Ask Jeeves rolls out enterprise self-service app
JEEVES SOLUTIONS, THE enterprise software division of Ask Jeeves, unveiled a new product Monday designed to improve the Web as a sales and support channel for customers by providing a single view for users to obtain answers to questions.
JeevesOne Enterprise combines natural-language processing, customer intelligence tools, and enterprise connectivity to connect and present data from disparate back-end systems to streamline Web self-service, according to company officials.
The new product is designed to fix a fundamental problem that has plagued many companies: how to connect to and present information stored in multiple systems to give users complete answers to their questions to improve customer satisfaction, said James Speer, product manager of Emeryville, Calif.-based Jeeves Solutions.
The solution is critical because while a company's internal systems may be organized along functional lines, a customer may need access to data residing in multiple systems to have a question fully answered, Speer said.
"It means we can move beyond providing answers from unstructured information ... and now we're able to provide answers directly from core business systems," he said. "We really bypass the traditional organizational structure and can pull the information back to support the user's objective. We can actually inter-relate the data at a very granular level."
For example, an auto insurance customer could inquire online about the status of a specific claim. With JeevesOne, the insurance company could respond not only with a summary of the claim record but with all relevant information related to the claim in one single view, including repair estimates from the auto body shop, photographs of the damage, insurance deductible information, and car rental information.
Even for companies with a strong Web presence, realizing the benefits of customer self-service has been a challenge, said Hadley Reynolds, research director at Delphi Group, in Boston. That is because for all but the simplest of customer problems they largely fail to deliver actionable solutions, Reynolds said. However, the new technology behind Jeeves Solutions composes answers from related information regardless of system boundaries, extending Jeeves' well-known conversational simplicity to improve the Web service experience, he added
In addition, JeevesOne Enterprise combines the natural-language processing techniques with traditional data analysis practices to provide improved insight into the motivation of site visitors, according to company officials. As a result, unconstrained questions can be mined to reveal needs and wants, awareness levels, and attitudes. This insight can allow companies to drive improvements in content development, marketing campaign effectiveness, and support call avoidance.
The new product is designed to offer a highly scalable architecture through a multitiered J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application and offers an advanced security framework designed to that control access to business critical data and can leverage single sign-on authentication mechanisms.
by Heather Harold
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