CRM News: Call Centers: Witness Acquisition to Enhance Impact 360 Suite

Witness Acquisition to Enhance Impact 360 Suite

By Erika Morphy
CRM Buyer
12/06/06 11:08 AM PT

Customer feedback call services have not performed as well as companies would have liked. Often times, the caller turns down the request to answer feedback-related questions. Third-party companies that proactively reach out to customers do not fare much better, said Oscar Alban, principal global market consultant for Witness.

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Witness Systems announced Monday that it has acquired Amae Software, which will add customer feedback capabilities to Witness' contact center offering.

"We felt it was the missing component from our Impact 360 platform," Oscar Alban, principal global market consultant for Witness, told CRM Buyer. "There is a lot of customer focus in this area and it was something we wanted to be able to offer our customers."

Valuable in Theory

Customer feedback calls -- or survey calls as they are sometimes called -- are increasingly being offered by companies, usually through a contact center operation. In theory, they provide companies with valuable feedback from call-in customers at low cost.

In reality, these services have not performed as well as companies would have liked. Often times, the caller turns down the request to answer feedback-related questions. Third-party companies that proactively reach out to customers do not fare much better, and it can take companies as long as 30 days to get the feedback results, Alban said.

Through experimentation, Witness found that customers were more likely to answer those questions if the agent or interactive voice response (IVR) system used the word "feedback" instead of survey, he said.

Plans to Integrate

The Amae application is a Web-based system that can survey across any communications channel or customer contact. It can link survey results and customer feedback directly to call recordings and then deliver advanced research analytics across these channels.

Ultimately, the new application will be integrated into Witness' Impact 360 workforce optimization suite. The company will announce the integrations that Impact 360 customers can expect in the near term, Alban said. Meanwhile, he added, "some of our mutual customers have already begun their own integrations."

Previous Acquisitions

In October, Witness acquired Demos Solutions and Exametric -- enterprise productivity and resource-planning applications for the financial services industry. These acquisitions will operate as Witness Enterprise Solutions, a group focusing initially on workforce optimization applications for retail bank branches and operations -- an industry in which Witness is making a serious play.

Some 30 percent of Witness' revenue is derived from financial services. In addition, the company is moving even deeper into the space by offering Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications.

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