August 14, 2001 -- FaceTime Communications, the premier provider of instant messaging (IM) applications for business, today announced that it has entered into a marketing alliance with eLoyalty (Nasdaq: ELOY), the leading management consulting and systems integration company focused exclusively on building customer loyalty. As part of this alliance, eLoyalty will leverage FaceTime's Instant Message Director as part of their managed services offerings to provide call centers with the ability to improve first call resolution by enabling time-sensitive problem solving and rapid escalation to appropriate knowledge resources.
Managers of distributed Global 2000 contact centers can now utilize eLoyalty's expertise in building integrated call center solutions in combination with FaceTime's sophisticated IM application to eliminate costly and frustrating telephone call escalations between various levels of an organization's customer support system. FaceTime's IM technology facilitates on-the-job call agent learning, increases accuracy of responses, and reduces contact center operational expenses to ensure service-level performance. By streamlining customer service escalation, FaceTime enables companies to dramatically improve the quality of customer contact while utilizing knowledge experts more efficiently, appropriately, and economically.
"FaceTime values eLoyalty's ability to fully integrate leading-edge call center solutions such as CRM applications, intelligent call management software, email management and knowledge base technology with FaceTime's next-generation enterprise IM applications" said Glen Vondrick, President and CEO of FaceTime Communications. "By partnering with eLoyalty, FaceTime will enable integration of IM for rapid problem resolution, call routing and IM presence-detection to identify, locate, and share knowledge with distributed experts within the enterprise."
Fortune 1000 companies rely on eLoyalty for integrating and deploying loyalty solutions requiring consolidation of customer contact channels, including the telephone, IM, the Internet, e-mail, field sales and field service. FaceTime provides an enterprise software server that automates finding the right knowledge experts, routes instant messages, and queues traffic to those experts, all while capturing the knowledge shared throughout the interactions for future use. The Instant Message Director also includes enterprise level administration and management services such as auditing to a data warehouse, session monitoring, configuration management, and access to knowledge workers based on business rules and on-line presence.
"Corporations are now recognizing the tremendous value and power of applying instant messaging for business," said Jay Istvan, Senior Vice President for Strategy and Marketing at eLoyalty. "FaceTime's unique approach to providing seamless access to public IM networks, such as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! for time-sensitive problem resolution in the call center adds significant value to our suite of solutions."
Instant messaging is the fastest growing communications channel in history. According to IDC, by 2004, over 400M clients will be using instant messaging to generate 2 trillion instant messages between consumers and businesses. Global 2000 contact center CRM budgets are predicted to be over $12 billion. Forrester Research states that by 2002, consumers will get answers to customer service queries by using instant messaging tools from the likes of AOL and Microsoft to link to agents and companies' knowledge bases. This channel will rapidly displace browser-based customer service chat systems. In addition, Forrester estimates that the average cost of a phone call to a contact center costs a business approximately $33 per call, whereas an instant messaging session costs about $7.33 per session. Instant messaging creates tremendous opportunities for Global 2000 businesses, and FaceTime is positioned to help their partners and customers capitalize on this opportunity.
About eLoyalty
eLoyalty is a leading management consulting and systems integration company focused exclusively on building customer loyalty. With professionals in offices throughout North America, Europe and Australia, eLoyalty's broad range of enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) related services and solutions include creating business strategies, defining technical architectures, selecting, implementing and integrating best-of-breed CRM software applications, and providing on-going support for multi-vendor systems. The combination of eLoyalty's methodologies and technical expertise enables eLoyalty to deliver the tangible economic benefits of customer loyalty for our Fortune 1000 clients. For more information, please go to the Company's web site at www.eloyalty.com or call 877-2-ELOYAL.
About FaceTime Communications
Founded in 1998, FaceTime Communications is the leading provider of security solutions for the management and
control of greynet applications such as adware/spyware, instant messaging, webmail, P2P file sharing, web
conferencing and instant voice. FaceTime delivers the industry's first IMPact Index, which assesses "point-in-time"
risks posed by viruses, worms and other malware propagating through greynet applications. FaceTime's award-winning
solutions are used by over 600 customers, among them seven of the eight largest U.S. financial institutions.
FaceTime supports or has strategic partnerships with all leading public and private IM network providers, including
AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, IBM, Bloomberg, Jabber and Reuters.
FaceTime is headquartered in Foster City, California. For more information visit http://www.facetime.com or call 888-349-FACE.
PR Contact:
Emily Chamberlin
650-762-2945
echamberlin@ar-edelman.com
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